The time of the gypsies
By: Michael Stewart.
Series: Studies in the ethnographic imagination
Publisher: Westview Press; Westview Pr (Short Disc)
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Boulder, Colo
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 302
Subjects: Romanies -- Hungary; Romanies -- Hungary -- Social life and customs; Romanies -- Hungary -- Ethnic identity; Hungary -- Ethnic relations
Other titles: Gypsies
Description: Until 1989 it was official Communist policy in eastern Europe to absorb Gypsies into the "ruling" working class. But many Gypsies fought to maintain their separate identity. This book is about the refusal of one group of Gypsies - the Rom - to abandon their way of life and accept assimilation into the majority population. It is a story about the sources of cultural diversity in modern industrial society and about the fear and hatred that such social and cultural difference many give rise to.

The core of the book, based on eighteen months of observation of daily life in a Gypsy settlement, describes the cultivation, celebration, and reinvention of cultural difference and diversity by a people deemed by their social superiors to be too stupid and uncivilized to have a "culture" at all.

The survival of the Gypsy way of life remains one of the great puzzles of modern European history. How has this despised and feared people protected itself through five hundred years of persecution? The Time of the Gypsies evokes the rhythms of the Gypsies' daily lives and leads the reader to the clues that unlock the secrets of Gypsy survival.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-288) and index.
Table of contents: title: Iintroduction : the lowest of the low. Post-Communist gypsies, or Roma -- Communists and gypsies -- Modernity and diversity -- The local setting and the problem of difference -- “Gaiety in the face of despair” -- Gypsy work. An origin story -- The free lunch -- Gypsy horses -- A place of their own. Gypsy settlements -- Work -- The ethics of communal life -- Idioms of community and identity : Romanes -- “We are all brothers here”. A world apparently made of men -- Alternative images of sociality : nonbrotherly relations -- Breaking down the house -- The nature of community and the means of resistance -- Breaking out. “If only we lived alone,” Šošoj and Čaja : getting rich on one’s own -- Čoro and Luludji’s story : upwardly mobile gypsies -- The rejection of differentiation -- Making workers out of gypsies. Assimilation as proletarianization -- “The living, form-giving fire,” -- The parquet flooring factory -- Redemption through labor? -- Gaźos, peasants, communists, and gypsies. Cigány -- Gaźo -- Peasants who are masters of themselves -- Disorderly persons -- Communists and Gaźos -- Gypsies, peasants, and communists -- Staying Gypsy in a world of Gaźos -- “My heart was cut in two,” -- The real and the imaginary -- Sons of the market. Horses, men, and Rom -- Market society -- A day at the market -- The economics of horse dealing -- The pure dealer, or middleman -- Dealers as managers of men -- A passion for dealing. From dependence to autonomy through luck -- Trade and the construction of society -- Brothers in song. Celebrations -- Slow songs -- True speech -- Song and the ritualization of equality -- The shame of the body. Dirty Gypsies -- The purity of the Rom body -- Shame and the gendered person --  The modest and the shameless body -- Beyond the body -- Conclusion : marginality, resistance, and ideology. The sources of the Rom adaptation -- Rom identity, ethnicity, and ideology -- A sealed ideology and its “open sesame” -- Glossary.