Exploring Gypsiness

"This is one of the best ethnographies of a Romani community and strangely one of the only modern ones from Romania, which has one of the largest Romani populations in the world. Very little has been written about the history, culture and language of the Roma in Romania, so this is an important contribution. Ada Engebrigsten lived in a village in Transylvania for more than a year and observes the relations between the Roma and non-Roma by spending time with both. In many ways it is a classic ethnography. She describes customs such as marriages and funerals and closely examines work patterns within the Roma community. She also looks at the impact of modern influences such as NGOs and church missionaries. One of the most interesting chapters is on what she calls the “Roma cosmology” – the internal value system which divides honourable and dishonourable behaviour, good fortune and misfortune, inside and outside and upper body and lower body. The idea of good and bad is mapped onto some very abstract notions, especially in respect of behaviour towards outsiders. This really is a core element of Romani culture and understanding it is essential to understanding the inner world of this community. One of the things I like about this book is that even though there is no commitment to a particular theoretical approach, it very much reminds me of the structuralist ethnographies that were popular in the 1920s and 1930s; the works by Claude Levi-Strauss and others who saw value systems in communities as systematic and structured in some way. Many modern ethnographies from the 1980s onwards are very much pitched in a post-modernist and post-structuralist approach, trying to do away with these systematic approaches. As I say, while Engebrigsten doesn’t specifically commit herself to a theoretical framework, I do think there is an aspect of structure that she brings into the discussion. She sees Romani actions and beliefs as not random, but fitting into a general whole."