stewart1.pdf

8/14/2019 Stewart1.pdf

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Tlt* Tit*e +tl** $yytietMICHABI STBWART

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A Noru oN rrrr TnxrIt ,r, ABSENCE oF ANy internationally agreed on orthography forRomany, I have adopted a srigh_tly simpiirie? version of tha"t currentryused by the Musicological and Linguisiics Institutes of the HungarianAcademy of Sciences.Characters that may be unfamiliar are:

d as in rlrurch5 as in slzop5 indicates a rougher, alveopalatal sft2 as in pleasureh after k, p, t indicates aspirationIn Romany there are two forms of the sound represented by r in thetext. In the words Rom and its derivatives (Romni, romanes, etc.), Coto,r.ode , yrry, the r represents a more intensely trilled a.rd usrally uvurar-ized rhotic than normal r. The same holds for the second r in korkoro, rntechnical texts this sound would normally be indicated with a macronover the r.. All Romany words lot T direct quotes are given in the singular (andy..thu case of adjectives) masculine form unless otherwise. stated,Following F6l and Hofer (1969), when I use such words in the plural Ihave added an English s,The Communist Party of Hungary was known as such only until 194g,when-it changed its name. The name changed again in .Dse,butl havekept the simple, generic title throughout.M,S,

xvill 1

IIrurnonucrloN: THn Lownsr

OF THB LOW

EVerywhere Gypsies are the lowest of the low. Why? Because they aredlffercnt, Because they steal, nre restless, roam,haoe the Eail Eye andthat attuming beauty that mnkes us ugly to ourselaes. Because tlrcirtflcre exlstence puts our aalues in question. Because they are all aeryruell /n operas and operettas, but in reality . . . they are anti-social,dd and don't fit in. "Torch them " shout the skinheads.

Giinter Grass, " Losses"

1989 rr wAs oFFICIAL CovrlruNlst PoLICY in Eastern Europe to ab-b yp:lea lnto the "ruling" working class. But many Gypsies foughtSlAhfeln their separate identity. This book is about the refusal of oneef Gypaies, the Rom, to abandon their way of life and accept as-ien lnto the malority population. Forget romantic notions of the

freedoms of caravans and campfires; these Gypsies' lives were&$el rometimes brutal. They dreamed of riches gained from gam-ar lueky horee deals, but in reality they were poverty-stricken. Theybt :enrlalurns, ghettos in all but name, taken over from HungarianIll rult;, End the law insisted that the Gypsies work, often for very low-*lgpe ht lndurtry or on collective farms. And yet despite their lowly po-#n and all their suffering, they held onto an image of their own dig-# md foY nu (lYPsies.Ehe people whom the reader will meet in this book are all HungarianEH :nA, And thelr stories come from the time whel that country, like the*kb cf Eeatetl liureipe, was under Communist rule, but what they have5 Ely ene:efnr &nyone who lives in the industrialized world. Ultimately,


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Introductiotrthis is a story about the sources of cultural diversity in modern industrialsociety and of the fear and hatred that such social and cultural differencemay give rise to. The heart of the book, based on a total of eighteenmonths' observation of daily life in a Gypsy settlement, describes the cul-tivation, celebration, and reinvention of cultural difference and diversityby a people deemed by its social superiors too stupid and uncivilized tohave a culture at all. The other part of the story concerns the sometimesdisastrous, sometimes comic, and sometimes sinister consequences of awell-intentioned policy of social engineering. Although the Hungarian at-tempt to impose a standardized vision of how an ethnic minority like theGypsies should live was in some respects a specifically Communist proj-ect, in many other ways it illustrated a relation between social reformersand the people who were supposed to benefit from these reforms thatcould have been found anywhere in the "democratic" Western world.

Post-Communist Gypsies, or RomaIn April 1993 seventeen-year-old Magdalena Babicka stood on the stageof a newly renovated hotel in the Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary.Magdalena was one of the twelve finalists in a new, televised competi-tion, Miss Czech-Slovakia. At one point in the evening, the master of cer-emonies asked the girls, one by one, about their ambition. The optionschosen by the other girls, air hostess, model, or even journalist, were notfor Magdalena. "I want to become a public prosecutor," she announced,"so I can clean our town of its dark-skinned inhabitants." Magdalena, ap-pearing for the first time on national television, looked around nervouslyfor an instant, but the ripple of laughter in the invited audience turnedinto a burst of applause. Magdalena's "little;'oke" had worked. "Yau're abrave girl," the master of ceremonies told her. "Some newspaperc won'tlike you for saying that, but those of us who don't live in your town haveno idea how difficult things are."1

The next morning Magdalena found that she had turned herself intoheadline material across Europe. The BBC World Service broadcast anitem about her, and newspapers across the Continent told the story of the"Czech beauty" who "wants to rid her town of Gypsies." For a few daysin the Czech Republic, there was talk of prosecuting her, but the author-ities decided to let the dust settle over the incident.Magdalena had inadvertently set off a small international outcry, butback in her hometown the work for which she thought herself fitted wasalready being initiated. The impending separation of the Czech andSlovak Republics meant that all residents of the former Czechoslovakiahad to acquire new papers and proof of citizenship. In the Second World

IntroductionWar, the Nazis had wiped out the Czech GyPSI population' so in 1993-^"y"r those living in*the czech lands were still seen by Czechs as "im-*iglu"rt- from SlJvakia.2 Their Presence had long caused resentment;;;t the tidy Czechs, and the iedefinition of nationality provided achancf, to officials so minded, to encourage some of the troublesome and'antisocial" Gypsies to leave' Through a clever use of stalling' obfusca-tion, and burealcratic intimidation, several families from Magdalena'shometown were being sent on their way by spring 1993' And despite therestraining influence if tf," media, ateited Uy tvtag{9lel:'s outburst' byAugust 19i95 conservative estimates suggested that 25'000 Czech Gypsiesi;;?; a total population of 200,000) w"t" ttow being excluded from cit-izenship and voting rights in the country where they lived and worked'3But ii was not just ii tn" order-obsesied Czech Republic that Gypsieswerediscoveringaharshnewreality.Gypsieshave-becomethescape-goats of postcommunism throughouf the region' fn the Czech Republic'most of the petty and not ,o p"[ty machinations that are worked againsti;;kil Cypry iamilies huvu'th" seal of bureaucratic procedure stampedon them. Elsewhere in post-Communist Europe' the marks of oppressionare different. Gypsy ,"'frg"", from warring Yugoslavil hlve repeatedlyclaimed that they *"r" ti" first sent into battle by their Croat and serbcommanders. In Romania in the first two years aJter the revolution';;;;it il; hundred Gypty lrom3s were burned to the ground in eleven,.p"irt" incidents. nive inaiviauals died in these attacks. There werecolntless other incidents of random beatings' some of them carried outwith official connivance.a In Poland, and in Hungary' too' ther^e have beeniy".tti"gt ,"d small-scale pogroms's Jllh: three yeats from.1993 throughig9S, d,"r,ty-eight Cypti"s" were killed by s-kinheads in. the CzechRepublic.6 In a ilore Jrgunized fashion throughout the region' revivedfas'cist parties have targe"ted Gypsies rather than the former victims of theextreme right, the ]ews.-

"rpry sluffering-has not been caused by racist violence alone. Havingfru#ir,L cheap libor of Warsaw Pact communism' Gypsies have oftensuffered most from the social and economic disintegration that has af-fected the whole region since 1989' In Hungary tn1994' 65.percent ofGyPsy men were un"employed' The figure rose to an astonishing 90 per-.ur.,t i,,, one of the northlm"counties, i for*et center of steel production'Incidents of terror and the objective hopelessness of the economic situa-tiorrofmostGypsiesintheneworderhaveledinevitablytomigrationand flight. tn i&many inl993,estimates from Gypsy organizations sug-["rtua"tnut there were more than 30,000 Romanian GyPty asylum-seek-ers. So severe was the problem that special arrangements,seem to havebeen made at that time tetween the Ciech and German authorities not to


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I

lntroductionallow Rorna'ian Gypsies through their borders. And in early 1996 therewere plans afoot in-I,varsaw t9 a"eqol large numbers of those"Gypsies un-able to get any farther west than poland.z. The history of persecution, suffering, and forced assimilation provokestwo questions about the Gypsies. First, just what makes them so threat-ening to their host populations? And second, the central question ttrat ttry to answer in this book, given the hostility toward th"*,io- and whydo the Gypsies go on?The problem is even more striking when seen in a deeper historical per-spective' For as long as there have been Gypsies in Europe, they have suf-fere.d hostility, segregation, and misery. In-preindustriai Euroie, despitefinding_an occupatioral niche, especiariy in iural areas of Easte'm Europe,where they provided crafts and servicei the Gypsies *ur"r,u..La as theytraveled and harassed when they settled. In the Czech lands in the six-teenth .century, the Gypsie, *-"." forced to be executioners, in thelorryu" provinces of Moldavia and wallachia they -"i" ""rru"ed, andin the France of the sun King they were tied into tr," gul"yr "r oarsmen.In the late eighteenth century in Hungarian-administe"red slovakia, someforty Gypsy men and women -"."""*""rrted for u ,rppor"J cannibalfeast that was later proved to have never taken pru"". a'nlrei sorutio, to"the G-ypsy problem" in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was adoptedaround this time by the "enlightened absJutist,, rulers Maria Theresaand her son Joseph II: Gypsy ihild."n were to be forcibry aJopted intopeasant families and their parents decrared "new Hunguiiu.,ri or ,,newpeasants"' The poricy.failed in large part because the notitty objected tothe loss of a source of cheap laboi8 the rise of capitalism ui-,d du*o".u-tic or quasidemocratic states reinforced, if anything, the margill position"f t-h: Gypsies. From the late nineteenth century one finds in raw booksand local edicts across Europe traces of efforts io restrict th" *orre-errtof the Gypsies and control the ,,nomad menace.,,e. Only very recently have a small number of Gypsies begun to respondto persecutlon by organizing political parties -ind socixl movements.Meetings of Gypsy intellectuals and political leaders have been held""q"1. the formal aegis of the International Romany U.,lor, *ith repre_sentatives from twenty-six countries. Numerous ress formal gatherings,known as the Romano Congresso (the Rom Conference), tut""piu"u "u"f,I.":. i" Eastern Europe. But for the ordinary Gypsy in one of ihe unoffi_cral ghettos on the edge of an Eastern European viilage or town, the ma_neuvers of Gypsy intellectuals on the national and i-nternational stagesrarely mean much, at least as yet. sometimes it seems that the Romanypolitical parties spend more eifort establishing ttrei. creJiuitity amongnon-Gypsy authorities than among their own constituents. Even thougtin most countries these readers hav:e successfully argued that the cypsies

lntroductiott 5should be treated as an ethnic minority and have succeeded in changingsome official practices-for instance, Gypsies are now normally referredto in the media as Roma, or some local version of this, rather than thederogatory local words for Gypsies, Zigeuner in German, Cig6ny inHungarian, Tsigani in Romanian-the leaders'cottcerns remain very dif-ferent from those of ordinary Gypsies. It is a telling statistic that in a re-cent survey of 10,000 Hungarian Gypsies, 90 percent of the respondentswere unable to name a single Gypsy political party.l0To understand how ordinary Gypsies survive persecution and perpet-uate their way of life, we have to turn away from the round-tables andinternational forums beloved of journalists and television reporters andtoward the politics of daily life on and off the Gypsy settlements inEastern Europe. It is in the repeated 4egotiation of identity and interest,in conflict with hostile non-Gypsies in towns such as the one I lived in,that the secret of Gypsy survival will be found.

Communists and GypsiesSince the beginning of the Second World Wat there have been two dra-matic attempts to "solve the Gypsy problem" once and for all. Betweent94'1. and 1945, the Nazis exterminated some 500,000 Gypsies in an effortto eliminate their "degenerate" and "antisocial" way of life'11 Between7957 and1989, avery different sort of campaign against the Gypsies waswaged in Eastern Europe. No one was to be imprisoned, let alone killed.Indeed, repression and discrimination could not have been further fromthe thoughts of the early Communist reformers. But the desired end wassurprisingly close to the fascist dream: The Gypsies were to disappear.The task that Eastern European Communists set themselves in 1957was indeed herculean-the social and cultural assimilation of millions ofpeople who had suffered discrimination for centuries. But theCommunists believed that history was on their side.12 And then there wasthe desire to use the Gypsies as an example. What better proof could therebe of the power of the Communist method of social transformation thanthe disappearance of the Gypsies? So throughout the Communist bloc,with the partial exception of Yugoslavia, the Gypsies were subject to asystematic assimilationist campaign. Czechoslovakia, Poland, the SovietUnion, Romania, and Hungary pursued almost identical policies.l3While in the capitalist West the Gypsy problem receded after the war,in the East two factors kept the Gypsies in the public and official eye. Firstwas their demographic importance. Whereas the Gypsies made up a tinyproportion (0.1-0.3 percent) of the population in the West, across the IronCr-rrtain they formed up to 5 percent and were often, as ir-r Hungary, thelargest siugle ethnic groLtp. Secorrcl was tl're fact that the nrere existence of


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6 lntroductionthe Gy-psies grated on the Communist ideological sensitivities. These areissues I return to in Chaptet 6,but the reader"may fincl it hetfru to havethe key elements highlighted here.From the Communist point of view, Gypsies were the poorest of thepoor.. They often lived in hovels outside of the villag" to *tii"n they wereattached, and in some highly visible places, ,ri"h u, the capital ofTrrg.rryl the Gypsies could stitl be found living in caves. Hr.afy any ofthem had any education, and as few had jobs. Flced with this deeply un-civihzed legacy of the capitalist past, the authorities took what, to theirminds, yu:.1ryrr-,pathetic approach. Although the ,,anarchicl, and ,,rn_productive" Gypry yly 9f liie might have beJn a rational."rpor,r" to "*_reme social marginalization and poverty, Communist societli could pro_vide a home for the Gypsies and io integrate them into ,,normar,, rife. Inthe past the Gypsies hid been excrudeifrom v,rages by Magyar peas-ants or only allowed to rive beside the vilrage "u.ri[r-r pii; tr-,"y had sys-tematically been paid lessthantheir Magyar"landless n;igilto;; for iden_tical work and had often found themseiirls paid in kind,"not cash.la TheCommunists would put an end to such disciimination.Crucially, however, the Gypsies were not to be allowed to ,,enter soci-ety" on their own terms. From the Communist point of view, there was aprofound opposition.between_the Gypry attitude toward wealth, work,and g9o$ housekeeping and tne sociitiit one. Communist theoreticiansargued that when capitalist industriarization had rendered the Gypsies,traditional skills (as foresters, _trough and basket *;k;;;; futty Ufu.t_smiths, and musicians) redundant,-most of them had been reduced toscavenging and begging' some had tried to surrender their way of rife,but there were others who instead had turned to ,,hustling.;ero* the of_ficial point of view, this "wheeling and dealing" wu, "iti",u more de-veloped form of begging or, worse,-active commlercial exploitation. Eitherway, these Gypsies "lived off the labor of others.,, The Communistsyi"ry* the Gypsies as members of the lumpen proletariat and so as po_tential opponents of the socialist transformation of society.ls The task,therefore, was to ,,raise,,them into the working "fr* Uy prrliing them towork in factories. There, the discipline, the organization, and the colrec-tive spirit of the socialist production rine wouliprovide tire Gyfsres witha model not just for the time spent working but ftr all their hvli. The val_ues of labor, thrift, and-diligence would ." ru." their old, feckress, and ir-responsible moral code. By finding their place in the prot"iuriut, *,"Gypsies would find their place at thJ heart of sociar rir"; ti"i. ,g"-ord ex-clusion would cease, and io wourd their distinct identiiy *a ii"rtyt".I discuss these ideas af mugh greater le'gth later, but it i, impo.tunt tounderstand from the -outset thaiin ,.rur"ry ,iruy, the Communisi doctrinethat labor was the sole legitimate source of .rlrru ""J th;ith; profits of

lntroduction 7"ttade" and "commerce" were morally illegitimate reproduced ideas thatwere already current among the mass of Hungarians. So in contrast to thenumerous unpopular Communist policies, the effort "to put the Gypsiesto gainful work" was a project that had widespread support in the pop-ulation.Ironically, however, far from merging into the working class, theGypsies, and the "problems" associated with them, became more promi-nent as the assimilation campaign continued. By the time I began doingmy research in 1984-1985, the "Gypsy question" had a public saliencegreater than at any time since the 1930s. There were two sources of thisrenewed anti-Gypsy feeling that I deal with in this book. First, there wasa dramatic gap between the theory of social assimilation and the realityof increasing social differentiation. Non-Gypsies were being told by theCommunists that much was being done to improve the Gypsies'lot andthat the disappearance of the Gypsies might soon be expected. But therewas very little evidence that this was the case. Ordinary Hungarians sawgood money being thrown after bad as rehousing policies did not achievetheir goals, schooling results failed to live up to expectations, and Gyprycommunities carried on, some thriving. Second, the policy reproduced, ina new guise, old ideas about the Gypsies as "the other." As ihe social andeconomic system stumbled into crisis in the 1980s, so the otherness ofGypsies became more prominent and threatening. But this happened insurprising ways, for these were confusing times. One unexpected way inwhich the "Gypsies" erupted into political discourse was in a commonrhetorical device for trashing the Communist Party and its apparatchiks:to describe them as people with a Gypry mentality. The very people whowere trying to get rid of the Gypsies were now popularly described asGypsies themselves.The fall of communism brought freedom of political expression for allhues of the political spectrum. Feelings that had formerly not been al-lowed public expression have surfaced and been intensified by the wayEastern Europe has been drawn into the world economy. But the ideas bywhich the Gypsies are judged have changed surprisingly little. Notionsof honest labor, just prices, and reward for effort, which informed popu-lar discussions of the economy under the Communists, still fuel the fearand loathing felt so widely toward the Gypsies. Nowadays, the wealth ofthe new robber baron capitalists appears to bear little relation to effortand diligence. And it is again the Gypsies who are the focus for the angerof people who feel excluded from the system. Those rare individualGypsies who have succeeded in manipulating the new possibilities havebrought down the wrath of their non-Gypsy neighbors. Often the successof these Gypsies is interpreted as the result of a cunning, simultaneousmanipulation of both the market and the state benefit system*just as in


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8 / ntrorluctionthe, past the Gypsies were. thought to benefit both from state handoutsand from the semilegar trade s.ct6* so arth.ugh *,i, uoot i"li, or.,ty *iththe period up to the fafl of cornrnuurism, in itr pages ,h" ;;;. will findstories and experienc;s. h3t are being repeatet{ -r.ro* Eastern Europetoday. As Magdalena Babicka's mother"tora;.,;i;;;rd;; much liketo see the day when honest w'rk will be properly rewarded.'I wouldn,thave any worries then. so that those who do not want to work have alower living standard than those who do. Today p"opt" iitu me live soclose to those who live off social benefits, we have to instalr some sort ofa legal order here.,, It is, then, at the rich Gypsies, ,, *;;h ;;;t the half_starved Gypsy pickpockets a^d thieves, tnaitrre ethnic "r"or",r"r, now di-rect their fury.

Mo dernity and DioersityIt is.an all-pervasive myth of the modern age that says our time is wit-nessing the replacement of cultural difference.and diversity by a homog-enized global culture. Like any good myth, this modern one iJconstanttybeing reinvented in uppur"r,itli r,u* grirur. In the nineteenth century,Karl Marx argued ttrai ine spread of Jommodification would render allaspects of human existence qlantifiable on a singre (monetary) scare, that"everything solid melts intolir."16 Although rrar?" r]"ir..r, ir'"li"tior, i., uradical context, his argument seems closery rerated io *r" tf"rar view, ex-pounded most fully perhaps by Max weber and George simmel, that therise of a modern nation-stite based on standard bureaucratic and techni_cal apparatuses wourd require a shared, uniform uoay oir.r,o*i"ag" *aculture.lT Both the radica[ and the liberar visions were of a flattened so_cial and cultural lancrscape. Fifty years rater, postwar theories of mass or:onsumgr society revived these ideas for boom-time capitarism, *r,iiu i.,Eastern Europe officiar Communist ideology seemed to promote an anal-ogous vision of modernity: the revelir',g of".rurr, ethnic,'ana naiiona air-ferences to create a homogeneous and unitary society. At the same time,as if echoing Communist propaganda, Westem Cold War mythology as_ rserted that communism turnedal its subjects into uniform rittre graymen' Uniting aI these myths was the idea ihut thu -ilp;;;;i";r,, of *u_chine production, market organization, bureaucratic power, globar meansof communication, unreashe-cl fo."", oi production, or some combinationof these would ensure that when diver'se peopres w".e brougr,t into thesame technologicar, social, and cultural space, difference and variationwould be eliminated.From the- perspective of moderni zation theories, the existence ofgroups/ such as the Gypsies, displaying striking cuitural iJllf"r"r,"",,from the surrounding population ,pp"rr"r to result from their lack of in-

lntroduction 9tegration into the wider social order. This book argues the opposite pointof view, starting from an argument made forty-five years ago by ClaudeL6vi-Strauss in an essay he wrote for UNESCO: "Besides those differ-ences due to isolation, there are those (just as important) due to proxim-ity, that is, the desire to differ to stand out, to be oneself. . . . Diversity,"he said, "is less a function of the isolation of groups than of the relation-ships that unite them."18 What this book shows is that, far from creatinga world of little gray men, the Communists inadvertently provided a par-ticularly fertile ground for preserving and elaborating cultural difference.In developing this argument, I use three separable levels and styles ofanalysis. The book opens with some of the Gypsy characters who taughtme much of what I know about the Gypsy way. Then, outside the settle-ment in the world of the factory, I take the opportunity to give a broadetmacroperspective on features of the social landscape that impinged onthe lives of the Gypsies. The Gypsies'view of the socialist factory and thesocialist market, of the formation of government policy and its applica-tion by local government, was inherently limited. Hence, I adopt a newlanguage and level of analysis in Chapters 5 and 6. Finally, in Chapters 9through 12, to develop an understanding of the resilience of their way oflife,I introduce a more structuralist perspective in interpreting Gypsy orRom ideology, the ideas that inform Rom cultural activities. I make nobones about mixing levels of analysis and what seem to me appropriateliterary styles in this fashion. Each of these corresponds to an aspect ofthe total social process. To listen only to the Rom's official account ofthemselves would be to succumb to a romantic view of "Gypsy freedom."To pay heed only to an objective, sociological view of the position of theGypsies in the Hungarian division of labor would be to commit the con-verse error: to imagine that the Gypsies had no autonomy and merely re-acted passively to their circumstances. It is in the lives of individuals, ob-served through fieldwork, that we cetn see how these two aspects of sociallife meet and how real people survive and surmount the contradictionsthey face. And so it is to them, ultimately, that I return. I hope that,by try-ing to integrate the three worlds of the Gypsies, their peasant neighbors,and the socialist state into a single study, I have given a more preciseethnographic sense than has been customary in earlier studies of theGypsies and the wider context in which they found themselves.

The Local Setting and theProblem of DifferenceIn C)ctober 1984, together with my six-week-old son, Gergely, and hismother, ]udit Szegd, I moved to the town of Harangos, two hours' drive


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,10 htruductionfrom Br'rdapest. There I spent the next fifteen monthsle in the settlementh:*It locally as "The Third Class," The name, it turned out, referred. notto its level of comfort or its reputatio' but to a technical classification oftypes of land around the town. Harango', an agrotown situated just northof the great Hungarian prain, had moie than rlooo cypr/i,r,utitur-,t, 1u"-cording to a then recent, if u,reriabre, census). The."t ,i*;t; somethingarb:trary about the choice of a fierdwork site, and Harangosiappenea tobe the.first place where I could envisage doing fieldwoit ir, .urror-,rutypropitious circumstances. In particulal this ileant that the town wasprosperous enough to afford plenty of employment opportunities in localfactories for the Rom: They aia noi have to commute weekly to Budapestas did many Rom from poorer areas. The Rom themselves wer" thereforeneither miserably impoverished .or so wealthy as to make fierdwork atricky prospect: our research relies, after aI, o" p"optu;r-*iiiir,g.,"r, toleave their doors open for us. But there was arso a self-esteem and dig-nity among the Rom of the Third Crass that attracted me. In other settle-ments I had visited with my ethnomusicorogist guide we hJbeen takeninto the Gypsies'homes and seated on the smartest furniture. Here, theRom gathered in a courtyard and sat us on the ground, ,,in the Gypsyway," as they would with one another. These were Gypsies who were notafraid of seeming ,,uncivilized',; they were too proud for that.In contrast to what outsiders Tigt t expect, the Gypsies in Hungary his_torically did not form a single, homogeneous grorp. I chose to researchamongthe Vlach Gypsy group, who alone of aI Cypsies in Hungary callthemselves Rom. Therefore when I talk of the Rom and Rom ways ofdoing things it is to them arone that I refer. To avoid confusion, I shourdsay that there is no universalry agreed on set of categories for crassifying9yptl groups. Hungarian scholais normaily tark of ir,."" *ri" groups ofGypsies. The so-called Hungarian Gypsies formed the *rj;.ity, perhapseven 70 percent of the totar, and weie found throughout th6 country.These were, by and large, descendants of Gypsies *toru arr"usto." nuas.gofen the Carpathian dialect recorded by Archduke Franz Josef in hisdictionary of 1893. one -hundred years riter, most of these spoke onlyHungarian, thgugh in a few comrn,nities where some indep"id"rrt ""o-omic activity had been sustained, their dialect of Romany ivas still spo-ken' Then there were the Boyash Gypsies, who made "p rl*" io percent.of fe total, living mostly in the rolihur., counties where their ancestorshad arrived from Romania and serbia at the end of the nineteenth cen-ty+ Thgr spoke an eighteenth-century dialect of Romanian and were tra-ditionally renowned as foresters ani woodworkers, 6;.trlly trough-m1ker1' Finally, the Romany-speaking Gypsies of vari,ous subdiatects-the Gypsies of the Third Ciasi in Haiangos spoke the Ma5ari dialect-accounted for some 20 percent o{ the poluraiion. Their ancestors had

lntroduction 11come in several waves of migration from Transylvania and the Romanianprincipalities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, andthey now lived dispersed throughout the country. They were especiallynumerous in the far eastern counties and around the major industrialtowns. A maiority were Vlach, that is to say, immigrants from theRomanian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia at the turn of the lastcentury; a minority were from other Transylvanian groups.2o OrdinaryHungarians and officials alike thought these to be the "worst" of theGypsies.Linguistic and historical differences aside, from a sociological point ofview none of these Gypsy "groups" formed a homogeneous population.Family organization and culture were varied, and consequently officialpolicies did not have a uniform, across-the-board effect' The HungarianGypsies were mostly laborers in factories and building sites, but somewere also traders selling fashionable clothes and other consumer goods.Boyash Gypsies were mostly employed as miners and agricultural labor-ers but also traded in wooden tools. Vlach Gypsies, too, were mostly pro-letarians, but they also managed to dominate the horse trade and, in-creasingly, the used-car market.21

The reader will discover that this last point was particularly importantin shaping the experience of the Harangos Gypsies' Communist hostilityand, later, ambivalence toward trade meant that the Gypsies who dealton the market were particularly liable to repressive measures. But fromthe Rom point of view, as I demonstrate in Chapter 6, Communist prac-tice merely repeated earlier non-Gypsy attitudes. In the interwar period,the Gypsies had been attacked by the Far Right in Hungary for their "do-nothing" lifestyle, and when the Nazis occupied the country and starteddeporting Gypsies, it was likewise because they r'4i4r't', work" and were"unproductive parasites."The idea that ethnic minorities may take on the role of "intermediary"and play an especially prominent role in trade and markets is a very fa-miliar one in social science.22 But perhaps because we think that we knowintuitively what a market is, surprisingly little has been written abouthow such groups actually think about their activity as traders. One of themore distinctive features, I believe, of this book is its attempt at a detailedethnography of a market and the rich symbolism of trade for the Rom.23The variation among Gypsy groups means that no single book could tellthe story of all Hungarian Gypsies under communism. Given this diver-sity I would have been pursuing a mirage if I had hunted for an "average"Gypry community. Nevertheless, I believe that in Harangos I found mostof the issues that pitted Gypsies of all groups against ordinary Magyarsand Communists elsewhere in Hungary. The particular way the Rom re-sisted assimilation may have been unique to them, but none of the other


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;;,,12 lntrttductionlrryr groups gave up its identity as a disti^ct group. And it was this thatthe Communists could neither siomach no, ,r,d"rsi and..zaA final word on difference: one of the ways that the Rom dealt withtheir position at the bottom of the sociar ordei was by elaborating a com-plex.ideology of gender difference. This is a theme ihut o".r., iirrough-out the book and is discussed in detail in Chapters 4 and 12. since Gyfsymen tended to spend time together and women likewise, I was relianion]udit Szeg6 for much of my information about women and their doings.At times I asked her to carry out particular tasks for me, such as inter-viewing women about shame and purity. Judit also did her own researchon child _development and worlied for the Hungarian Academy ofsciences' Linguistics Institute collecting texts of uau talk and children,sgames. she has kindly made all these data availabie for me. There are,howevel, and perhaps inevitably, serious gaps in my knowledge. I knowmuch less about how women talked withlich other and behived whenthere were no men present than I would like. I am particularly aware thatI give no sense of a critical, alternative, or even subversivl discourse,however fragmentary, among Gypsy women. I would stress, however,that though my book presents whal may seem to be a male-centered viewof Gypsy social life, that is how Gypsy men and women often representtheir activities. Indeed one aim of ihis-book is to explain how srch a pa"-tial representation of life can seem acceptable and iesirable much of thetime to the Rom.

"Gaiety in the Face of Despair,,9ypri"r are a part of our world and yet are distinct from the rest of us.They live in the world we*now, yet they seem to offer an alternative wayto be in our world. The Gypsy woman who appears on your doorstepselling-clothespins may be poor and dressed in-threadbaie clothes, butmost likely she will have a style, a panache, and a charm denied to mostof the rest of us. It is no accident that the question everyone wants an-3we1ed. about the Gypsies concerns their origins, since *" hurr" difficultyin placing these outside-insiders, understanding where they come from.\A/hen they offer to tell our fortunes, Gypsies Jaim that tt*y "* speakdirectly to our innermost hopes and dreams, and yet at other times'theydisplay a nonchalant disregard for local ways. Ti-rere is always an am-bivalence in our feeling-s towardthe Gypsies. By their differe.r"", th"y r"_mind us of our ordinariness, and thougir their unruliness may ilrt ui outof ourselves, at other times we resent iL Alternately, we find them attrac-tive and thre-atening. The woman who offers to bless you in the subwaywith a gift of heather might be the same lady of folklore who steals yourchildren.

lntroduction 13The sheer persistence of the Gypsies needs, I think, to be stressed. Theydo not have faith in a particular creed or book that might impart a senseof destiny and history to them or in religious leaders who might encour-age them to remain firm in the face of adversity. Patrick Williams arguedthat there is no single "cote" to Gypsy culture.2s It reminds me of theRussian dolls in which progressively smaller dolls are hidden inside thelargest one; however, with the Gypsies, each one of those dolls differs

slightly from the next. So that even if the Gypsies have to abandon largerand more spectacular forms of their way of life for a period, they are oftenable to reinvent the larger pattern from the smaller section they have beenable to hang on to. In Western Europe it is commonly thought that no-madism is an essential feature of the Gypsies. But in Eastern Europe,where most of the world's Gypsies live, far fewer than 1 percent of theGypsies travel. Likewise, the rejection of wage labor by the Gypsies inWestern Europe has been taken, by both themselves and their ethnogra-phers, as a key marker of their identity.26 But in Hungary and otherCommunist countries, nearly all the Gypsies work for wages. So theGypsies can be sedentarized and proletarianized-they can give up whatseem to be defining features of their identity-without that leading totheir cultural extinction. Why?Giinter Grass talked of the Gypsies' "gaiety in the face of despair," andit is here, in the ways they defy adversity and the sheer inventiveness oftheir responses to life's challenges, that the secret of the Gypsies' survivaland the fury they provoke in others can be found. In the chapters that fol-low, I show how the Gypsies transform their often harsh experience of theworld into something that makes sense of and gives value to their suf-fering. The solution to the puzzle of the Gypsies, a people without ahomeland but, unlike any other diaspora population, with no dream of ahomeland, lies in unfamiliar territory. Their "Torah," the reader will dis-cove4 lies in their cultivated insouciance, their careful disregard and at-tentive disdain for the non-Gypsy way. The Gypsies take objects/ repre-sentations, and practices-in Hungary, horses, cleanliness beliefs, markettrading-that exist in the outside world, and they invert or subvert theirmeanings to their own ends. In this way, they create a specifically Romsense of what it is to be human.

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