Bear beat me to it.
Damn.
Every night, all the men would come around....
Deric: . I personally don't know much about Gypsy/Romany culture at all, and I'm sure that there are many others out there who are in the same boat. If you're knowledgeable, educate!
Although the word "gypsy" is generally thought to refer to an Egyptian origin for this group, anthropologists are now fairly sure they're descendants of nomadic people from northern India, who only entered Europe by way of Egypt. I think this happened sometime after the fall of the Caesars and before the signing of the Magna Carta, but I'm not sure. "Gypsy" is a name given by outsiders - I'm under the impression that "Rom" is the people's name for themselves, with "Romany" being the name for the language (no relation to either Rome or Romanian, I'd assume), but I also remember hearing that there are different names for various ethnic subdivisions within Rom culture (which is much larger than you might suspect).
There's an excellent documentary called Latcho Drom that's about the Rom migration. It has no narration, no interviews, no spoken material at all - just a sequence of songs done by Rom people in various countries from India to Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Germany, and Spain. Seasons change. People live.
It's well worth a watch - sort of National Geographic meets MTV.
Much of the social attitudes towards the Rom have been shaped by their nomadism - home-owning, city-building cultures tend to focus on building up stores of resources, and view anyone who simply passes through and lives off what they can find on the way as a threat to the stores. Similar, ethnically unrelated societies have been fiercely oppressed in American history, with the eugenics movement in the early 20th century actually rounding them up and sterilizing them, while law enforcement did what they could to stop their annual triangular pilgrimage between three cities in the east-central part of the country.
Here's a bit of their history:
The Ramapaughs of northern New Jersey (incorrectly known as the "Jackson Whites") present another romantic and archetypal genealogy: freed slaves of the Dutch poltroons, various Delaware and Algonquin clans, the usual "prostitutes," the "Hessians" (a catch-phrase for lost British mercenaries, drop-out Loyalists, etc.), and local bands of social bandits such as Claudius Smith's.
An African-Islamic origin is claimed by some of the groups, such as the Moors of Delaware and the Ben Ishmaels, who migrated from Kentucky to Ohio in the mid-18th century. The Ishmaels practiced polygamy, never drank alcohol, made their living as minstrels, intermarried with Indians and adopted their customs, and were so devoted to nomadism that they built their houses on wheels. Their annual migration triangulated on frontier towns with names like Mecca and Medina. In the 19th century some of them espoused anarchist ideals, and they were targeted by the Eugenicists for a particularly vicious pogrom of salvation-by-extermination. Some of the earliest Eugenics laws were passed in their honor. As a tribe they "disappeared" in the 1920's, but probably swelled the ranks of early "Black Islamic" sects such as the Moorish Science Temple. I myself grew up on legends of the "Kallikaks" of the nearby New Jersey Pine Barrens (and of course on Lovecraft, a rabid racist who was fascinated by the isolate communities). The legends turned out to be folk-memories of the slanders of the Eugenicists, whose U.S. headquarters were in Vineland, NJ, and who undertook the usual "reforms" against "miscegenation" and "feeblemindedness" in the Barrens (including the publication of photographs of the Kallikaks, crudely and obviously retouched to make them look like monsters of misbreeding).
The "isolate communities"--at least, those which have retained their identity into the 20th century--consistently refuse to be absorbed into either mainstream culture or the black "subculture" into which modern sociologists prefer to categorize them. In the 1970's, inspired by the Native American renaissance, a number of groups--including the Moors and the Ramapaughs--applied to the B.I.A. for recognition as Indian tribes. They received support from native activists but were refused official status.
(from Hakim Bey, here.)
There are also plenty of Rom in America, too - they've been here at least since the 1800s. In South Florida, they often pass as Cuban (dark hair & skin, slightly accented English).
There are good chances I've met some and simply not known it.
Personal anecdote, compressed form: My uncle Peter, as a toddler, was stolen by gypsies, according to my grandmother's diary. The family was sheltering from the war in a castle in Czechoslovakia, and a troupe of musicians breezed through town. When they left, Peter was gone. They found him two towns down the road. The performers apparently promised him a monkey and pony of his very own. |
