Gypsies; The Hidden Americans

New York, NY: The Free Press, 1975. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. x, [2], 330, [6] pages. DJ is price clipped, with some wear, tears, and soiling. Pencil erasure residue on fep. Includes Preface; Introduction; Methodology; The Kumpania; Economic Relations; Leadership and Conflict; The Relationship Terminology; The Vitsa and Natsia; Marriage; Pollution; Boundaries and Beliefs; and Conclusions. Appendix A contains the exact text of taped interviews with John Marks; Appendix B contains Relationship Terminology--Male or Female Speaking. Figures and Tables. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Author and Subject Index. Name Index. Anne Sutherland is a professor of anthropology at University of California at Riverside. She received her D.Phil. in social anthropology from Oxford University and has taught at Durham University in England for four years, at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN for 19 years and at Georgia State University for four years. She has conducted research on American Roma since 1968, on economic development and national identity in Belize since 1972 and recently on identity and culture in Texas. In all three cases, the focus of the work has been to understand how and why people create and maintain identity and culture. The author spent two years in close, continuous contact with a community of Rom Gypsies living in Barvale, California. Overcoming the secrecy, suspicion, and deception with which the Rom commonly treat all non-Gypsies, the author has produced an in-depth look at the full range of everyday social life among the Roma. The Gypsies portrayed in this book are the Vlax-speaking Rom, the largest group of Gypsies in the United States, numbering 500,000. Not officially recognized as a minority in the U.S. until 1972, Gypsies have led an almost entirely invisible existence here. Now in this fascinating work--the first complete account of American Gypsies--Sutherland has produced an in-depth look at the full range of everyday social life among the Rom. Separate, elusive, complex, and unique among the people of the world, Gypsies have preserved their traditional way of life. How have they avoided assimilation? What keeps them apart? How are they organized, and what do they believe? These and other important questions about these hidden Americans are addressed in Sutherland's contemporary study. America has always been a land of fascinating cultural diversity. From the extremely wide range of cultural groups on the American scene today, Gypsies, or Roma, are among the most extraordinarily elusive and complex. For more than forty-five years, social scientist Anne Sutherland has researched and objectively written about the American Roma worldview. She honed traditional research methods to study the Roma, who normally obscure the truth about themselves to outsiders, dispelling centuries of misinterpretation, bias, and romanticism that have led to discrimination. In this latest work, Roma: Modern American Gypsies, she succinctly portrays their twenty-first-century lives and identifies how their realities have been shaped by global processes and agents of power. Throughout complex stages of change and adaptation, Sutherland concludes, Gypsies have managed to retain, not lose, their identity. The Romani (also spelled Romany), colloquially known as Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally itinerant, living mostly in Europe and the Americas. The Romani originate from the northern Indian subcontinent, from the Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab regions of modern-day India. Genetic findings appear to confirm that the Romani "came from a single group that left northwestern India" in about 512 AD. Genetic research published in the European Journal of Human Genetics "revealed that over 70% of males belong to a single lineage that appears unique to the Roma". They are dispersed, but their most concentrated populations are located in Europe, especially Central, Eastern and Southern Europe (including Turkey, Spain and Southern France). The Romani arrived in Mid-West Asia and Europe around 1007. They have been associated with another Indo-Aryan group, the Dom people: the two groups have been said to have separated from each other or, at least, to share a similar history. Specifically, the ancestors of both the Romani and the Dom left North India sometime between the 6th and 11th century. The Romani are widely known in English by the exonym Gypsies (or Gipsies), which is considered by some Roma people to be pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity. Beginning in 1888, the Gypsy Lore Society started to publish a journal that was meant to dispel rumors about their lifestyle. Since the 19th century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States; and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the 19th century from Eastern Europe. Brazil also includes a notable Romani community descended from people deported by the Portuguese Empire during the Portuguese Inquisition.[70] In migrations since the late 19th century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada. In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora. The Romani language is divided into several dialects which together have an estimated number of speakers of more than two million. The total number of Romani people is at least twice as high (several times as high according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the dominant language in their country of residence or of mixed languages combining the dominant language with a dialect of Romani; those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani.