The Time Of The Gypsies / Edition 1

by Michael Stewart

Overview

HIS IS A STUDY OF HOW some of the most marginal and exploited people that exist can imagine themselves to be princes of the world.During the past two hundred years the Gypsies of Eastern Europe have faced near enslavement by land owners, the physical and moral onslaught of the Nazi holocaust, the fundamental challenge to their central values from the Communist state, and the violent discrimination and dislocation caused by the return to capitalism. One would have thought that the challenge would be too great, that they would have suffered cultural

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813331997
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/03/1998
Series:	Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1460L (what's this?)

About the Author

Michael Stewart received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and is currently a reporter with the BBC.

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Illustrations — Foreword /Maurice Bloch — Acknowledgments — A Note on the Text — 1 Introduction: The Lowest of the Low — Part One — The Gypsy Way — 2 Gypsy Work — 3 A Place of Their Own Gypsy Settlements — 4 "We Are All Are Brothers Here" — 5 Breaking Out — Part Two — Beyond The Ghetto — 6 Making Workers Out of Gypsies — 7 Gaos, Peasants, Communists, and Gypsies — 8 Staying Gypsy in a World of Gatos — Part Three — The Reinvention of the World — 9 Sons of the Market — 10 A Passion for Dealing — 11 Brothers in Song — 12 The Shame of the Body — 13 Conclusion: Marginality, Resistance, and Ideology — Glossary — Appendix — Notes — Bibliography — About the Book and Author — Index.

Editorial Reviews

Anthropologist Stewart, a research fellow at the London School of Economics, conducted fieldwork among the Gypsies of Harangos, Hungary, in the 1980s. Focusing primarily on the economic life of one Roma settlement, Stewart also addresses broader questions: Why are Gypsies perceived by others as threatening? How has their way of life survived despite relentless persecution and, in the case of the Harangos Gypsies, Communist policies of assimilating them into the working class? He argues convincingly that the differences between mainstream and Gypsy cultures are more the result of social and economic marginalization than of the Gypsies' non-European origin. This theory and Stewart's interesting analyses of horse-trading, purity beliefs, and song traditions are grounded in a lively and sympathetic documentary of Gypsy life in a small community. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.Judy Sierra, Eugene, Ore.

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