Romania has a larger Gypsy population than most other countries but little is known about the relationship between this group and the non-Gypsy Romanians around them. This book focuses on a group of Rom Gypsies living in a village in Transylvania and explores their social life and cosmology. Because Rom Gypsies are dependent on and define themselves in relation to the surrounding non-Gypsy populations, it is important to understand their day-to-day interactions with these neighbors, primarily peasants to whom they relate through extended barter. The author comes to the conclusion that, although economically and politically marginal, Rom Gypsies are central to Romanian collective identity in that they offer desirable and repulsive counter images, incorporating the uncivilized, immoral and destructive "other". This interdependence creates tensions but it also allows for some degree of cultural and political autonomy for the Roma within Romanian society.

Who are the Romani people? -- Romani society -- Customs and traditions -- The Romani language -- The Roms among the nations -- Between romanticism and racism -- A modern Romani identity -- Appendix: The mosaic of Romani groups.

The vast territory from Asia to Eastern Europe that was part of or under the influence of the Soviet Union comprised cities, which have undergone profound changes in the last twenty years. The opening of borders combined with the affirmation of market dynamics, privatization and concentration of wealth, and the emergence of nationalist discourses have upset ways of life and value systems leaving deep marks on the urban landscape and organization of living space. These essays take an in-depth look at specific cases – Samarkand, Sarajevo, Berlin, Almaty, and others – to offer a complex picture of the transformations affecting the post-communist city.

Explores the evolving human rights of Roma in Eastern Europe's recent history, and the complex politics of Roma rights today.

What happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. This volume uses the concept of indeterminacy to explore how conditions of exclusion and abandonment may give rise to new values, as well as to states of despair and alienation. Drawing upon ethnographic research about a wide variety of contexts, the chapters here explore how indeterminacy is created and experienced in relationship to projects of classification and progress.

A collection of essays on a wide range of aspects of the Roma communities, cultures, social and political conditions across Europe. The scholarly field of Romany studies is trapped by the history of Roma in a unique and peculiar position in Europe. The investigation of Roma was in the past marginal to academic concerns because most of its practitioners were amateur folklorists interested in treating the Roma as paragons of a lost world and not as citizens of modern nation-states. Today the field is hemmed in by two different power fields: the emotionally understandable, though intellectually debilitating, concern to turn the plight of the Roma into a matter of human rights and the difficulty that academics experience in dealing with people who are not a people in the sense that nation states constitute and make peoples. CONTENTSIntroduction Michael StewartOPERATIONALISING ETHNICITY AS A THEORETICAL TERM What Makes Us Gypsies, Who Knows !: Ethnicity and Reproduction Judit DurstConstructing Culture through Shared Location, Bricolage and Exchange: the Case of Gypsies and Roma Judith OkelyThe Romani Musicians on the Stage of Pluri-culturalism: the Case of the Kalyi Jag Group in Hungary Katalin KovalcsikHarming Cultural Feelings: Images and Categorisation of Temporary Romani Migrants to Graz/Austria Stefan BenedikOPERATIONALISING ETHNICITY IN PRACTICECrediting Recognition: Monetary Transactions of Poor Roma in Tercov Yasar Abu GhoshOn the Borders of Gender. Marriage and the Role of the Child amongst Hungarian Gypsies Cec lia Kovai Passing: Rebeka and the Gay Pride. On the Discursive Boundaries and Possibilities of Skin Colour Kata Horv thThe Employment of Roma, Turks and Bulgarians. A Comparative Report Based on the Outcome of the Multipurpose Household Survey 2007 Alexey PamporovANTI-ROMANY RACISMSHistory and MemoryFrom Time-Banditry to the Challenge of Established Historiographies: Romani Contributions to Old and New Images of the Holocaust Huub van BaarThe Other Genocide Michael Stewart The Unhidden Jew . Jewish Narratives in Romany Life Stories Zsuzsanna VidraContemporary ManifestationsNomads Land? Political Cultures and Nationalist Stances vis- -vis Roma in Italy Giovanni PickerNot Always the Same Old Story: Spatial Segregation and Feelings of Dislike towards Roma and Sinti in Large Cities and Medium-size Towns in Italy Tommaso Vitale and Enrico ClapsRomany ResponsesThe Web against Discrimination? Internet and Gypsies/Travellers Activism in Britain Marcelo FredianiRomany/Gypsy Church or People of God? The Dynamics of Pentecostal Mission and Romani/Gypsy Ethnicity Management Johannes RiesClaiming Legitimacy in/of a Romany NGO Hana Synkov Short Biographies of the Contributors

Roma identities have often been presented in literature as collectively constructed and in opposition to those who are not Roma. Contesting Moralities challenges these preconceptions about Roma identification by disentangling the binaries between Roma and non-Roma, state and non-state, public and private. It explores topics resonating in contemporary Romani studies that are in need of further exploration through individual perspectives, including history, activism, kinship, childhood, and gender hierarchies. The book paints a complex picture of inequality and how it is negotiated amid conflicting, ambiguous and contradictory regimes of power and moral demands, including those of state and kin.

How do objects mediate human relationships, and possess their own social and political agency? What role does material culture - such as prestige consumption as well as commodity aesthetics, biographies, and ownership histories - play in the production of social and political identities, differences, and hierarchies? How do (informal) consumer subcultures of collectors organize and manage themselves? Drawing on theories from anthropology and sociology, specifically material culture, consumption, museum, ethnicity, and post-socialist studies, Materializing Difference addresses these questions via analysis of the practices and ideologies connected to Gabor Roma beakers and roofed tankards made of antique silver. The consumer subculture organized around these objects - defined as ethnicized and gendered prestige goods by the Gabor Roma living in Romania - is a contemporary, second-hand culture based on patina-oriented consumption. Materializing Difference reveals the inner dynamics of the complex relationships and interactions between objects (silver beakers and roofed tankards) and subjects (Romanian Roma) and investigates how these relationships and interactions contribute to the construction, materialization, and reformulation of social, economic, and political identities, boundaries, and differences. It also discusses how, after 1989, the political transformation in Romania led to the emergence of a new, post-socialist consumer sensitivity among the Gabor Roma, and how this sensitivity reshaped the pre-regime-change patterns, meanings, and value preferences of prestige consumption.

This book engages with the life and works of Indira Goswami, the first Assamese woman writer to win the highest national literary award, the Jnanpith Award, in 2001. From sociological treatises to a springboard of a socio-political milieu, Goswami’s texts are intersections of the local and the global, the popular and the canonical. The writer’s penchant for transcending boundaries gives a new contour and shape to the social and cultural domains in her texts. That every character is a representative of the society, that the context comes alive in every evocation of class struggle, power play, caste discrimination and gendered narratives add an interesting semantic load to her texts. While tracing the trajectories discussed above, this book foregrounds Goswami’s act of going beyond the margins of varied kinds, both abstract and concrete, in search of egalitarian and democratic spaces of life. The book looks at Indira Goswami’s works with a special emphasis on the author situated within the Assamese literary canon. It not only discusses the themes and issues within her writing, but also focuses on the distinct language and style she uses. The volume includes non-fictional prose, excerpts from her short stories and novels, viewpoints of critics, letters and entries from diaries, as well as interviews with Goswami about her writing and personal life. It engages with her works in the context of her multifaceted, almost mythical life, especially her avowed ‘activism’ against animal sacrifice and militancy in her latter career. Part of the Writer in Context series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Assamese literature, English literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south studies, gender studies and translation studies.

Social scientists did not predict the collapse of the socialist system in 1989-91 and their attempts to explain postsocialism have not been comprehensive. Economic disintegration and political instability have been documented, but the deeper causes have often gone unnoticed. Consequently the solutions proffered, such as the promotion of non-governmental organisations as the foundations of 'civil society', have so far brought little success. Postsocialism presents, for the first time, the anthropological responses to these problems which are all grounded in intensive fieldwork. The authors demonstrate that even when local conditions are specific, the view 'from below' illuminates macro trends. A wide range of topics are discussed, including: *the role of social and cultural capital in determining the 'winners' of rural decollectivization *the devaluation of blue collar labour *the position of Gypsies *the viability of 'multicultural' models in situations of religious differences and ethnic violence *new patterns of consumption in China *the revival of rituals and the healing of socialist 'trauma'. _