Cingeneyiz.org: You think that the theory of migration from India makes the gypsies "exotic strangers" for European intellectuals. Why do the European intellectuals have such an apprehension?
Many Europeans, indeed many European scholars especially, are entranced by the idea that Gypsies can be traced back to India. This does NOT necessarily cause apprehension. On the contrary, as Edward Said has argued, people like to exoticise the 'Other'. I have found that non-Gypsies or Gajes in public discourse, aswell as in some of the literature, are more troubled to think that Travellers or Gypsies may include some indigenous individuals. This is seemingly because it implies they have resisted assimilation into the dominant, if not 'superior' settled society.
Groups around the globe may have multiplex origins and continuities. It is no longer possible to imply there are distinctly bounded genetic groups. There are of course populations, as opposed to cultural groups, with some genetic similarities, but without inevitable cultural uniformity. It seems, as I argue below, that under Stalin, the communist states favoured a single territorial origin.
Given the controversy which erupted in the late 1980s from the calculated misreading of just a few pages of chapter one of The Traveller Gypsies (Okely 1983), I take this unexpected opportunity publicly to correct some of the gross misrepresentations which emerged through the 1990s and beyond. However, a careful and open minded, rather than malicious reading of my original texts will expose the travesties that have circulated on the internet, hearsay gossip and in some supposedly academic publications.
First, I have NEVER suggested there were NO Indian connections among Gypsies. I was merely sceptical of the suggestion that ALL persons calling themselves Gypsies, Roma or Travellers are direct descendants of a single, bounded group who either moved gradually or in one era 10,000 AD from India. But it has been politically usefull to invent and attribute to me bogus arguments, then pass them on to others who will never read the original texts.
For example, when teaching on the Roma course at the CEU in Budapest in the late 1990s, I was questioned by a Russian linguistic student on the course. He was amazed to hear me describing Roma/Gypsies/ Travellers as ethnic groups. He had somehow been informed in advance that I categorically denied this. I pointed out that I was actually one of the first to introduce in print their identity as an ethnic group in my joint authored book Gypsies and Government Policy in England (Adams, Okely et al.) way back in 1975. As the sole author of Chapter 2 'Gypsy Identity', I introduced the anthropologist Frederick Barth's (1969) notion of 'Self Ascription'.
Again in the 1990s, a much respected member of the English Gypsy Council, who admitted that he did not read 'academic' books, confided in me, in considerable distress, that a British linguist had informed him that I had declared: 'There was no such thing as Gypsies; only tramps'. Perhaps the linguist was intoxicated by Cher's 'Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves'. I had indeed once played it to some Gypsy children on a camp in Yorkshire. They already knew it word perfect and begged me for my copy which I of course gave them.
Back to the historical, intellectual debates: from the 1970s, I had necessarily been drawn into the discussion of Indian origins, not only because of Sanskrit linguistic links, but also as an anthropologist who necessarily studies every aspect of a peoples' way of life and cultural context, that is the Economy, Religion, Family Structure, Kinship and Wider Policy and Politics. I was influenced by the holistic anthropological approach taught by my mentor, Edmund Leach at Cambridge. Cultural practices cannot be explained solely by origin but also by current meaning and practice- which are flexible over time.
From my reading of the folklore and scholarly publications from the early 19th century, it emerged that gaje scholars and others seemed obsessed with explaining all contemporary Gypsy customs in terms of Hindu origins, neglecting entirely any contemporary significance to the people concerned. I still encounter gajes who assert that the Gypsy practice of burning the possessions of the dead proves the Indian legacy. Yet the Gypsies' practice is the very opposite. Hindus do indeed burn the bodies of the dead on funeral pyres, ideally at Benares. But Gypsies never do. I contributed to a Dictionary of Cremation, having contacted a wide circle of researchers around Europe, including Piasere, Stewart and Williams, who confirmed the similarities of burial of the body in graves NOT cremation. The possessions of the dead are burned or disposed of, but the bodies are placed in sometimes very elaborate graves (see also Okely 1983 ch. 12).
This questioning of a reductionist interpretation of beliefs has had unexpected consequences. It has been distressing that gorgio scholars then asserted that I deny the Gypsies their history. The linguist Donald Kenrick shouted at me: 'Every time I read your book, I want to burn it'. (Okely 1997 in After Writing Culture eds James, Hoccky and Dawson)I asked why he supported a policy of book burning, with its ominous history. I should have asked why he read it again and again. On an even more personal level, the Manchester University linguist Yaron Matras has in a collection published by Liverpool University Press, with its distinguished connection with Gypsy Lore publications, asserted that my arguments amounted to a 'self righteous crusade' (p. 65 in The Role of the Romanies eds. N. Saul and S. Tebbutt 2004.) Additionally, he declared that my book ignored 'two centuries of serious scholarship from different parts of Europe' (ibid). Perhaps my Oxford doctoral examiners Michael Banton and Peter Riviere should have been informed. My supervisor Godfrey Leinhardt did not describe me that way.
Not understanding terminology commonplace in social science, including geography, Matras suggests that my use of the label Gypsiologist is a term of abuse. Yet it has been standard practice to define specialists by regional interests e.g. Africanist or South Asianist. The term Gypsiologist, moreover, overcomes the fact that Gypsies are NOT linked to one territory. In many cases, the linguist professor had not understood that I, as social scientist, was engaging with popular discourse encountered in local and national contexts (see Okely 2008 'Knowing without Notes' in Knowing How to Know eds N. Halstead, E. Hirsch and J. Okely).
When referring to 'secret languages' in inverted commas, I was signalling popular representations, including sometimes the description by Gypsies themselves, not, as Matras dismissively caricatures my belief, that Romani was in reality totally secret. My commonplace English irony was culturally misinterpreted. It may be strange for some academics that an anthropologist mixes with living human beings as the core of her research. The emergent material is not restricted merely to that 'evidence' which can be downloaded or dusted down from shelves. Surely a linguist who interviews or employs assistants to record living humans speaking, albeit confined in space and time, should be open to understand the wider horizons of knowledge and humankind.
Another possible source of the misrepresentation may have been assisted by Fonseca's Bury Me Standing (1995). In her acknowledgements, she declares 'I am especially indebted to Donald Kenrick...over four years he patiently responded to my ideas and impressions and finally read the whole book in manuscript'. Perhaps this explains why the ONLY reference to my work in the text is as follows: 'Judith Okely, with particular reference to British Travelers (sic), deplores all talk of an Indian origin, (my emphasis) which she sees as just another way of exoticising and marginalising this widely traveled and long resident European people'. (p.100). In the Bibliography she asserts that 'Okely rejects the widely accepted theory of (and the linguistic arguments for) the Gypsies' Indian origins' (p.308).
I was to discover that the same author who had, through naming, so misrepresented my views, had no compunction in plagiarising core pages and concepts of my work when 'revealing' Gypsies' beliefs about animals and pollution taboos affecting edibility etc. (Fonseca 1995 pp 104-106. cf Okely1983 pp 89 -104). There was not one reference to my work, although, after repeated complaints to the publishers, this may have been rectified in some later editions. The frontispiece informed us that Fonseca 'has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work..No part of this publication may be reproduced ...without the prior permission of the publisher'. Thus others' unacknowledged scholarship is appropriated. Mine is not the only work to be plagiarised.
According to The New York Review of Books, when her book received double page publicity, their centrepiece was that all these strange Gypsy animal beliefs were her unique discovery. I received a copy of that review from a Chicago Professor of anthropology asking had we not learned of this a decade ago through my original work. During a later plagiarism scandal involving a Dr. Persaud, a UK journalist heard of my complaint as to how the literary world, including the author of Atonement, consider that reproducing others' published non-fiction, without full acknowledgement is not plagiarism because mere 'reportage'. After all, that was merely the published autobiography of a living woman, whereas the acclaimed novelist thought it crucial to obtain permission to reproduce a few lines of a dead male poet. It seems while poetry is acknowledged as the work of a creative artist, no consideration is given to the fact that an autobiography involves creative selection and construction. Claire Armitstead asked me for proof of my complaint (i.e. evidence) and was fully satisfied after comparing Fonseca's pages and my own. Thus I was placed on her Guardian website (Blog books).
Linguists and the Glitterati do not understand nor, it seems, want to understand the painstaking work involved in social science and especially the analysis of anthropological field research. I have introduced that process in 'Thinking Through Fieldwork' (Okely 1994 in Analysing Qualitative Data eds. A. Bryman and R. Burgess). My analysis of what social scientists recognise as evidence was considered so informative that sections of that same article were reproduced a decade later in an Open University text book- Doing Social Science Research (S. Yates 2004). Among other procedures, it demonstrates the hitherto lost potential in a mere footnote of a 'gentleman scholar' in a 1922 article by T. W. Thompson in The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society. Oh ye of little faith, I did indeed spend months reading through all those journals accessible in the Kensington Public Library. T. W. Thompson actually referred to pioneering anthropological texts.
Despite the known caricatures of my work, I am still taken aback by the vitriolic falsehoods on the internet. Someone informed me I had been branded 'The enemy of the Roma people'. A sociologist had already announced at a Netherlands conference plenary in the early 1990s that I was personally 'responsible for all the racial discrimination henceforth against Gypsies in the UK'. Apparently, in a UK court case, without my knowledge, my book had been naively used in a discrimination case by solicitors for Gypsies and Travellers,. The magistrate or judge, on reading that I challenged the notion of a 'pure race'- (something with which most social scientists agree, after the discrediting of Nazi theories), then decreed that Travellers were not a 'pure race', so could not claim racial discrimination. All this was done with neither my consultation nor consent.
Ironically, despite the plenary speaker's assertion, I have repeatedly been engaged as Expert Witness for court cases on behalf of the Gypsies through the 1990s and up to the present. I have helped win a number of individual cases and once, when outrageously contacted to defend a racist landlord, I of course refused and informed the prosecutor's expert witness. I am proud that more recently my testimony was used in a Scottish Tribunal in 2009 to establish for the first time the ethnic identity of Scottish Travellers.They had hitherto been denied recognition. I was invited up to the Scottish Parliament to celebrate the launch of legislation with Scottish Travellers.
Why is it that academic hatred is fuelled by masculinist fear of women intellectuals? For indeed the hatred has come mainly, if not entirely from males. If I was of a UK ethnic minority, these men would not dare make such attacks. My warning to younger women and gentle men, (yes- the alternative meaning of gentle), aiming to teach and research in universities is – Be ready for the blood splattered cock fighting in macho academia where it seems that verbal violence and defamation of imagined rivals are perpetually rewarded. Regrettably, that seems to be the way to obtain funding, smart publications and premature promotion. The moral and intellectual search for knowledge, and indeed political commitment are steeped in gendered conflicts and caricature assassinations (see Okely 'Gendered Lessons in Ivory Towers' in Identity and Networks 2007 eds D. Bryceson, J. Okely and J Webber). Intellectual exchange and shared learning in the quest for knowledg are apparently to be discredited. Fortunately, my academic position never depended on references from male linguists who are not social scientists. But then, by contrast, I have learned so much from the Gypsies and Travellers who have survived far worse. I admire their refusal to be assimilated into dominant and harsh systems.
In a recent article in The Times Higher Education, 'Backup is needed for those under fire in the field, abused lecturer says'(27 may 2010 p. 17), it is revealed that Margaret Greenfields has been 'targeted for abuse because of her work with Gypsy and Traveller communities'. The examples concern mainly members of the public, especially after court cases, then hate messages online, although 'even academics have questioned her work'. However, the latter were not engaged in research on Gypsies.
Cingeneyiz.org: A categorization, gypsy and gypsy-like, has emerged especially after 19th century. Have the communities that are not categorized as "real" gypsies been affected negatively? In this context, what do you say about the situation of Irish travellers?
Yes ironically the stereotype of the 'real' Gypsies reflects more the interests of the definers. I have argued in 'The Traveller Gypsies' that the so called 'real' ones are a mythical construct used to justify condeming others. The 'real' ones were supposed to be rural, have horse-drawn carriages and have polite manners! But as I have mentioned on page 32 (Okely 1983), when the first horse drawn waggons were reported in The Times newspaper, in the nineteenth century in the UK, these was seen as hideous, not romantic and beautiful.
Acton (in Gypsy Politics and Social Change 1974) made a fulsome and intelligent critique of the denigration of Irish Travellers in news and policy reports in the 1960s and before and later. Everything loathed about Travellers, whether English, Scottish, Welsh or English was attributed only to the so called Irish. I have, in an article in a book edited by Dr Seamus O Siochain, Manooth university argued that the anti-Irish theme reflects the attitude to the Irish in British colonialism.
The privileging of an Eastern Oriental origin as proof of a group as being authentic therefore has consequences for the acceptance of a modern group. Thus it is forgotten that the first 'Egyptian', later labelled Gypsy, in the UK was recorded in Scotland. But some people, including the Scottish folkloreists, prefer to elaborate an indigenous 'Pictish' or Celtic origin of the Travellers. The Irish have had enough of foreign invasions, so to privilege a foreign Indian origin is not to be celebrated. Some prefer to argue that the Travellers are the carriers of some unchanged ancient civilisation before the wicked English siezed power.
Cingeneyiz.org: Is it a racist taxonomy to categorize the gypsies as "real gypsy" and "gypsy-like"?
It can indeed be racist to talk of "real Gypsy" . But Gypsy-like is not necessarily bad. There are good aspects to the popular image of the Gypsy if we consider their music and dance and indeed their capacity for movement and travel. I admire their brilliance at adaptation and their imaginative assessment of each specific context. I recall a Gypsy man telling me 'Wherever anyone might land me, I could earn a living. You could put me in a desert and I would find a way to survive".
Cingeneyiz.org: What do you think about the Romani as an independent language? Is there such a language?
I am not a linguist so cannot engage with linguists' latest professional definitions. But from my working knowledge of Latin, French and English with a bit of Italian and Persian, we can rarely if ever talk of an independent language. (I am not a professionally patented linguist, but did indeed study in French at La Sorbonne, Paris and passed the entrance exam to Oxford to study initially for a degree in French and Latin). But you have asked for my response. The first four languages above have interconnections, along with Spanish. I can often understand words from several European ones because of latin connections and the legacy of the Roman Empire. This does not mean we can always understand each European language because of Latin 'roots'. In any case, English has Anglo-Saxon connections. Also, the English spoken in India and the USA are not exact replicas. Therefore it seems possible that we can accept that Romani has many variations and forms over time and space. I believe that Sampson who searched for and asserted the pre 10,000 Sanskrit 'roots' of any Anglo Romany words, may have sometimes prioritised the links where others might argue for ambiguity.
Ironically, I have been criticised for deferring to an early article in the JGLS by Ian Hancock who queried in 1970 whether Anglo-Romany was indeed a creole. I responded with respect to someone with greater expertise on this, then suggested very tentatively that further research needed to be done. I merely raised questions to be pursued by linguists. Hancock seemingly, no longer stands by his own article. But why should Matras be so determined to blame me the messenger? It is argued by the specialists that some groups beyond the UK do use a form of Romani which could be called as much a language as any of those I have mentioned above.
However, I am sceptical of the EU funded project to construct a single, transnational Romani dictionary. This has resulted in individuals from some European Roma groups describing how they felt their own form of Romani was now devalued and discredited. Were they now ordered to speak only according to the official dictionary compiled by a committee?
Again the idea of constructing a once original language 'contaminated' over centuries resonates with the notion of some 'pure' race. Some linguists may deny arguing this, but I am also including popular discourse about such claims which I heard repeatedly by gajes with political power in the public domain. Anthropologists do, indeed, must engage with ideological representations, something which I argued in 2008 above.
Incidentally, I was bewildered to read that one notable scholar suggested that if a pure Indian genetic origin for Gypsies cannot be identified this is because, in the course of their migration westwards, the women were raped by gajes! As an anthropologist, I am far more concerned with the wonderful, ingeneous transformations and adaptations by Gypsies/Roma/Travellers. When I lived with Gypsies, gaje wives chose to join the travelling community alongside their husbands, while Gypsy women who married gajes tended to move away into houses. I did NOT find couples where the Gypsy woman had been raped!
I was far more interested in noting the occasions and contexts when specific Romany words were substituted or introduced i.e . the social and cultural context of language use, rather than isolating an informant in a one-to-one recorded interview with ready made questions. In contrast to that method of 'data collection', anthropologists prioritise participant observation. I lived weeks and months extending beyond a year, alongside my neighbours with occasional weekends away or other short breaks with my partner. Fieldwork was not reduced to snippets of fixed hours and quickie day visits. I lived the 24 hour, unfolding contexts on several camps. My encounters with officials, both on and off their territory, were relevant for understanding policy discourse; something which a linguist seemingly ridicules as devoid of 'evidence'.
Among my co-residents and companions, it was significant why some Romany words were substituted while other concepts left as English. eg I was quickly taught the Romany word 'chavvie' for child, 'gavver' for policeman or the crucially revealing word 'mochadi'. These choices are crucial pointers to values and social context. But perhaps the linguist essentialists would denigrate this puzzle. One gaje linguist had the audacity to tell some East European Roma on a university course that they were making mistakes in their use of Romani. The students walked out in protest. Instead, the academic should have pondered why and how language use changes through time and space.
Cingeneyiz.org: In recent years some concepts have been developed like "commercial nomads" or "Peripatetics"; do you think these kind of conceptualizations are functional?
These terms at least point to the fact that hitherto in the classical anthropological typology we were told there were only two types of nomads, hunter-gatherers and pastoralists. With the help of Rena Cotten's work I suggested a third type which was interconnected with a dominant economy see my chapter 4 in The Traveller Gypsies. My early and detailed focus on the primacy of the economic niche of Gypsies defies Acton's claim that I, as an anthropologist, only focussed on the Superstructure and Ideology and not on the Economy. He repeated this in january 2010 at the Oxford University Refugee Studies Centre conference on 'Romani mobilities in Europe'. Ironically my observation that a range of nomads first recorded throughout Europe could be linked to the collapse of feudalism was influenced by Marx, for whom the political economy was primary.
Unfortunately an outmoded and 19th century caricature of anthropology continues among some social scientists. Finally, I am puzzled by Matras' determination to demarcate so radically the study of Gypsy-like nomads from the Romani language of such groups (Saul and Tebbutt Introduction above and Matras 2004) as if interest in language should not be interwoven with economic practices. Anthropologists are interested in the full range of human possibilities and this includes all political/economic variations. Nomads are to be celebrated, not despised and stigmatised as is the usual knee jerk response. That Roma, Gypsy,Traveller groups have special nomadic formations, interdependent with dominant political economies, should be reinstated in the academic typology of world systems. To further sideline nomadic histories and possibilities, as separate from the cultural, is to internalise the sedentarist hegemony.
Cingeneyiz.org: While there is "Gypsy" do we need another concepts?
I can't say that Gypsy is a concept. It is true that Service, Commercial or peripatetic nomads seem to be words which are too banal.They sound like the inventions of deskbound technocrats. They lack the power of titles such as hunter gatherers and pastoralists. Perhaps the word Traveller embodies that power. But it is also for the Roma/Gypsies/Traveller to decide.
Cingeneyiz.org: In our web page Cingeneyiz.org, we use the concept Çingene which means Gypsy in Turkish. how do you evaluate this usage in the context of political correctness and activism?
I would have to be able to understand the context. Words and meanings change over time.eg in my childhood we could not use the label 'black' for persons because it was linked to the embarrassing 'Black Sambo'. I learned this partly because through my later childhood, we shared our home with individuals and families from Jamaica and Trinidad. We used their self ascription including negro (actually from the latin word for black). But suddenly in the mid 1960s, with the rise of Black Power and after I met Malcolm X at Oxford, the word Black was to be celebrated. Negro, with its Southern racist history, was rejected. Subsequently, people adopted the title African/American. But political correctness in the USA media was so automatic that a US journalist later asked Nelson Mandela if he was proud to be an African American!
I certainly regret the order by the EU that the word 'Gypsy' should never be used in a public sphere. This is what I was told before speaking in Berlin in 2004. I argued that the people I lived with chose the label Gypsy among themselves. They taught their children to pronounce the word and to identify themselves as such in early speech. My neighbours sometimes used the word Traveller when speaking to potentially aggressive outsiders partly because they feared the external stereotype. Brian Raywid who assisted in the wonderful book of photos by Tony Boxall (1992) reminded me only recently that they both asked the Gypsies what they would like in the title for the book. They ALL chose the title Gypsy Camera. The main Gypsy who appeared in the photos asked if a copy of the book be placed in his coffin when he died. His relatives respected his wishes.
I believe in what might be labelled political correctness IF the people themselves want such a label. I wonder if the professional Roma representatives from Eastern or Central Europe, once salaried under communism as mediators, demanded of the EU, after its expansion, to adopt their own preferred title. Then the EU in Brussels complied, without bothering to consult other groups in Western Europe. Could they not have realised that there is for example, an organisation called The Gypsy Council in the UK? Did they realise that the Scottish Traveller organisation, in the early 1990s, deliberately inserted the title 'Gypsy' because they worried that 'Traveller' might by then be linked solely to New (Age) Travellers? Again this is where day-to-day participant observation and enquiry should be considered fundamental. At that same 2010 Oxford Conference mentioned above, I was delighted to hear an English Gypsy woman, on the platform at a plenary, refer to 'Us Gypsy people'. Thus the pressure from Central and Eastern Europe to call all groups Roma had not succeeded.
As Will Guy noted in an article in Gypsies, Tinkers and Other Travellers (ed. Rehfisch 1975), Stalin gave extra authenticity and political power to any national minority, if they could prove an original territory. Thus there was a vested interest in salaried Roma representatives in restricting their origin to one territory, namely India, and this had to exclude any other mixed origins.
I recall a much respected Gypsy representative telling me with sadness how at one World Congress of Roma, some representatives form the European continent argued that Irish Travellers and the Sinti should be excluded because they were not of Indian origin.
Cingeneyiz.org: How do you evaluate the racist attacks in recent years in Europe?
All sedentarist states hate nomads. Unfortunately it has been politically useful to blame and scapegoat Gypsies as uncontrollable and both menacing and the subject of erotic fantasies. The examples in Italy are horrific. Politicians can invent, then exploit scapegoats. Nomads or migrants rarely have enough, indeed any significant votes. I was shocked that during the recent general election in the UK, the right wing press, and indeed some 'distinguished' journalists, regretted that the Conservatives, in their election campaign, did not attack Gypsies' attempts to build their own camp sites. It is terrifying how just a small group continues to be at the receiving end of so much larger social unease. The Conservative, Michael Howard, in 1994 helped steer through parliament the abolition of the legal duty for councils to provide Gypsy sites. Then in the 2005 Election, when he was party leader, he signed full page adverts condemning Gypsies who had made efforts to provide their own sites. Already Jack Straw, when Labour Home Secretary under Blair in the late 1990s, accused Travellers of 'defecating in doorways and stealing'. He was safe from prosecution for discrimination because he did not use the label Gypsies. It was said that Travellers were not an ethnic group, only Gypsies. But this contradicts the EU dictat. It puzzles and distresses me that while both Gypsies and Jews were victims of genocide, even politicians from once vulnerable minorities, can collude in ethnic intolerance.
Cingeneyiz.org: What are your ideas about Gypsy activism? what are the problems? How it can be improved?
Given Gypsies are indeed a very small minority and traditionally in the UK non-literate, without the legal and documented presence which many other ethnic groups achieve, Gypsies have less lobbying power. I cannot, as a gaje, speak for Gypsy political activism. It would be arrogant. I have noticed in the past that UK Gypsies have survived through invisiblility and movement. But I have always been impressed by the Gypsies/ Travellers/Roma who have spoken in the public domain. Here I have witnessed and conversed with Irish, Scottish, English, Hungarian, Romanian and Danish Gypsy/Roma/Traveller spokespersons.
At the same time, I am inspired by the increasing number of committed students, mainly Gaje, around Europe who support Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. They have been puzzled by the anti-Gypsy propaganda and not been brain washed by negative media representations. Instead they have tried to understand their context and they speak out in relevant and unexpected spheres. As graduates, they may move into positions of influence, alongside the increasing Roma/Gypsy/Traveller graduates.
The Open Society and George Soros are to be commended for a superb encouragement of Roma/Gypsy empowerment. I have been delighted to teach on courses at the CEU, Budapest.
I have also had the honour and joy, when I was Professor of Anthropology at Edinburgh University, of supervising the phd of a Scottish Traveller, Dr. Colin Clark, now a lecturer at Strathclyde University. More recently at Oxford, I have supervised a Masters dissertation by a Bulgarian Roma. It is inspiring to see that they can be future triggers for informed activism. I as a gaje cannot, like others may, pretend to be a leader of Gypsy descent.
Cingeneyiz.org: What do you think about our webpage Cingeneyiz.org? What are your comments?
Meanwhile what I have been able to access and read looks wonderful. There is a superb mix of different voices and groupings. It is a pity I could not access you website before embarking on my interview. Maybe I would have been more cheerful and entertaining. I also have some wonderful photos which I collected from the offices of the local newspapers both during and after the time I was living with the Gypsies. Some I reproduced in my book The Traveller Gypsies so at least they are archived there.
I am delighted with the aim of international solidarity through links with different groups across the world. In one section on commercial nomads ( yes maybe the label is more convincing the way you have elaborated it), you have emphasised different names and different countries . I love the use of the word 'transracial'. You have gone beyond the reduction of the so called 'true Gypsies' as those linked only to one part of the world.
I am always excited when I hear about yet another group of Gypsies or 'commercial nomads' when they were previously unknown in the dominant society. When lecturing in Leipzig last month, I met two postgraduate students who are working with Gypsy groups in South America. I recall Anne Sutherland pointing out in the 1970s that Gypsies were not then recognised as a minority in the US-. hence the title of her book 'Gypsies: the Hidden Americans'. Sometimes the Gypsies found it best as fortune tellers to present themselves as native Americans-a group the local population would recognise.
Thus your website give wonderful scope for the celebration of ALL persons and groups with some common associations. You also recognise that not all are nomads. Some were forceably settled. That may be an increasing risk in the UK at present.
Your website also has some heart-rending personal life histories of suffering and political injustice. At the same time there are admirable accounts of resilience. Such resilience is something I admired among those who welcomed me as their neighbour, co-worker and friend. As outlined in my 'Knowing without Notes' (2008), I learned especially the shared knowledge tthat the children gained when confronted by the death of a close one. In my upper middle class 'stiff upper lip' British culture, children were shielded from death and accompanying rituals. But they were left in agonising isolation and bewilderment. Gypsy children also learn about death through participating in a funeral rather than being excluded..That is why I was always impressed by the fact that Gypsy children I knew may not have been schooled but they were EDUCATED in the broader aspects of the world. The children accompanied their parents when working and were soon so wise. I am NOT advocating non schooling, but arguing that, in contrast to one of your entries on the website, It should be recognised how brilliant the children are through their alternative education in their society.
(see my article 'Non territorial culture as the rationale for the assimilation of Gypsy children' in the journal Childhood vol 4 1997). Sorry about the title. It was part of an international forum on childhood and nationalism. To recognise the often unique skills Gypsy children defies a shocking practice in some, especially ex communist countries, of puting them into classes for the subnormal! I hope your web will explore more and celebrate the alternative and loving family care which so many Gypsy children experience.
Finally, I also, as part of your web declares, recognise the power, brilliance and political intelligence of Gypsy women, so it would be good to have this made more visible in the organisational 'leaders' whom you portray in your photograph.
On the whole congratulations! All good wishes for it power to unite the political voice of a persecuted and misrepresented peoples around the globe
PROFESSOR JUDITH OKELY
Deputy Director, International Gender Studies Centre (IGS).
Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University
Research Associate, School of Anthropology, Oxford University.
Footnote * I have decades later mentioned a former partner and collaborator before becoming an anthropologist. My past association assisted neither media nor academic endorsement (Okely 'Written Out and Written In: Inishkillane Remembered' in Irish Journal of Anthropology Vol 12 (2) 2009 .)
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