All Change! extract
Table of Contents
Editor’s preface 1
Damian Le Bas
Introduction: a new turning point in the debates over the history and origins of Roma/Gypsies/Travellers 3
Professor Thomas Acton
1 Mind The Doors! The contribution of linguistics 5
Professor Ian Hancock
2 The Gypsies in Turkey: history, ethnicity and identity — an action research strategy in practice 27
Dr Adrian Marsh
3 Knowing Gypsies 39
Dr Brian Belton
4 The construction of the history of the Roma in the ‘Great Land’ (Russia): notions of Roma history and identity in Imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia 49
Valdemar Kalinin
5 The possible implications of diasporic consciousness for Romani identity 61
Damian Le Bas
6 The importance of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society (RTFHS) 71
Janet Keet-Black
7 The RTFHS: a special family history society 75
Michael Wayne Jones
Afterword: Rom, Roma, Romani, Kale, Gypsies, Travellers, and Sinti … pick a name and stick with it, already! 79
Gregor Dufunia Kwiek
Extract from All Change!
Taken from the Introduction by Professor Thomas Acton
In 1992 a consensus on Romani history seemed to have been reached, in Western European scholarship at least, with the publication of the late Sir Angus Fraser's The Gypsies, a magisterial work embodying a century of research. And yet, by the turn of the century its narrative was under attack from all sides. Radical social-constructionist critics (such as Wim Willems in his In Search of the True Gypsy: from Enlightenment to Final Solution) argued that this Fraserian history was merely a projection of the non-Gypsy racialisation of Gypsies in the eighteenth century. Some Gypsy/Roma/Traveller intellectuals have used Willems’ theory to insist that historical accounts must be rooted foremost in the varied accounts their communities give of themselves now.
On the other hand, those Gypsy/Roma/Traveller intellectuals committed to the Romani language and its Indian roots nonetheless insist that any account of how that language came to be in Europe, the Americas and indeed all over the world cannot simply dismiss it as a ‘mystery’, and still less the result of any primordial disposition to nomadism. It has to make sense in terms of plausible actions taken by real human beings. And as the Soviet Union crumbled, a new Romani intelligentsia emerged, cobbled together from the old apparatchiks of the East and the autodidact activists of the West, which simply did not fit into the range of possibilities envisaged by the old narratives. Nonetheless, this new leadership, subject to much critical self-scrutiny, and perhaps reluctant admiration, tempered by fear of community betrayal, wanted to claim historical legitimacy for themselves.
So, why should the Fraserian consensus, so long in the making and so dominant after publication, have been followed by such a lively period of historical revisionism? The answer surely lies in this emergence of a Gypsy/Roma/Traveller academic and intellectual community, asking new questions and presenting new critical challenges, because for them this identity was not something exotic but their own. The Romany and Traveller Family History Society in the UK currently has over 600 members. Forty years ago the embryonic ‘Gypsy Education Movement’ in England thought that history was the last thing Gypsy children needed to study. Now we realise that only by studying history can we actually confront its legacies of oppression, genocide and bitterness.