The Time Of The Gypsies

Michael Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429975431
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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

Part One

---

THE GYPSY WAY

2

GYPSY WORK

THIS BOOK DEALS WITH REPRESENTATIONS and misrepresentations. Both the Gypsy and non-Gypsy give a systematically distorted sense of the other. A good place to begin is with a basic source of misunderstanding—attitudes toward work and the acquisition of wealth—since it was around this issue that the Communist state focused its campaign to assimilate the Gypsies.

As far as most non-Gypsies were concerned, there were no more inveterate thieves and parasites than the Gypsies. Although most Magyars would have agreed that the Hungarian economy under Communist rule could not have functioned without widespread disregard of the regulations, without semilegal and sometimes fraudulent activities, the Gypsies were nonetheless held up as a particular example of lawlessness. Confusingly, the Gypsies themselves, in some contexts at least, seemed quite willing to accept the non-Gypsy stereotypes. By creating legends around these stereotypes and rhetorically celebrating economic cunning, the Gypsies cultivated an ethic that inverted prevailing non-Gypsy ideas about labor and the creation of value. It is this, their central ethic of non-production, that I explore here.

An Origin Story

Daily life on a Gypsy settlement could be uneventful, and I would often fill my days with making rounds of the households I had come to know, hearing their news, checking up on their latest livestock trades, delivering photographs from earlier visits, or just passing the time of day in the company of people other than my immediate hosts. On one such lazy afternoon some months after I had moved to Harangos, I called in at a small cottage on the edge of the settlement. A man called Zeleno lived there with his wife and three young children. Zeleno had always been slightly suspicious of me and my activities in the settlement, and when I entered, rather than sitting with me as other men might, he busied himself with his nine-year-old daughter, Rebuš. However, after a short while he settled her down and told me I might like to listen in on the following story, a “true” story, he insisted:

Kana o Sunto Del ostilas djiv le gaźenge,

akhardas vi le romen

te del.

De le romenge nas gono,

ke čore sas.

Kana phende le roma le Suntone Devleske:

“Suntona Devla,

amenge de ande gaźenge gono!”

Taj o Sunto Del merilas o djiv

ande gaźenge gono.

Pala kodo le gaźe

či kamel te den o djiv,

hiaba mangle le kodo.

Azir čoren le roma

Kathar le gaźe.

When Holy God gave out wheat

to the gaźos,

he called the Rom as well

to give them some.

But the Rom did not have a sack,

because they were poor.

Then the Rom said to Holy God:

“Dear Holy God,

give us ours in the gaźos’ sack!”

So Holy God poured the wheat

into the gaźos’ sack.

But afterward the gaźos

did not want to give wheat [to

the Rom],

even if the Rom asked for it.

That’s why the Rom steal

from the gaźos.

The story was meant, no doubt, to amuse Rebuš, but Zeleno had also told it for my benefit, as an example of a type of moral tale Gypsies called “true speech” that he knew I was keen to record. This one, like many such stories, dealt with Gypsy poverty and explained the origin of the Gypsies’ deceitful attitude toward the non-Gypsies: The result of God’s original distribution of wheat was that the gaźos, non-Gypsies, had become people with productive wealth who could exploit the poverty of the Gypsies and deny them what was rightfully theirs. As a result, the gaźos could now produce wealth by working on their land, while the Gypsies had been forced to get their daily bread by deceit.

Zeleno’s story made me uncomfortable. Many Magyars believed that there was an epidemic of “Gypsy criminality” in Hungary, and some police forces even had special departments devoted to “Gypsy crime.”¹ I saw one of my roles as an ethnographer as helping to dispel the prejudice that sustained the fear of the Gypsy. But Zeleno’s story did nothing to expose such concoctions as the mythological products of a fevered, late-Communist imagination. Instead, this story was forcing to my attention something that I had been trying to avoid for some months. Early in summer 1985, a fellow anthropologist had visited. One day, through me, he questioned Marča, the old lady of the family with whom I lived, about how the Gypsies lived. In sign language, Marča told him that it was by cunning and trickery. What she did was show him the fingers of her right hand palming an imaginary object. This, I was told to tell him, was “Gypsy work” (romani butji)—going “round the back” and putting one’s hand on goods by more or less devious means, including theft. Frequently after that, when he asked what someone had been doing, he was shown that same gesture. I knew, from living with Marča and her husband, that the amount of wealth that she and Śanko acquired through theft was minimal and that the rent I paid for myself and my family accounted for half of all the monthly income, yet here they were boasting of a lucrative larceny. Likewise, Zeleno, together with most of the men in the settlement, left home each day not as a predator on the undeserved wealth of the gaźos but as a semiskilled worker in the factory that dominated the horizon outside the windows of his two-room house. There he worked alongside of, and as a subordinate to, a number of gaźos, as an operative testing the quality of railway track, not as a thief. It is true that he had been involved in occasional cattle rustling and had even been imprisoned for this, but the money that his daughter Rebuš spent when her mother sent her to the shops for daily provisions came from banally legitimate sources.

My Gypsy “mother,” Marča, had, of course, been playing on non-Gypsy stereotypes when talking to my friend, but as was so often the case with the Gypsies and the gaźos, the outsiders’ stereotype was not wholly false. Indeed, there was also something of which Marča was obviously proud in that gesture of palming. It was only later in my fieldwork, again as a result of something that Zeleno said, that I understood the pride and the broader metaphorical truth conveyed in Zeleno’s origin story. The point was that, although the game of life was set up so that the gaźos could exploit the weaknesses of the Gypsies, there were also activities in which the Gypsies could gain the upper hand and redress the balance. In these, the Gypsies got something for nothing, palmed objects that the gaźos thought belonged to them. Participation in such activities, which went under the generic term of “Gypsy work,” was what any self-respecting Gypsy man or woman aspired to.

The Free Lunch

In Harangos, Gypsies often talked about how “stupid” (prosto) or “foolish” (dilo) the gaźos were and told me of ways that the “cunning” (buźanglo) Gypsies outwitted them. In all these activities, mythical and real, the point was to assert an attachment to wit, cunning, and the Gypsy way of doing things, that is (to borrow a peasant metaphor), harvesting wealth without having sown its seeds.² There was no strict boundary among scavenging, begging, or trading as forms of appropriation, nor was legality always of concern. The Rom were the ultimate bricoleurs, able to turn whatever was at hand—whether it was material items or rhetorical cunning during dealing—to some good use. The point was simply to get the goods of the gaźos at a rate that appeared to benefit the Rom, that is, to realize the “free lunch” of which others only dreamed.³

For Zeleno and his family, there were several ways in which they were able to engage in such romani butji. Most of these involved scavenging raw or discarded material and selling it back at profit to the gaźos. Like many women in the Third Class, Zeleno’s wife, Morga, kept pigs, which she fed on bread scavenged from rubbish bins in nearby housing estates and sold later at a profit to the State Slaughtering Company. But this was not her only form of Gypsy work. Together with groups of women who themselves, or whose husbands, worked in the Railway Company and therefore had free rail travel, Morga would visit a huge industrial garbage dump outside Budapest to collect nylon thread discarded by a tire factory, as well as rubber gloves on occasion. The women later sold the nylon and gloves at markets to gaźo viticulturists, who used the thread as twine for their vines. By not paying market taxes, these women could make some profit from every trip. Discarded book covers or even Pirelli calendars, also found on the industrial dumps, provided another form of “income”—these were used to decorate the Gypsies’ homes. In Harangos Zeleno himself bought scrapped horse carts from peasants who no longer needed them. Using a homemade welding system cobbled together from spare parts acquired at work, and daringly running this off his home (non–heavy duty) electricity supply, he repaired and repainted the carts. He then sold them back to the “peasants.” Most of the materials came as a gift from his sister, who specialized in scrap dealings, thereby reducing his costs, but as important to his success as that was his skill at placing his goods. A week’s work at this endeavor produced the equivalent return of a month’s factory earnings.

The Rom tried to provide feed for their horses too from Gypsy work. Throughout spring and summer Zeleno would go off with other men and cut grass from the roadside to feed his horse, and in the early autumn he could often be found with his brother-in-law out gathering unharvested agricultural produce on the fields of the collective farms. During this time of intensive gleaning, many Rom took several days off from their official jobs. As each day’s parties of Gypsies went off to see what their luck would bring them, a festive atmosphere built up. Brandy was brought early in the morning to the settlement and bottles passed around freely among the different families before they set off in groups. Sugar beets for horses, fruit for immediate domestic consumption, and root vegetables for the winter were all garnered this way. Though most trips brought only petty returns, in 1985 the entire settlement, Zeleno’s family included, found enough potatoes to last through the winter. And that same year, grapes were gleaned in such quantities that many individuals made more money in four days—selling the grapes to private wine makers—than they did in the whole month at the factory. In the winter carrion was occasionally given by peasants or even on rare occasions taken from state farms where a bribable official had been located. Although only a tiny portion of the meat that the Rom ate was acquired this way, there was a sense in which it was especially “Rom” to have eaten “dead meat” (mulo mas), and Rom from other families would ask me, in a part-teasing, part-serious tone, whether I ate this kind of food with my hosts.

Gypsies liked to spend much of their time when they were not at work for wages dealing with peasants and trying to gain an advantage over them in various trades. Whenever there was an opportunity to do so, it was taken with alacrity. Thus, every Friday morning when there was a particularly large market in Harangos, men would come “into town” from all the settlements to see “if something can be done.” When I was doing research, I was often struck by the willingness of Gypsy men to convert their resources into almost any number of different assets. Cows, pigs, secondhand cars, horses, and gold could all pass through a man’s hands, whichever would allow him to realize the arbitrage opportunities presented by different price levels. I use the term “market” here in a broad, modern sense, rather as the Rom talked. In fact, there was no special term for market in Romany: The phrase “he / she makes foro”—a word commonly translated in dictionaries as “market”—was used for any business conducted, any exchange in which money or other valuables were “turned around” (bolel peske love). Foro also referred to “the town,” as when each morning some of the inhabitants of the Third Class would announce that they were going ando foro, “into the town.” The sense of expectation as someone set off to that site of generalized dealing was almost tangible. And afterward, on the return of these traders to the settlement, everyone wanted to know “what had been done.”

Sometimes the markets were far flung. At a time when the Gypsies could obtain only the “red” passports for travel within the socialist bloc, some men planned trips to Bulgaria to benefit from the advantageous street price of gold there. Then in the mid-1980s as travel restrictions eased for all Hungarian citizens, Istanbul became the focus of the men’s travel plans, since sheepskin coats, denims, and gold were said to be well priced there. By 1987 the Rom had turned west to Vienna, where they bought, among other things, pornographic videos—still semi-illicit in Hungary—for resale to Magyar buyers at the workplace.

All these activities rested, it was said, on one’s being “lucky” (baxtalo), on having gone out and tried one’s luck in the non-Gypsy world.⁴ In part because of this, there was a feeling that romani butji ought to be engaged in collectively, that the opportunities ought to be shared. So whether scavenging on garbage dumps, visiting the houses of non-Gypsy clients, or just touring a local market, few Rom went alone; and where “helpers” had enabled a deal, profits were shared out equally.

Children gamble: Getting into the spirit of Gypsy work. (I. Németh)

In the context of romani butji, the horse market was just one moment in a continual effort to profit from the non-Gypsies; but more than any other aspect of Gypsy work, it was these trades that were rhetorically elaborated and celebrated. Just as the non-Gypsies and Rom seemed to agree that Gypsy economic activity was larded with a healthy helping of deceit, in relation to horses I found that both the gaźos and Rom were keen to talk about one thing in particular: “Gypsy hookery and crookery” (cigány csalafintaság). Stories of crooked horse deals are, of course, one of the staples of the European folk imagination.⁵ In Hungary there were also plenty of tales of a man drugging an animal by pouring fruit brandy in its ear so as to render a wild horse calmer or concealing the cracks in a horse’s hoof with tar. But the favorite story of all time, in socialist Hungary as elsewhere, is of the man who could buy a horse, disguise it, and sell it back to its former owner for a profit. I must emphasize that these were stories, and in over a year of observation I only once witnessed a successful bit of trickery.⁶ But in the context of the market, where all exchanges were supposed to be fair and even “equal,” where, ideally, no one bought a horse for more than its value, these stories of trickery affirmed that the Gypsies were nonetheless getting something for nothing, an unearned profit from the gaźos. On close inspection, then, Gypsy crookery proved to be a concoction of fantasy and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Text
• Part One The Gypsy Way
• Part Two Beyond the Ghetto
• Part Three The Reinvention of the World
• Glossary
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index