Gypsy Politics and Social Change

The Development of Ethnic Ideology and Pressure Politics among British Gypsies from Victorian Reformism to Romany Nationalism

Thomas Acton

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000387704
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Ethnic Studies

This book, first published in 1974, analyses the position of the Gypsies in Britain in the twentieth century, and assesses its significance in their overall history. Two dramatic shifts in Government policy towards the Gypsies are examined – in the 1880s and the 1960s – as are the changes in the stereotype of the 'true Gypsy'. Dr Acton traces the developments of attitudes and economic conditions that gave rise to the 1970s increase in interest in Gypsies, and discusses the concomitant political and pressure group activity. He gives an account of the historical background to modern Gypsy politics; describes the postwar situation of the Gypsies in England and Wales, including pro-Gypsy pressure group activity up to 1965, and goes on to cover the campaigns of the Gypsy Council, including a sociological assessment of its work. He considers these aspects of Gypsy life in the light of modern sociological theory on minorities and race relations.

1 General introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003172871-1

Historical

The ancestors of the Romani-speaking peoples left India some one thousand years ago, moving along trade routes trodden over the centuries by countless other migratory nations. Some two or three hundred years later, contemporary documents attest their arrival in eastern Europe; before the end of the fifteenth century their presence is recorded in the British Isles.¹ They brought with them a language whose Indian construction was in the eighteenth century to betray their history to the learned world; but with the Indian base came loan words from every country on their path; and hybridisation and creolisation with other languages has fragmented the Romani language into hundreds of dialects. Today, like the Jews, they live throughout the world, sometimes intermarrying, sometimes not, disunited politically, heterogeneous culturally, and with the most diverse aspirations.

1 The most recent and comprehensive summary of the earlier history of the Gypsies is that of de Foletier (1970a).

Why they left India, why they took the paths they did, why they and no other people have the reputation of being the world’s nomads par excellence, are questions in varying degrees controversial; but I hope to show in the economic section of this study that the nomadism of the Gypsies is neither irrational nor unique; I shall instance similar economic patterns from non-European societies. Some two million people in India still lead what their anthropologists have called ‘a Gypsy life’ (‘Sher’, 1965, pp. 47ff., Ruhela, 1968, pp. 242ff.; Bhattacharya, 1966, pp. 9ff.).

Only a minority of the world’s Romani-speaking communities are nomadic today; large groups, in eastern Europe in particular, have been more or less sedentary for a long time. I shall show in Chapter 7 that no definition of the term ‘Gypsy’ could even begin to command universal acceptance, any more than could a definition of the term ‘Jew’; I attempt, however, in that chapter, to indicate reasonably precisely the people about whom I am writing, in order to thread my way through the controversy, and to puncture the illusory image of the ‘true’ Gypsy.

In the past few years Gypsies have been in the news in England and Wales more frequently than at any time since the 1880s and 1890s. I shall attempt to trace the developments of attitudes and economic conditions that brought this about, and the concomitant political and pressure group activity; since no clear continuous account of this has yet been written by anyone else, I have been obliged to write a fair amount of history as well as sociological analysis.

The two events that I have chosen to bound the restricted area of British history, from which most of my data are drawn, are not themselves events in the economic history of the Gypsies; they do not mark any dramatic changes in the lives of ordinary Gypsies; rather they are landmarks in the history of ideas. The Moveable Dwellings Bill agitation in the 1880s marks the entry into the debate of the ideas of welfare socialism; the occasional demand for a Gypsy homeland to be called Romanestan is the most extreme sign of the effect amongst the Gypsies of the general movement in the 1960s to give more power of self-determination to the underprivileged. Welfare socialism, however, scarcely began to have an effect as policy on the Gypsies until the 1960s; the consequent raised expectations perhaps played some part in giving rise to the beginnings of a movement for Gypsy civil rights, and ‘Gypsy power’.

This study involves me in two major problem areas of conventional sociological theory; first the study of ‘minorities’, and second the study of‘development’ (or ‘adaptation’, or ‘assimilation’ or ‘modernisation’, as it is variously known with different value-loadings which I shall examine). I shall argue, however, that a sociology of minorities must also be one of majorities, that is to say one of culture as a whole; while the study of change, if undertaken with an open mind, rapidly becomes also a study of continuities. Conventional sociological theory will help us describe events, but a convincing causal analysis, both of ethnic differentiation and of changes and continuities amongst the Gypsies generally, requires the economic analysis of Chapter 20 as well.

Values and methods; the collection of data

Although I have probably spent more time in ‘participant observation’ than in reading about Gypsies, I have had the benefit of a vast literature on the subject, including several anthropologically respec table participant-observation studies, and even one or two attempts, on non-British Gypsies, to use questionnaire surveys. The differences between the conclusions of these studies serve as a valuable reminder of the heterogeneity of Gypsy culture. The great fault of the literature on Gypsies, both official and academic, is overgeneralisation; observers have too easily been led to believe that the practices of particular groups are universal, with the concomitant suggestion that any group not having such a practice are not ‘true’ Gypsies.

I felt, therefore, that the great need was not for another detailed study of some small group of South Essex Gypsies, with whom I did my most intensive field-work, but for synthetic studies, drawing together all the data on England and Wales as a whole, and comparing them, where appropriate, with the situation in other countries of Gypsies or other cultural groups. Moreover, since time has not lessened the fury of controversy over many of the matters with which I am dealing, I have preferred to rest my argument as much as possible on documentation rather than merely on personal observations.

But although the 100,000 words of my field-log are quoted comparatively rarely here, my field-work was still of paramount importance in my research; for it gave me critical insight into the literature. I do believe, with Goffman, that

any group of persons … develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable, and normal, once you get close to it, and that a good way to learn about any of these worlds is to submit oneself in the company of the members to the daily round of petty contingencies to which they are subject. (Goffman, 1961, Preface)

Equally, I believe, however, that this approach cannot stand on its own; the analytical confusion of one of the classic early Chicago participant-observation studies, Nels Anderson’s The Hobo (1923), can stand as a warning of the dangers of shortsightedness in the participant-observer.¹

1 This book sets together in a single category migratory workers, the urban sedentary unemployed and homeless, and pathological alcoholics, without any thought of their different economic positions. It gives a marvellous picture of the atmosphere of low status groups and deviants to a middle-class student who did not realise either the difference between them or why they exist.

But, although in analysing the situation of the Gypsies, I must stand back humbly, as one observer amongst the others whose work I want to synthesise, I judge those others from the coign of vantage of knowing what it is to be an observer myself.

Only in one section does my analysis rely heavily on my own observations, and that is in my analysis of the later history of the Gypsy Council. Here, as the first writer on the subject and, in a very small measure, one of the agents of that history, I must act as my own primary source, though rounding out my own experience with local authority material, Gypsy Council correspondence and reports. The difficulties of this process gave me more sympathy for some of the other writers whose work is debunked elsewhere in this book; I imagine that I will be criticised in a similar way for my analysis of very recent affairs by writers of the future, even while they are using my book—as I have used the work of writers I have debunked—as valuable source material. But not to have attempted, through fear of my own partiality, to record and analyse events which I was in a unique position to observe and understand would have been an unpardonable failure of nerve.

I should perhaps discuss further the objection that my deep involvement in recent Gypsy politics will both prejudice my account of them and produce ideological distortions in my analysis in other areas.

I cannot pretend to be neutral. I have been involved in work for the Gypsy Council since 1967. I believe that its struggle for social justice and self-determination for the Gypsy people is a righteous one. I am attracted by the values of family solidarity, economic independence and opposition to territorial state authorities and their boundaries, which run as recurring themes through Romani culture. Despite reservations about certain of its forms, I accept ‘Gypsy nationalism’ in the belief that self-respect is a necessary condition of respect for humanity, and in the belief that respect for individual national and ethnic cultures, and not the imposition of some uniform culture, is the path to international understanding and community. If I had not been so involved, I would not have been able to carry out my field-work in the way that I did; I would have had to appear as the representative of some other set of values, like, for example, a government-paid social worker.

Acknowledging, however, that I have these values, I have made my best endeavour as a scholar to ensure that I have not falsified the evidence to make history favour their advocates; but I consider it better to declare my values now, so that those who wish to discount them may more easily do so.

It is far more dangerous when scholars pretend they have no bias, no interests of their own; for the attempt to deal in this way with the problem of value-judgments in academic analysis in the social sciences obscures self-knowledge and prevents scholars watching for their own value-distortions.

The ‘ethnomethodologists’ have shown the importance of the observer’s acknowledgment that he is also an actor, of his recognition that the method of studying a group is given to him in large part by the group itself. I here document over sixty years of the detail of the interaction of academic (or ‘romantic’) perspectives with Gypsy perspectives, on the one hand, and governmental perspectives on the other. With regard to the concept of the ‘true’ Gypsy in particular, and the development of various sub-ethnic scapegoat-stereotypes, I try to show how the mutually distorting effects of these perspectives on one another have followed a cyclical pattern.

But if the writings of others have been distorted, will not my own be? If my vision is also obscured by my values, how can I know when to perceive value-distortion in others?

The answer is that the refutation of error is oddly easier than the establishment of truth. A contradiction is a contradiction, no matter what values might make it convenient. If I can show, on the basis of premises that an opponent would accept, that some of those premises are themselves false, this contradiction is a more certain refutation than merely seeking to establish alternative premises. A demonstration of inconsistency, not just an accusation of mis-statement, must be the basis of the refutation of error; and charges of value-distortion are no refutation at all; we use them rather to try to explain why particular people hold already refuted errors at all.

From this logical asymmetry between the processes of disproof and empirical assertion, we are led to some rather worrying conclusions. The social importance of some positive assertion by a scientist or politician or priest will remain only until it is refuted; but the refutation, if valid, stands for ever more. Or, to put it another way, reality, social or physical, requires that a constant flow of new statement be made about it (reality) to accommodate it to the human intellect; but each statement needs only to be refuted once.

We are led thus to speculate that, as a general rule, the destructive part of a social scientist’s work is more likely to be of lasting significance in the history of human ideas than anything ‘constructive’ he has to say. If the destructive argument is, as we have postulated, of the reductio ad absurdum form, that is to say that it turns on showing the latent contradiction between premises, then in actual disputation it will tend to be ad hominem, that is to say based on premises held by an opponent, but not by the arguer. It would be difficult for this sort of argument to establish the kind of body of objective truth which is the declared aim of the physical sciences.

My arguments, both against those who may object to possible value-distortions in my positive analysis, and those who may object that the anti-value-distortion argument, which I also use against other writers, is itself incoherent, reduce then to a kind of prolonged tu quoque. In logic this is perhaps a very uncertain and unsatisfactory response to objections; but a wise man will accept that this uncertainty only reflects more general uncertainties about the stating of all human knowledge.

part one Theoretical perspectives

2 Introduction to the literature on culture and race relations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003172871-3

The complaint that there is no general theory of the causal processes of race relations, or any stock of widely confirmed empirical generalisations, is a commonplace. Equally constant are the complaints about the number of books, all with their own typologies and other theoretical devices personal to the authors, which have to be considered before one can gain a general picture, even at an elementary level, of how race relations theorising has been done. Not that many people consciously set themselves to survey the whole vast literature, but those who do resemble each other in this if little else. The latest complaint to come to my notice is that of Herbert H. Hyman (1969) in Katz and Gurin’s collection of essays on possible research programmes, who comments: ‘Alas one becomes weary at the mere thought of reading so much, let alone understanding i t …. Confusion falls upon weariness as one begins to read the empirical studies.’ Over a decade earlier, with a comic disdain that would probably prove unacceptable in scholarly writing today, Professor M. B. King (1956) wrote similarly of a pile of textbooks which had been sent to him unsolicited:

Nowhere in the ‘minority’ literature can one find a systematic and comprehensive set of sociological generalisations. This lack is not so culpable, for such a set does not now exist. What surprises me is that many authors do not seem to miss it.

Leaving aside concern for sects, homosexuals and cripples, King divided the books into three categories. The first concentrated on racial, ethnic, inter-group, inter-cultural, or even human relations. The second consisted of lists of groups and their contribution to the ‘American way of life’. The third type ‘explained everything in terms of psychology’, ignoring the possibility that real conflicts of interest and culture-clashes as well as ‘prejudice’, might have to be resolved; it is regrettable that since the experimental tradition in the study of the social psychology of prejudice has produced more concrete results than the sociological work on the situations in which prejudice is found, it is still the case that many social psychologists tend towards a psychological reductionism. A recent book by P. I. Rose (1968), on the teaching of race relations and related subjects in America, documented at great length an even greater variety of title, content, emphasis and conclusions of teaching and research in the field. British students are even worse off: in addition to reading the American literature, they also have to read an equally diverse English literature. I have not space here to survey all of this literature, although I shall comment on some of the surveys that have been made; my interest will be to speculate about the theoretical confusion itself. I wish to examine why people are continually proposing and using such differing methods, which nearly always fail to yield generalisations which can in any sense be divorced from particular...