Gypsies and other itinerant groups : a socio-historical approach /

The authors of this volume, all historians, ask "Who are the Gypsies, and why are they so widely discriminated against?" Their desire to put a new slant on the discrimination issue affects the position they take on who the Gypsies are. They contend that the identity of Gypsies is socially constructed by non-Gypsies, especially through government policy, in highly arbitrary and usually negative, stigmatizing ways that vary from time to time and place to place. They contend that for outsiders, the construction of "Gypsy" identity is driven not by ethnicity (the emphasis of mainstream, anthropologically informed positions in Gypsy studies exemplified by Angus Fraser's The Gypsies, Ch, May'93) but by economic factors, such as changes in the administration of poor relief law, small shopkeepers' fear of the competitive threat posed by "Gypsy" trade, and state pressures on the professionalizing police force to exert more effective social control on itinerant segments of the labor force. Marshaling their data meticulously, the authors make a strong and cogent case for the salience of the non-Gypsy role in the formation of Gypsy social identity. Upper-division undergraduates and above. C. Hendershott; New School for Social Research