Reviews Du wirst keinen Ehemann nehmen! Respekt, Bedeutung der Toten und Fluchtheirat bei den Sinti Estraixaria. Elisabeth Tauber. 2006. Berlin: Lit Verlag. 270 pp. (Paperback € 19,90). isbn 3-8258-8816-9. Reviewed by Johannes Ries From the early 1980s on, many German speaking scholars dedicated to academic scholarship got into conflict with Sinti and non-Sinti activists who tried to empower Sinti and Roma as a German national minority and fought for minority rights. The activists’ general argument was that researchers do not have the right to study Romani/Gypsy cultures from an emic point of view because they could reveal ‘secrets’. In fact, this argument makes anthropological research impossible since cultural anthropology aims at interpreting the Other’s worldview within its own logic and translating this perspective to the own world. Unjustly, cultural anthropologists were accused of continuing research with Nazi methods and racist ideologies (e.g. Reemtsma 1998). Only some years ago, a new generation of researchers started to introduce the international anthropological paradigm in Romani/Gypsy studies to the German speaking audience. In tolerant dialogue with a new generation of Sinti and Roma these young researchers seem to be able to overcome the seeming conflict between academic scholarship and political activism (e.g. FTF 2007, von Dobeneck 2006). This background is important to understand why Elisabeth Tauber’s book Du wirst keinen Ehemann nehmen! Respekt, Bedeutung der Toten und Fluchtheirat bei den Sinti Estraixaria can be seen as a milestone for the anthropology of Romani/Gypsy cultures in the German speaking area. Tauber’s published PhDthesis is an ethnographic portrait of a Sinti group in South Tyrol. It continues the theoretical line of anthropologists such as Judith Okely, Leonardo Piasere, Michael Stewart and others. Most influential for Tauber is Patrick Williams, the first anthropologist who reconstructed the complex philosophical worldview of French Sinti/Manush. It is also Williams who introduces Tauber’s study with an empathetic preface. Empirically, Tauber’s book is based on very intensive fieldwork. In 1996 Tauber came into first contact with Sinti on a campo nomadi (official Romani/ Gypsy camping site). One year later she married a Sinto, with whom she has Johannes Ries is a co-founder and member of the Forum Tsiganologische Forschung at the Institute for Ethnology, Leipzig University, Schillerstraße 6, d-04109 Leipzig. Email: johries@ gmx.de. Romani Studies 5, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2008), 93–96 issn 1528–0748
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a daughter today, and lived three and a half years in the caravan with his extended family. Tauber herself experienced the issues she is writing about: she went manghel (begging and selling) with Sinti women, eloped with her future husband in order to marry him, and afterwards had to re-establish a respectful relationship with the Sinti and their deceased relatives (see below). This is participant observation in the true sense of the word and strongly demonstrates the strength of the anthropological approach. The death of a relative and the elopement of two lovers are the two important instances for the Sinti Estraixaria because both relate to respect. Tauber identifies respect and the relation to the dead as key elements for Sinti philosophy and ethnic identity. Her book is divided into three parts: In the first part she demonstrates how the Sinti preserve a respectful relationship among each other and in regard to their deceased relatives. The second part deals with marriage by elopement, which disturbs respect. Finally, in the third part Tauber explains how respect is re-established. The Sinti have two categories of deceased persons: The two or three generations of a Sinto’s relatives who died recently belong to the category of fris mule (recently deceased). These deceased persons are known by name and remembered individually. But sooner or later, all fris mule lose their individuality and are referred to as u core mule (the poor dead), the second category of all dead Sinti. In one line with Williams (1993) Tauber argues that the Sinti negotiate their most important issues by keeping silent: ‘for the Sinti silence more than speaking is the expression of social and cultural continuity’ (p. 38, all quotes translated from German). Consequently, the Sinti talk about their deceased relatives only indirectly. They relate certain stories, places, situations or actions with dead persons. The men act respectfully towards their dead relatives by finding the right balance between talking and keeping silent. They remember their dead relatives by ‘quoting’ them, playing a special song the deceased liked best, or comparing a TV actor with a dead person. In contrast, the women pay respect by going manghel (begging and selling) in the same way as their ancestors did. Only those who pay respect to the deceased in the proper way are accepted as true Sinti. ‘Marriage by elopement (i fuga) is the only possible form of relation between man and woman!’ (p. 143). When two young Sinti fall in love they have to elope in order to marry. But by eloping, the couple disrupts its relation of respect to its relatives – alive and dead. Nevertheless, this disruption is fundamentally important for the couple in order to build up their own, new entity of mure Sinti (own Sinti). The key for Tauber’s lucid interpretation of the common practice of Sinto marriage by elopement is: it challenges the Sinti order (of respect) but at the same time is the precondition for the Sintis’ survival. That’s
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why the fathers threaten their daughters from a very young age that they must not elope; but simultaneously they time and again make it implicitly clear to them that they have to elope. After elopement the couple has to return to its families (who have negotiated how they react to the disrespect of the youngsters and if they should accept the informal marriage). The returning couple has to feel ashamed and to ask its parents, relatives and the deceased for forgiveness. At the same time, the two lovers now act as a married couple (although there is no formal marriage ritual). In particular the Sinta performs the habit of a married woman: She wears unobtrusive clothes and stops signalising any eroticism. She does not follow her parents’ tradition any more but her husband’s. As soon as a child is born, the couple has confirmed the formation of a new, ‘own’ tradition. A new generation of Sinti is born and the ‘oldest’ layer of the fris mule merges into the category of o core mule. In Tauber’s interpretation, the deceased play a crucial role in this cycle. While the fris mule demand respect (and thereby prevent the connection with others so that they can continue to remain individually remembered), the anonymous o core mule demand the connection of different Sinti family groups by marriage. Tauber uses a lot of ethnographic examples to describe the dynamics of shame and respect, elopement and return, birth and death. Besides this basic cycle of Sinto cosmology and anthropology (which can be sketched only roughly here) she explains in detail Sinti discourses and social practices. Tauber elucidates the rationales of affiliation and avoidance and reconstructs migration routes all over Austria, Italy and Slovenia. She dives into the Sintis’ emic perception of the Gage as ialo (raw, empty, cold) and explains what makes the Sinto world romano (full, warm, powerful, calm). Her careful analysis unveils the Sinti concepts of gender and sexuality and introduces common Sinti strategies to encourage or to prevent the marriage of the eloped couple. Tauber goes into details about how a Sinto can make another Sinto palecido kova (backed off thing) and exclude him from the world of ‘true’ Sinti. All these social practices are seen by Tauber as essentially linked to the dead – although nobody speaks about them. Tauber’s book is a rich source of ethnographic facts collected in participant observation in its best sense. Even more, it is a great example of interpretative anthropology: Tauber links every ethnographic fact to Sinti concepts and her own interpretation. With this balanced perspective Tauber is able to give the reader a deep understanding of a complicated worldview. Her book underlines the importance of the concept which is not only important for the Sinti in their relation to the dead but which must be the basis of all interaction between Roma/Gypsies and Gage: respect.
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References FTF. 2007. Forum Tsiganologische Forschung [homepage]. Electronic document: http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~ftf, 3 Dec. 2007. Reemtsma, Katrin. 1998. Exotismus und Heterogenisierung – Verdinglichung und Ausbeutung: Aspekte ethnologischer Betrachtungen der ‘Zigeuner’ in Deutschland nach 1945. In Zwischen Romantisierung und Rassismus. Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Baden Württemberg and Verband Deutscher Sinti und Roma, eds. Pp. 63–8. Stuttgart, Heidelberg: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, Verband Deutscher Sinti und Roma. Von Dobeneck, Florian. 2006. Sinti in Freiburg. Auseinandersetzung mit einer deutschen Minderheit. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 102(I): 43–66. Williams, Patrick. 1993. Nous, on n’en parle pas. Les vivants et les morts chez les Manouches. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.
• Gypsy architecture: Houses of the Roma in Eastern Europe. Texts: Renata Calzi, Patrizio Corno; photographs: Carlo Gianferro; [translation into English by Neil Stratton]. Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges. 2007. 159 pp., numerous color photographs, 1 map; 31cm. $75.00 (USA). isbn 978–3-936681-12-3 (Hb.) Reviewed by David J. Nemeth This is a Roma-related picture book for architects. It illustrates the creative influence of some rich Eastern European Roma in house surface design and execution using various treatments, for example, ornate and colorful exterior metallic towers and scintillating claddings. This catalog of elaborate “facades” not only introduces Roma to architects, but invokes a convenient metaphor for Roma/Gypsy culture that begs for more penetrating ethnographic enquiry. Previous English-language books by Romani studies scholars making mention of these “Gypsy palaces” (for example, Achim 2004: 203–11) have done so merely in passing and without photographic examples. Romani studies scholars around the world should therefore find Gypsy Architecture (hereafter GA) fascinating and provocative. GA is a coffee-table book that should successfully transcend at a glance any lingering doubts in the public mind that Gypsies—in this instance Roma— have houses. And what splendiferous houses they have on display here: villas; mansions; palaces! As seen through the impressionable and impassioned eyes of its Italian authors, GA leaps alive in its oversized wraps, larger than life, to announce its irresistible message in photography and text: Voila! Look here! There is an authentic Gypsy domestic architecture! David Nemeth is Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio 43606–3390, USA. E-mail:
[email protected] Romani Studies 5, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2008), 96–99 issn 1528–0748
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GA is the collaborative research of two enthusiastic architects (Renata Calzi and Patrizio Corno), a talented photographer (Carlo Gianferro), and a visionary publisher (Axel Menges). Their focus on rich Eastern European Roma families and their unusual living conditions comprises stunning photographs of house exteriors and interiors (excepting kitchens and bathrooms) accompanied by several short essays, all ripe for scholarly elaborations. CC&G offer a festive presentation of Roma mansions and their proud owners in GA providing a dramatic, drastic departure from the usual media fare of hate walls, hovels and barefoot children in rags. GA will shatter some stereotypes and reinforce others. It should stir the intellects and emotions of Romani scholars and bring new evidence to bear on numerous significant ethnographic issues still unresolved. CC&G compiled their photo catalog while deliberately searching throughout Romania and Moldova for brazen examples of Gypsy architectural excess. Corno (pp. 7–9) describes the entire graphic adventure presented in GA as “an immediate, rapid and intriguing view of a new world that is almost unknown in the West—the new static world of the Gypsies.” Of his epiphanic first encounter with a colony of rich settled Gypsies in Soroca, Republic of Moldova, he writes: “I could not believe what I was seeing from the car window... this was a ghetto with a difference.” He describes the “striking, violent and vulgar” panorama of multi-storey villas with “Indian-style” roofs, having extravagant wrought-iron railings and great variety of wall ornaments and decorative materials—“a world of dreams and fairy tale.” Gianferro’s photographs capture in great detail and at various scales the astonishing panorama that stirs the fancies of Corno and Calzi as demonstrated in their essays. Successful coffee-table books aim to inspire conversations without being conversations in themselves. Calzi (p. 12) describes GA as a cultural trail that does not explain but illustrates how architecture, by its nature one of the most static of arts, has been taken as a frame of reference through which to provide the world with images of the dreams of a people who have wandered throughout the world. The romanticized vignettes contributed by Corno and Calzi amidst Gian ferro’s vast feast of photographic images and include: “Preface;” “Settled Gypsies?”; “Gypsy architecture;” “The man with the gold tie;” “The magician and the feminist;” “The community of Artur;” ”Requiem for a pig;” and “The family of songsters.” I have selected a few of these for comment here. Soroca’s Gypsy quarter is an emerging international sight-seeing destination overlooking Moldova’s isolated northeastern Dniester River borderland with Ukraine. Corno’s typically incredulous-at-first-glance experience reveals the depth of his and other tourists’ entrenched outsider expectations for Gypsy residential conditions in Eastern Europe, where Roma are widely perceived in the popular mind as “the beggars of Europe” (Dragomir, 2000).
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Corno describes the Soroca Gypsy quarter consisting of around fifty villas of various styles and shapes (all built after 1992) as inhabited by “Calderari” families of traditional metalworkers. The authors (pp. 9, 12) interpret the spectacular building-boom in Soroca and elsewhere as the outcome of competitions between rich and powerful Roma families who vie against one another “to construct the largest, the most striking, the most eye-catching house, because the house … represents the family, its standing, its power and its wealth.” The extravagant house designs, treatments and details are of “no practical use” and function only “to represent through their lack of proportion and absolute needlessness, the financial and social power of the family.” Many of Gianferro’s photographs show local Roma leaders (identified as “Bulibashas”) and their family members posing proudly amidst their houses and automobiles and other prestigious properties. This matter of Roma prestige properties brings immediately to mind Peter Berta’s recent discussion in Romani Studies involving Transylvanian Gabor Roma and their taxtaj (silver beaker) “prestige items” (2007: 36): “Prestige items are primarily important means of political self-representation and status rivalry among Gabor individuals and patrilineages, and their ownership is usually interpreted as an index of economic and social status.” The important primary role of these Roma domestic architectures interpreted as prestige items “on display” to impress and intimidate others (mainly other Roma) might also help explain why many of the mansions, though furnished, are not even inhabited by their owners, who nevertheless may live on or near the premises. Calzi (p. 12) proposes while waxing poetically that “They still live anchored to a past in the open air that finds it difficult to transform itself and confine itself to the closed rhythms of a room ….” She adds that “most of the time they live outside, in the street ... [and that] at certain periods of the year, the villa owners and members of their families travel widely “to work and make money.” Both authors agree that remittances from family members abroad help finance the constructions of the villas, and that unfinished houses are indicators of delayed and ceased remittances. Design ideas are apparently also inspired from abroad. Corno (p. 9) reports that each family head “uninfluenced by any knowledge of architectural culture [chooses] the style, size and furnishings on the basis of his ... personal tastes or memories of travels, houses and things seen in other countries.” I would tentatively classify the design ideas as “Bulibasha baroque” though CC&G seem intent on stretching their interpretation of design origins all the way to India. Corno implies Calderari workshops are at the heart of the Roma colony at Soroca, but both authors seem unclear about the extent to which the local Roma metalworkers have active roles in the constructions of the villas.
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There is an intimate relationship between Roma prestige houses, their designs, and Bulishiba power that Calzi elaborates in two of her essays, “The man with the gold tie” and “The community of Artur”: She reports the essentiality of obtaining a variety of permissions from the local ‘Bulibashas,” the heads of the communities, in order to interview local Roma and photograph their homes. She describes these leaders as “indisputably charismatic figures,” having strong personalities as exhibited in their extravagant articles of clothing, accessories and accouterments. Gianferro captures these items in some marvelous triumphal Bulibasha portraits. One photo-essay introduces Bulibasha Artur, “Baron of the Gypsies of the Republic of Moldova and all the Russias.” He is photographed standing in the spacious courtyard of his palatial villa, gripping the restraining collars of two muscular pit bulls. Ostentatious display of Gypsy triumphalism is not a new story in Romani studies. The intimate relationship between leadership, power, prestige and territorial behavior among Romanies (and among ethnic Travellers for that matter) has been well documented over many centuries in both Europe and the Americas. GA merely reminds Romani studies scholars that these displays in the context of these relationships continue. In conclusion: the exemplary houses and owners depicted in GA, while indeed remarkable and perhaps unique phenomena, are from a broader perspective of Romani studies scholarship not near as exceptional as portrayed. GA demonstrates that competitive Romanies and Travellers continue to choose their own times and places to demonstrate to outsiders and to each other the rich and symbolic rewards of their remarkable entrepreneurial spirit and economic flexibility. References Achim, Viorel. 2004. The Roma in Romanian history. Budapest: Central European University Press. Berta, Peter. 2007. Ethnicisation of value—the value of ethnicity: The prestige-item economy as a performance of ethnic identity among the Gabors of Transylvania (Rumania). Romani Studies. Fifth Series. 17(1): 31–65. Dragomir, Marius. 2000. Europe’s beggars: Romanian Roma. Central European Review 2, 41 (27 November). Accessed 4/1/2007 at http://www.ce-review.org/00/ 41/dragomir41.html
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