Gypsy Architecture, by Renata Calzi. Patricio Corno, Carlo Gianferro (Book Review)

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Gypsy Architecture: Houses of the Roma in Eastern Europe David “Jim” Nemeth

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Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH Version of record first published: 17 Sep 2008

To cite this article: David “Jim” Nemeth (2008): Gypsy Architecture: Houses of the Roma in Eastern Europe, The Professional Geographer, 60:4, 583-586 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00330120802239902

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Book Reviews 583 account is well situated in discussing the events of the 1990s in a longer perspective than a single field season. He successfully explains the evolution and microrevolutions of land invasions, landed production, and new indigenous resurgence. Chiapas’s agrarian reform experience and trajectory differed from those of other regions of Mexico, in that land invasions and redistributions occurred in the mid-1990s. That experience did fit in with what the country had experienced during the twentieth century, a point clearly made by the author. If there is a caveat to this positive and empathetic review of the work, it lies more in the differential perspectives and approaches to the subject of landed elites and land ownership in general. Bobrow-Strain has clearly written this for a larger audience than geographers and as such it is a remarkable success. The text feeds on the roots and literature of agrarian political economy and history in a way that was once rare in our discipline. The “place” of land ownership and “spaces” of fear in Intimate Enemies, then, seem rather nonspatial in terms of treatment as they become instruments and devices for metaphor, comparison, and contextual social relations. In other words, the book could have been easily written by an anthropologist or an ethnographically inclined sociologist in that it is not inherently geographic in its scope and treatment. The volume contains only four maps, most of which were frustratingly generalized and none of which played a crucial role in the story or the author’s arguments. For traditionalists, this will be dissatisfying; for scholars interested in communication between and outside of geography it will be unimportant. More relevant, and useful, to the author’s narrative is the use of photography. The photos chosen convey the changes discussed, and occasionally the angst of many of the central characters, far better than any map could. This is a remarkable book for many reasons. It is one of the more gracefully written and evocative accounts of the Chiapas uprising and its aftermath. The work is candid in its treatment of landed elites and in its warning about essentialist arguments. It will likely appeal to more people interested in Latin American studies than other books by geographers that are more narrowly “geographic” in scope and approach. Readers will also appreciate the attractive packaging and benefit

from a useful index, fully explained abbreviations and acronyms, a glossary, solid citations and bibliography, and nicely detailed research notes. To be blunt, this is one of the best geographic ethnographies of the last decade. Its lack of spatial explicitness or visualization may occasionally frustrate some geographers, but it is nevertheless a book that will appeal to geographers and nongeographers alike. It not only will force Chiapas specialists to reconsider their own work, but it forces many of us working in other parts of Mexico to reexamine the assumptions behind our own approach. If it forces us out of, to paraphrase Bobrow-Strain, our own “honest shadows” then the book has fulfilled its purpose and then some. More important, the author has raised the stakes for open and direct scholarship with his use of real names, events, and towns. This approach may not be possible for most work and for most authors, but at least readers can use the places and names in this volume as they travel in the region and reflect on the implications of the book. Key Words: Chiapas, land owners, Mexico, violence, Zapatistas.

Gypsy Architecture: Houses of the Roma in Eastern Europe. Renata Calzi and Patrizio Corno [texts] with photographs by Carlo Gianferro. Translation by Neil Stratton. Stuttgart, Germany: Edition Axel Menges, 2007. 159 pp., map. $75.00 cloth (ISBN 9783-936681-12-3). Reviewed by David “Jim” Nemeth, Department of Geography and Planning, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH. Gypsy Architecture beckons cultural geographers and others to experience an unusual sort of vernacular landscape located far off the beaten path. Although vernacular architectures appear in many different guises and disguises, and constitute a huge catalog of possibilities still ill-defined, this book of photo essays—long on photos, short on essays—is particularly provocative. It features a selection of opulent houses in Romania and Moldova, located in urban and suburban environs, owned and designed by wealthy, powerful Gypsies (Roma) and their families. Italian architects Renata Calzi and Patrizio Corno have collaborated with photographer

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584 Volume 60, Number 4, November 2008 Carlo Gianferro in Gypsy Architecture to capture in this large-format picture book some of the oddest and most audacious Roma house designs and treatments they could find, both exteriors and interiors, including variations on fantastic metallic wall claddings and facades, roofs, towers, and canopies described later. The authors envision this book as the first installment in a series of studies introducing little-known domestic architectures, or Architetture Imperfette. The glitzy examples of Gypsy (Roma) domestic architecture in this book should appeal not only to architects but also to general readers—and should even spark interest among academics across the social sciences and humanities who might seek to comment from various perspectives on this remarkable phenomenon. Roma are a diverse ethnic group living in many communities all over the world, where they are often still referred to in English as “Gypsies.” Although enslaved for centuries in and around what is now Romania, the Roma slave populations varied in status, occupations, and lifestyles, and were not nearly all settled into permanent dwellings. Emancipation from slavery culminating in the mid-nineteenth century led to increased and sometimes far-ranging Roma migrations; for example, to the United States. Roma have most often appeared in literature and folklore as wandering nomads and this particular stereotype endures in the public imagination to this day (even though most Roma around the world now have permanent and semipermanent residences). This prevailing popular stereotype of rural “wandering Gypsies” is shattered in Gypsy Architecture along with entrenched stereotypes of “poor,” “victimized,” and “hovel-dwelling ghetto” Roma. Gianferro’s rapid-fire photographic focus on colonies and neighborhoods of grandiose Roma houses and their wealthy owner/architects on display in this volume present them at disparate locations and at multiple scales throughout Romania and Moldova. The photographs are interrupted by a handful of brief essays, beginning with a preface, followed by “Settled Gypsies?” (both by Corno). The remaining essays (all by Calzi) are: “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.” Aside from these few dramatic, romantic vignettes, and a scattering of stringent photo captions, the Gypsy Architecture production team seems mainly content to let the book speak for itself through its photo images. It succeeds marvelously. As seems true with all successful coffee-table books, Gypsy Architecture inspires conversation but avoids becoming a conversation it itself. Gypsy Architecture provides a vicarious whirlwind tour offering ample evidence that, yes, some of the wealthiest Gypsies in eastern Europe at a specific time and place of their own choosing appear to have settled into their own comfort zones, surrounded by their own architectural constructions. The outcome as photographed by Gianferro constitutes a unique vernacular landscape. Corno describes it as a “striking, violent, and vulgar” (p. 8) Roma dreamscape. He appears thunderstruck on his first encounter with a wealthy colony of traditional Roma Caldarari families perched on the outskirts of a small, historic castle town named Soroca and overlooking the meandering Dniester River, of which he writes “I could not believe what I was seeing from the car window . . .” This spectacle, preserved in the book by Gianferro’s photographs, is described by Corno, and later Calzi, in their essays: fantastic edifices . . . villas . . . palaces . . . heterogeneous assemblies of diverse and contrasting elements . . . Indian-style crowns on neo-classical buildings, mansard roofs on structures of improbable style, Frenchified Chinese pagodas, white marbles, galvanized metal roofs, masterfully handled wrought-iron gates, metal castings transformed into life size statues of horses, eagles, lions and neoclassical putti, bas-reliefs and twisted columns . . . a world of dreams and fairy tale. . . .

The unusual story presented here, highlighting the splendiferous material rewards of Roma accomplishment in eastern Europe, will come as a surprise to many non-Gypsies, including some scholars and authors, both Roma and non-Roma, who have built their careers, reputations, and political platforms by telling sadder stories. Corno’s “Preface” opens opposite a simple, colorful map that identifies the fifteen locations in Romania and Moldova where Gianferro photographed. Corno describes the events and personalities behind the inspiration and

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Book Reviews 585 production of Gypsy Architecture, including salutations and tributes to Moldova’s emerging entrepreneurial class and its capitalist spunk. Calzi remarks on the avid conspicuous consumption enjoyed by local Roma as evidenced by their palatial, ornamented villas: “The important thing is to make the neighbours green with envy and to make clear through cubic metres that you’re a financially sound person who is flush with cash, and who can take the capitalist world on because you possess all of its symbols” (p. 12). Among the more provocative and insightful essays in Gypsy Architecture associated with some remarkably blunt photographs are “The Man with the Gold Tie” and “The Community of Artur.” Here, Gianferro’s photography captures the self-assured, sometimes arrogant, and triumphal attitudes of powerful Roma territorial chiefs (called “Bulibashas”) posing in front of their villas. These photo essays suggest that the primary function of the Roma houses on display in this book is to establish the prestige of competing Roma elites and their families. The houses therefore do not primarily function as domiciles and residences. Being neither domiciles nor dwellings, these triumphal, prestige house architectures form an interesting category of vernacular domestic architectures. Calzi reports that many of these Roma houses, although photographed as furnished, are not even “occupied” by their owners. About this odd circumstance she waxes poetically: “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” (p. 12). 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.” Indeed, Gianferro provides no photographs of interior kitchens or bathrooms. Corno and Calzi romance their topic in their essays. They deliberately decline to offer any “clinical” social-science explanations for their architectural discoveries. They seem unaware that the local Roma potentates have used them as a convenient advertising medium for the purposes of their own self-promotion. Geographers stimulated by Gypsy Architecture might delve deeper into their mysteries and implications. Economic and political ge-

ographers could hypothesize, for example, on the success of these Roma—especially those in Soroca—in relation to factors of site and situation that favor Roma economic strategies, stratagems, and empowerment. A cursory look at any political map reveals straightaway the location of Soroca far away from Moldovan central government authority, on an international border with Ukraine, and near the renegade state of Transnistria. Moldova itself is at this time among the poorest countries in Europe and at the heart of a regional instability characterized over the past decade by widespread crime and underground economic activity. Regional economic, social, and political insecurities and opportunities since the fall of communism have triggered mass movements of local peoples that, in the words of one anonymous Internet pundit, “have not been known since the Dark Ages.” Is the prevailing situation a convenience or inconvenience for Roma peoples in the region, many of whom are undeniably hyperactive in informal economies, some extralegal? Corno briefly remarks on the founder of Soroca’s robust post-1992 Roma colony, whom he introduces both as the selfstyled “Viceroy of the Gypsies of Moldova and all the Russias” and as a “calm and capable businessman who, without betraying his Romany origins, decided, since he preferred the settled life of Soroca to the traditional wandering, to found commercial enterprises, creating both business and work for the indigenous local population” (p. 7). Over the past century, Roma peoples in eastern Europe have successfully survived as “interim masters of imperfect markets” under both capitalist and communist regimes. A proverb observes: “If you want to know what’s going to be scarce next, see what the Gypsies have to sell” (Lockwood 1985, 97). As skilled “gap-fillers” positioning themselves temporarily between supply and demand, opportunistic Roma have assumed the risks and reaped the rewards of exploiting a transitory economic niche where their ethnic-based endogamy, secrecy, and geographical mobility combined have served them well. The advent of freewheeling postmillennium global market conditions in eastern Europe have more recently offered some Roma in that region unprecedented opportunities not only to compete and to survive, but—as their prestige houses

586 Volume 60, Number 4, November 2008 demonstrate—to triumph. Key Words: conspicuous consumption, eastern Europe, elites, prestige, Roma (Gypsies), urban vernacular domestic architecture. References

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Lockwood, W. G. 1985. Balkan Gypsies: An introduction. In Papers from the Fourth and Fifth Annual Meetings of the Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter, ed. J. Grumet, 91–99. New York: Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter.

Globalized Freight Transport: Intermodality, E-Commerce, Logistics and Sustainability. Thomas R. Leinbach and Cristina Capineri, eds. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2007. 287 pp., maps, diagrams, and index. $130.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 9781845425029). Reviewed by Robert N. Martin, Department of Geography, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA. The subtitle of this group of ten original essays by fifteen authors provides the focus and organization of the contents of this book edited by Thomas R. Leinbach and Cristina Capineri. These essays developed out of several meetings of North American and European scholars over the last five years. The purpose of the meetings was to identify the critical transport issues of an increasingly global economy for international freight. Using the ideal of seamlessness in freight movements, the essays address efforts to and the limitations of improving the efficiency of transportation by looking at intermodality, logistics, technology, sustainability, and the status of public policy developments within the North American and European freight systems. As one reads these essays, one should keep in mind the following statement by Leinbach and Capineri in their concluding essay: “The pattern of global freight trade is highly concentrated on select routes and through a relatively small number of gateways. The implications of this spatial selectivity are enormous in terms of externality effects” (p. 259). Intermodality is addressed by the first pair of essays. John Bowen and Brian Slack look at the shift between modes and the patterns of spatial flows in North American. Their es-

say provides a very good background to the history and growth of intermodal freight in North America. Using U.S. and Canadian data sources, the authors document the growth and modal shift in freight movements and its concentration in a limited number of gateways. They also address the trends and problems with intermodal freight and suggest solutions. I found their discussion to be informative, especially the topic of air freight. In the second essay, Michel Beuthe addresses the topic of intermodal freight in Europe. He provides very good examples of how European intermodal freight differs from the situation in North America, especially in the aspects of dealing with many national and multinational government agencies. As with the first essay, the author provides excellent tables and data providing information on modal share and their changes over time. European and North American logistics are discussed in the pair of essays in the second section of this volume. Jean Paul Rodrigue and Markus Hesse look at the North American perspective on logistics. They discuss global product networks and the impact of information technology on e-commerce as well as intermodal freight. The problems of limited gateways and congestion are discussed along with the limited rail network within North America. In the first half of this essay there are several problems a professor should point out to students who are studying this essay. Specifically, Table 4.1 should be titled to indicate projected freight tonnage and values. The map in Figure 4.1 is much too cluttered and the symbolization is difficult to read and understand. If the students do not catch it, the professor will have to point out that the Port of Los Angeles is not on the California–Arizona border. Given the discussion in the earlier essay by Bowen and Slack, students (as well as this reviewer) may question why Louisville and Memphis do not appear on this map as major air gateways. Three separate maps for the land, port, and air gateways would have been much more effective and less distracting. The map in Figure 4.2 should have Long Beach, California, as large as Los Angeles based on Table 2.5. The map in Figure 4.3 does not match the information in Figure 4.1, or maybe it should be vice versa. Finally, Savanna, Georgia, has become Savannah, California, in the text. The conclusions of