DIANA MUIR APPELBAUM - The Rootless Roma: The benefits of nationalism, as illustrated by its absence
....At the core of the
Roma’s troubles is the fact that they are a people without a land - but with a
twist. To say that a people is without a land can mean at least three things.
It can mean that, for one reason or another, a people does not in the main live
in the land with which it is historically associated. That was true, of course,
of the Jews for most of the past 2,000 years. But it has been true, too, for
what are sometimes called projection states - states defined by the fact that
more members of a particular group live outside their homeland than within it.
That was the case for Greeks during much of the 19th century, and it is true
for Lebanese and Armenians today.
For a people to be
without a land can also refer to a lack of sovereign control over a territory
or country in which, in fact, most of the national group does live. That is the
case today for the many peoples, including the Kurds, Puerto Ricans, Berber,
Baloch, Palestinians, Basques, Aymara and Quechua. But the Roma are
different, if not unique. The Roma are “without a land”, and
thus by definition without a state, not only because they have no history of
attachment to a particular territory, but because Gypsy culture does not value
attachment to place.
That is why if you
think you know, or if you want to know, where the Roma “really” came from, you
are revealing yourself as a Gazo - a non-Gypsy. The first substantive attempt to
discover their origin came in 1783, when Heinrich Grellmann of the University
of Göttingen demonstrated the similarity of the principal family of Gypsy
languages, Romani, to Sanskrit. Other Roma languages are Slavic, but linguistic
analysis of languages in the Romani group indicates that Gypsies originated in
or around Kashmir or the Punjab. Genetic studies in recent years have
substantiated this evidence by demonstrating that, although Gypsies have
intermarried as freely as other peoples, most of Europe’s Roma groups can trace
an ancestral line to the Subcontinent.
This information has
not excited much interest among the Roma, who themselves tell no stories about
their geographical origin. They do tell stories about how they have been and
still are the target of much discrimination, but even here the Roma operate at
a disadvantage: Roma, a term promoted by ethnic activists, is by no means
universally accepted by the people it purports to describe. Nor do all Roma
think of themselves as forming a single people, a fact reflected in the
difficulty of defining who we are describing.
In earlier times, the
names used by Gypsies to describe themselves referred to small groups of
people, clans for the most part, in the different places they were to be found.
The name “Gypsy”, some version of which is used in most European languages, is
not a name that Gypsies ever gave themselves, but is rather a term that has
stuck among most due to prevalent use by others. It derives from the word for
“Egyptian”, and was used by Europeans in earlier centuries to characterize as
exotic, Eastern and different the itinerants who begin to appear among them in
the late Middle Ages. Thus Gypsies became “Gypsies” in more or less the same
way that native Americans became “Indians”—for lack of an obvious alternative
by adopting a term invented by outsiders.
Roma Identity
By most measures, the Roma are a people, or a
nation in the strict sense of the term. They have a dominant language, a
culture and, above all, a sense of being a people. As Hans Kohn used to put it,
a nation is a group of people that calls itself a nation and gets away with it.
But the Roma have sought neither a country nor any form of political
sovereignty or government structure for themselves. Roma identity is bound up
with the romance of rootlessness. In a way, then, Roma identity takes the
anarchist ideal one step further; they reject government by rejecting the
territorial sine qua non for it... read more: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2011/03/01/the-rootless-roma/
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