A book by a professor who has spent his career researching Roma language, culture and issues. A well-written overview with chapters looking at history, common cultural aspects shared by the diverse communities, language and dialect, historical and contemporary challenges to survival both as a people and as a culture.
He brings up many of the difficulties around these issues:
- the diversity of communities from country to country and the difficulty of creating an inclusive identity
- the challenges of survival while at the same time avoiding integration and culture loss
- the myth of gypsies within the dominant societies and how this is both exploited by Rom and also how it works against them
- the ambivalence about school with its needed skills to be learned, but at the same time being apart from the strong family culture that both ensures identity and cultural continuity
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