Thread: Gypsy/Romani PC

Trying to prevent a thread hijack, I'm posting this as a new topic rather than as a response on the Tribal/Egyptian thread.

I should make note of the fact that I'm not PC. I try to be sensitive to an individual and generally try to avoid blanket statements. However, I don't go too far out of my way to make certain that I get the terminology up-to-date and I dislike the "blanding" of the English language.

That said, I DO enjoy irony (which tends to be an enemy of PC!). I was in a health food store recently when something caught my eye. In this bastion of PC, where everything "native"-no matter which culture it was native to-was extolled, and all groups were held up to be the very best they could be there were a fair number of products that claimed to be "GYPSY". And those with pictures all seemed to have voluptuous women wearing ruffled skirts and peasant blouses (I come from a long line of peasant women, BTW, and none of them ever wore peasant blouses but that's another topic).

Why is it that even is a place like that the Gypsy stereotype is encouraged? Maybe I've spent too much time with Morocco, but......

Just asking.

Kitty

And, I confess that I love the Dunyavi style. But I'm very careful to explaining to students that it's theatre and has very little to do with the Rom cultures which are diverse and far-reaching......My word, I am a PC prig!..l;,

are you speaking of Zhena's Gypsy Tea, by chance? I can't answer your Q's but I'm addicted to the stuff!

I think in the U.S. the Romani population is so far underground (and perhaps sparse?) that to the typical American they're fantasy creatures, like elves or fairies. It's therefore OK to make things up about them or accept Hollywood stereotypes.

Though one of my students is Romani. And my mother remembers traveling Romani families in wagons from her childhood, but interestingly enough she's quite certain they're all dangerous thieves, even though she raised me to be aware of & resist stereotyping.

Howdy there, Madame Kitty Kahaz,
This topic topic seems endlessly complex to me and ties my brain all up in convoluted knots, so I dare not try to comment.
I just wanted to say hey, nice to hear from you!
Rosette

A lot of people are ignorant that "gypsy" is offensive. I probably would know nothing about the Romani people if it weren't for bellydancing. Most of my friends don't know much, if anything about them.

I always wondered why some groups chose their name, like Ultra Gypsy, since they probably are aware of the issue

I don't think you're being PC. I think the motivation to be PC is a lot different from being sensitive to other groups. The way I understand it is the motivations are very different. I think being PC means you're afraid of offending someone, not that you agree with why it's bad to use x word or phrase. Being sensitive is when you don't use "retarded" to describe a stupid or annoying situation, because you understand you'd be using a word for a group of people pejoratively.

Well, I come from the land of PC, most-PC-generation version, and I agree that where people are not "real" to the locals, they get "othered" very easily. I lived in London for four and a bit years, and got very used not only to seeing and interacting with people of African heritage, but recognising that there were self-perceived cultural differences between people who called themselves British Black and people who called themselves Afro-Carribean and people who called themselves Africans, and that you had to be aware of all these differences, and so on and so forth. Same with people from the Indian subcontinent. Before that I had had very few interactions with such people, especially not African people.

So I was really nonplussed when I came home in 1995. On the one hand, I was reintroduced to a TV world where heterosexual people had "partners" and Maori were tangata whenua and if a Maori person ever said anything the correct procedure was to nod sagely and say "kia ora" in agreement, and never ever ever suggest that there wasn't really a taniwha in that river, or that that person was not being spoken to by ancestors but was mentally ill. (Btw I do accept this stuff at least in principle, for serious.)

On the other hand, we still have chocolate and fruit juice advertisements populated with smiling black folks on picturesquely poor and scruffy islands, with elaborately OTT Caribbean accents, who I sometimes fear are going to start waving their hands, dancing around and saying "lordy massa." Because they are SO stereotypical. Same happens a bit with Latin people, who are always passionately dancing about in ruffles and/or seducing each other with coffee or icecreams. That's when they're not inventing special flat-bottomed taco shells, causing their entire picturesque village to start dancing around joyously to "La Bamba."

Seriously, it's quite bad.

I would say that there are probably next to no people of Rom heritage in NZ - I've met one and he calls himself a gypsy - and that most NZers wouldn't know that gypsy could even *be* a perjorative term, unless they're belly dancers who spend time online, or people with a major fascination for European history. OTOH I had a granny who was actively prejudiced against gypsies, so after I heard stories about her I came to know a) that not everyone thought of gypsies as lovely tempestuous magickal individuals with tambourines and b) that gypsies are actually real humans.

The general rule of PC thumb is that you call people what they want to be called, but it can be tricky, because so often you have to use the hated term to explain the new one. Baby steps...

I've met a number of English and Welsh gypsies who have introduced themselves to me as just that..one in particular was a archeologist from Southern England who lived on the road and earnt his money by uncovering Roman (not Romany) villas on farms and the other a horse trader.
I taught tinker children at school from travelling Irish families and some prefer to be called travellers.
Ask about the origin of the word and it is because the English called the first Romanies to arrive here in the 1500s, Egyptians(the most exotic and foreign people they could think of) and the name got bastardized to Gypsies.
For most British people wether Rom, traveller or tinker, the word is not an insult(How can it be with its' origin?)but the word Gy$$0 is just as the word Pa&i is.
Travelling people do still come in for a lot of stick..it seems we always have to have a societal scapegoat. At present in the Uk, they have been replaced by the scourge (????) of Eastern European workers (taking all the jobs the Brits really really wanted didn't they HAH!) and asylumn seekers ( also taking all the jobs..HAH they can't they're not allowed to work)
In the UK Gypsies were always used as seasonal workers on farms but as these jobs became mechanised, they have turned to other specialisions scrap dealing, asphalting drives.They still read palms and tell fortunes..my gypsy lady was uncannily accurate and I will never have it read again!
I once spent a week in a traditional horse drawn caravan as a child..it's a far cry from the shiny trailer containing fine china and crystal and drawn by a 4X4 of the successful gypsy over here.
Of course many live in dire circumstances and many children get little chance of a settled education but I often think that much of the prejudice comes from people who envy their freedom if not poverty.
And as long as the Gypsy governing body here in the UK calls itself the Gypsy council, I'll continue to call a gypsy a gypsy.
The Gypsy Council

I'm not sure I have problem with the WORD Gypsy; I understand that many of Romani heritage prefer it. (On a side note, many American Indians prefer that word-Indian-to Native American. Which makes me happy because I"M a Native American. My ancestors were European, but I'm not! But I digress......)

Actually, I'm not sure that I'm bothered per se. Just perplexed at the stereotyping being acceptable for this group. Although seeing people that should know better-and I mean actual dancers calling what they do gypsy style without ever learning any real gypsy styles-but, then, what should they call it?

I seem to have opened a can of worms without a clear direction in mind. No, wait, maybe I'm a bit appalled at not wanting to learn all that we can about another culture BEFORE we decide to use it?

BTW, are "Tinkers" Rom? I was under the impression that the Irish Travelers, at least, were dispossessed Europeans rather than of Rom heritage. But I actually am looking for enlightenment!

Kitty

I wonder if Rom people continue to call themselves 'Gypsies' for the same reason we call ourselves 'belly dancers.'

As much as either term may lead to an instantly stereotyped mental picture, no one recognized what we're talking about by any other name.

In the U.S., at least, it seems that some Roma prefer the word "Gypsy" and others find it offensive. I *think* I have noticed a pattern that, the longer someone's family has been in the U.S. (ie, away from persecution in Europe), the more likely they are to be comfortable with being called "Gypsy".

I wonder why many people don't capitalize "Gypsy". Especially if those same people would capitalize the names of other ethnic groups who have experienced a diaspora such as Jews or Armenians. Why should one ethnic group be handled differently from another? I'm not trying to snark here, just asking something that puzzles me a bit.

As for why dancers who put on a peasant blouse and bang a tambourine on their butt think it's appropriate to call it "Gypsy", well, there are lots of people who call what they do "belly dance" when I don't see anything recognizably "belly dance" about it, not even much belly dance movement vocabulary. I went to a workshop recently that was advertised as "Egyptian pop" and it was almost entirely jazz-style dance with tons of traveling steps, half-spins, and such, and very little hip articulation. The music wasn't Egyptian pop, either. There was nothing "Egyptian" about this workshop. I think belly dance as a whole has a big problem with truth in advertising.

Originally Posted by Lauren_

I wonder if Rom people continue to call themselves 'Gypsies' for the same reason we call ourselves 'belly dancers.'

As much as either term may lead to an instantly stereotyped mental picture, no one recognized what we're talking about by any other name.

I hear you. I'll just call people what they want to be called. I'll say Romani because that's what Rocky taught me. and if I meet someone who prefers to be called Gypsy then i'll say that but I won't be using that term with anyone else. but i don't think any of you will ever see me wearing a ruffled circle skirt and a peasant blouse beating a tambourine on my butt and calling it Gypsy.

But I can never say never. Because now i'm more likely to say Belly Dance than I am to say Egyptian Dance or Raks Sharki. And any of you who have known me for a while know what a stickler I was for terminology. People don't really know it by any other name and I can teach them but increasingly what I do is not solely Egyptian or Middle Eastern for that matter. So I don't want to be misleading to my students or the public. And the fact that so many people of Middle Eastern origen call it Belly Dance. But I need to start a whole new thread about my mixed feelings on the dance and it's origen and it's place in society.

Originally Posted by Lauren_

I wonder if Rom people continue to call themselves 'Gypsies' for the same reason we call ourselves 'belly dancers.'

As much as either term may lead to an instantly stereotyped mental picture, no one recognized what we're talking about by any other name.

When I started the thread about the Gypsy dancers, that's what they called themselves!!


I believe the term "tinker" refers to the travellers earning money by fixing things. (Read that somewhere) sort of like a handy man-I mean handy person..l;, (couldn't resist)

For what it's worth, I get fed up with so much PC. It gets ridiculous. Like when you shouldn't use the word "retard" because it's offensive, but we don't even use the word retarded anymore to describe the mentally challenged, so now it's a dead word all around. Nobody can use it.

Retarded is still used to describe the mentally challenged. I've seen organizations that are for them that still use it. Dear Abby covered the topic fairly recently.

Some people who are "Gypsies" don't care. Some are deeply offended.

Originally Posted by *Shira*

I wonder why many people don't capitalize "Gypsy". Especially if those same people would capitalize the names of other ethnic groups who have experienced a diaspora such as Jews or Armenians. Why should one ethnic group be handled differently from another? I'm not trying to snark here, just asking something that puzzles me a bit.

I'd suspect it's because "gypsy" is also an improper noun and an adjective in English. Off the top of my head I can't think of any other ethnic groups to which this also applies, but one parallel usage might be there's the Arctic, and then there's arctic foxes and arctic temperatures. So that still doesn't really answer your question, but I suspect most people don't think about it because it's what they have already seen in print somewhere else. Maybe it's because despite being derived from Egypt, Gypsy doesn't refer to a specific country or religion the way most other ethnic group names do.

Originally Posted by badriya_al_ahmar

I'd suspect it's because "gypsy" is also an improper noun and an adjective in English. Off the top of my head I can't think of any other ethnic groups to which this also applies (snip)

How about bohemian? The word is used as an adjective with little thought to the root, but it comes from a real place and people.

Definitely less loaded of a term, though.

Originally Posted by Monica

How about bohemian? The word is used as an adjective with little thought to the root, but it comes from a real place and people.

Definitely less loaded of a term, though.

Ah, there's an example!

There's probably conservative Bohemians who don't like the connotations of bohemian

Question?

What about the PC ness of using the word Gipsy(i) in a printed document. For example, I am going to do a roma inpsired drum solo, the song is called Gipsi Girl from the passion of percussion 3 Cd. Well this will be for a show where there will be the name of the song printed on the program. I know I could choose another song but this one is calling me, ........ugggg......Thoughts on this one?

My thoughts are that you didn't title the song, so *shrug* I'd just call it what it's called.

That was quick, I head to tribe for a sec and BAM you answer. Ok That is what I was going to do just *Shrug* but wanted to make sure

Originally Posted by badriya_al_ahmar

Ah, there's an example!

There's probably conservative Bohemians who don't like the connotations of bohemian

Certainly there are residents of the island of Lesbos with similar concerns!

I think it also depends on the actual language and the situation. I also feel that the word Gypsy is offensive and the proper word is Roma, however...
I think it's more offensive when you refer to a person face to face and not so much when you refer to a thing. Saying "I love to listen to Turkish Gypsy music" is different than referring to a person that "he married a Gypsy".
Also the language...
Growing up in Hungary we always heard the word "cigány" which means Gypsy. It is and was offensive but Romas were stigmatized and scrutinized in Europe, so that's just what they were called. We didn't hear the word Roma until 10-15 years ago.
Calling someone a "cigány" is extremely offensive, but referring to the music as Gypsy music or dance is not, that is just what it's called. Calling it roma dance would sound to artificial, too politically correct.

A few of us Hungarians are planning on performing a Hungarian Gypsy dance on the 24th at the International Food Festival, and that's exactly what we will call it. Also when we are discussing the costume, we say "yes, the Gypsies at home wear this and that.." we don't refer to them as Romas. But if we had a 100% Roma girl we would never say "your're Gypsy, right?"

So I think it's a delicate issue depending on the situation and the language. And the person's attitude: you can say Gypsy affectionately and you can say it with hatred.

Just to add: If I was to form a Gypsy style dance group I would not use the word Gypsy - I would use Roma.
I also don't like the name Ultra Gypsy - to me it shows at least the possibility of being ignorant of the issue (perhaps it's just a bad choice of word). But then again I also don't get the word Ultra - what exactly do they mean by that? They're more Roma than the Roma?

Originally Posted by kahaz

I was in a health food store recently when something caught my eye. In this bastion of PC, where everything "native"-no matter which culture it was native to-was extolled, and all groups were held up to be the very best they could be there were a fair number of products that claimed to be "GYPSY". And those with pictures all seemed to have voluptuous women wearing ruffled skirts and peasant blouses (I come from a long line of peasant women, BTW, and none of them ever wore peasant blouses but that's another topic).

Why is it that even is a place like that the Gypsy stereotype is encouraged?

As to the question of why a "back to the earth, eco-love" product would use such images.

Because the product is trying to create the image of simpler times, basic ingrediants, a disconnect from modern pressure and life, and seem carefree and the sort of thing an "independant spirit" would buy...and whoever is packaging and marketing the product probably thinks "Hey! Gypsy life! All the things we're associating with this way of life are positive! Let's DO it!" They do it because they see no reason not to.

They aren't getting to the whole issue of Roma/Gypsy labels because they aren't even thinking "Hey, 'Gypsy' is a racial identity with mostly shared language and that within that label is a variety of cultures/groups/locations"...they are thinking "colorful world-friendly marketing!"

They aren't realizing that to pidgeonhole the 'Gypsy' as a thing of the past they are not acknowledging the present reality of the the Roma now, or that reducing them as something outdated and unconnected to the modern world is disrespectful to the complex beliefs the Roma hold now. They probably have no clue at the way the idea of 'Gypsy' as a people without land who like to travel has been used time and time again to deny the Roma land rights, voting rights, respect...or that the idea of Gypsy as a lifestyle/choice has been used to discredit the Roma as not even being a race.

Originally Posted by Marianna

I think it's more offensive when you refer to a person face to face and not so much when you refer to a thing.

A Vietnamese friend of mine feels that way about the words Asian and Oriental. He is Asian; things are Oriental. He's fine with Oriental art, Oriental carpets, Oriental dance, etc., but to call him Oriental is to turn him into a thing.

Originally Posted by Marianna

I think it also depends on the actual language and the situation. I also feel that the word Gypsy is offensive and the proper word is Roma, however...
I


So I think it's a delicate issue depending on the situation and the language. And the person's attitude: you can say Gypsy affectionately and you can say it with hatred.

Obviously your experience is different to the UK where Gypsies have lived for centuries and still call themselves "Gypsies". As I wrote and gave you the link their governing body is called the "Gypsy Council"
I am not sure about the gypsy population in the USA..wether they are a familiar group of people or not?
Here they are. We have permament sites near us and regular visiting gypsies and very locally in our village ( we are all swallowed up into one town) there are Romany families who have settled.My friend's grandmother was one of these, living in the picture postcard thatched cottage in the village street. And she has inherited her dramatic looks particuarly her fabulous eyes.
We have families of Irish descent who are usually called tinkers who regularly visit nearby sites then move on to the horse fairs.
I really miss the knife sharpeners and clothes-peg sellers who used to call to my door . Times have sadly shanged
My mother and father years ago made friends with a gypsy couple who worked in a circus and they would meet up for "High Tea" in their luxorious caravan when they hit town. Not all Gypsies are impoverished!
I know that in eastern Europe the Roma have been very badly treated and British gypsies also come in for abuse and discrimination but they are also seen very much as part and parcel of our historical make-up. British people tend to have an ambivalent attitude to travellers..sometimes despised, sometimes envied and admired and most often ( as is our wont) tolerated with a shrug.
After all we have a new scapegoat these days..anything that goes wrong...it's all the fault of "illegals" according to the ignorant.

BBC Inside Out - Romany Gypsies

this is an interview with one of our regions best known Romany families and does give you an insight into their lives today in the UK

Romani Cymru: British Gypsies, Welsh Gypsies, Kale, Teulu Abram Wood

another useful link and the word " box" is intriguing. Yes these have been or are still well used in the UK.

well, my point also included that you can't put a blanket statement on the Roma and say you can't say the word Gypsy, because it's offensive. Like I said it depends on the situation, the lanaguage and even on the individual.

I can definitely understand that some people may refer to themselves as Gypsy, while others detest it.

I actually have no idea how the population is in the US - in my 16 years here I have only met 2 Romas, one father and one son, and it was so obvious that they were Roma.
I was talking about my experiences in Hungary.