Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-Historical Approach PDF
Preview Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-Historical Approach
GYPSIES AND OTHER ITINERANT GROUPS Also by Leo Lucassen ZIGEUNER MIGRATION, MIGRATION HISTORY, HISTORY (editor with J. Lucassen) Also by Wim Willems IN SEARCH OF THE TRUE GYPSY Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups A Socio-Historical Approach Leo Lucassen Wim Willems Annemarie Cottaar Centre for the History ofM igrants University ofA msterdam The Netherlands First published in Great Britain 1998 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-26343-1 ISBN 978-1-349-26341-7 (eBook) DI O 10.1007/978-1-349-26341-7 First published in the United States of America 1998 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-21258-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lucassen, Leo, 1959- Gypsies and other itinerant groups : a socio-historical approach I Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems, Annemarie Cottaar. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-21258-2 (cloth) I. Gypsies-Europe-History. 2. Travelers-Europe-History. 3. Europe-Etlmic relations. I. Willems, Wim, 1951- 11. Cottaar, Annemarie. III. Title. DXI45.L86 1998 305.891'49704--dc21 97-38692 CIP CLeo Lucassen, Wim Willems and Annemarie Cottaar 1998 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1998 978-0-333-68241-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have assened their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 07 06 OS 04 03 02 01 00 99 Contents Preface vii 1 Introduction 1 Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems and Annemarie Cottaar PART I IMAGES AND REPRESENTATIONS 2 Ethnicity as a Death-Trap: the History of Gypsy Studies 17 Wim Willems 3 The Church of Knowledge: Representation of Gypsies in Encyclopaedias 35 Wim Willems and Leo Lucassen PART II STIGMATIZATION AND GOVERNMENT POLICIES 4 Eternal Vagrants? State Formation, Migration and Travelling Groups in Western Europe, 1350-1914 55 Leo Lucassen 5 'Harmful Tramps': Police Professionalization and Gypsies in Germany, 1700-1945 74 Leo Lucassen 6 A Silent War: Foreign Gypsies and the Dutch Government Policy, 1969-89 94 Wim Willems and Leo Lucassen 7 The Making of a Minority: the Case of Dutch Travellers 114 Annemarie Cottaar PART III SOCIO-ECONOMIC FUNCTIONING 8 A Blind Spot: Migratory and Travelling Groups in Western European Historiography 135 Leo Lucassen v vi Contents 9 The Clink of the Hammer was Heard from Daybreak till Dawn: Gypsy Occupations in Western Europe (Nineteenth-Twentieth Centuries) 153 Leo Lucassen 10 Dutch Travellers: Dwellings, Origins and Occupations 174 Annemarie Cottaar ~~ 1~ Bibliography 206 Index 220 Preface More than ten years ago Dik van Arkel, at the time still Professor of Social History at Leiden University, brought together a group of students working in the field of historical racism studies. Its members were focusing on subjects such as the causes of the nega- tive attitude towards unclean Burakumin in Japan, the stereotyp- ing of colonial migrants from the Netherlands Indies in the 1950s, the position of Black Americans in the contemporary ghettos in the large cities, the differences between left- and right-wing anti- Semitism in nineteenth-century France, and the relation between race, class and status in the social structure of Kaapstad from the seventeenth century onwards. All these themes were explored in an attempt to reveal the structure beneath the diverging manifes- tations of prejudices and social exclusion and thus to develop a general theory about the origin of racism. As members of this society we observed that historical research into the nature of antisemitism and the discrimination against Black Americans had been expanding since the 1950s, but that our under- standing of the deep-seated prejudices and the persistent social exclusion of Gypsies and other itinerant groups was still limited. Only recently has the world become aware of the fact that hun- dreds of thousands of them met the same horrendous fate as Jews and other Nazi victims between 1933 and 1945. Why have (social) historians been so blind to what has happened to wandering groups who made a living with ambulant occupations? That has been the leading question in our research during the last ten years. Besides that we have tried to fill the gap in knowledge about the history of these groups, especially by writing monographs about the life of so-called Gypsies and caravan-dwellers not only in the Netherlands, but also in other Western European countries. Most of our findings have been published in Dutch. Only re- cently some books have appeared in German and English. We there- fore thought that it was about time for a collection of our main articles in one volume, thus giving a state of the art from a socio- historical point of view. We have tried to present a range of di- verging contributions to the historical study of Gypsies and other itinerant groups. For more than five centuries people have written vii viii Preface about these groups as the ultimate aliens, who were supposedly a threat to society. We think that a new perspective can help a re- valuation of their position in European societies in the course of time and gain a better understanding of their fate during the twentieth century. If this volume stimulates the study of Gypsies and other itinerant groups from a social-historical perspective, our aim is achieved. Centre for the History of Migrants University of Amsterdam 1 Introduction Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems and Annemarie Cottaar A HISTORY IN FOOTNOTES The student of European history who searches for Gypsies will find them only in footnotes. Today we still know little about how they worked and lived in the past. The same holds true for itinerant groups in general. That during the Second World War hundreds of thousands of them met the same horrendous fate as Jews and other Nazi victims has only been recognized with reluctance. Gypsies appear to appeal to the imagination simply as social outcasts and scape- goats, or, in a flattering but far from illuminating light, as roman- tic outsiders. The world is patently intrigued by them, yet at the same time regards them with anxiety as 'undesirable aliens'. For historical knowledge about these groups we have therefore to rely mainly on (often popular) books by social scientists, writers and enthusiastic amateurs interested in the folklore of Gypsies.1 It may come as no surprise that due to this situation a more thorough insight into the functions of Gypsies and other itinerant groups within the larger society through time is still wanting. One of the aims of this book is to remedy this and shed more light on the historical development of showpeople who go from fair to fair: musicians, conjures, jugglers, acrobats and others who perform their activities in the streets of big cities, collectors of scrap metal, and so on. These kinds of occupation have existed for a long time and are practised by all kinds of people, of whom the best known are those who travel in groups. They differ from others because they combine these occupations with an itinerant way of life, made vis- ible by their choice to live in tents or caravans which enable them to move around with their families. In many countries these travel- ling people have been given names such as 'Gypsies', 'tinkers', 'bohemians', 'travellers' or 'caravan-dwellers'. They performed a wide range of functions, which had in common the spreading of goods and services that mostly could not be offered, or not at such a low price, by the sedentary professional class. 1
The list of books you might like
