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Romani Foodways: Gypsy Culinary Culture
| Article
# : |
19310 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
3,292 Words |
| Author
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Ian Hancock
Ian Hancock is the UN and UNICEF representative for the
International Romani Union and a professor of linguistics and
English at the University of Texas at Austin. He has
published
extensively on the Roma; most recently he has written The
Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution. |
There is no single cohesive Romani culture but instead there are many. While all Gypsy populations retain a more or less shared cultural and linguistic core, their fragmentation after they reached Europe seven centuries ago has led to emergence of many distinct groups. Thus, no description of the life and customs of any one group can possibly hold true for all Romani people.
In the mid to late thirteenth-century, the Romani migration arrived in Europe. Half of their number dispersed throughout the continent, reaching every country in northern and western Europe by about 1500, but the other half was enslaved in the Balkans until the mid-nineteenth century. While Roma in south eastern Europe were being thus held in bondage, anti-Gypsy laws elsewhere, resulting partly from the misconception that Roma were associated with the invading Muslims and partly from prejudice against their dark skins and foreign ways, ensured that Roma were kept on the move and out of sight. By the 1600s laws in Germany, Finland, and England made it a hanging offense simply to be born a Gypsy.
It would be logical to look for parallels with Indian culinary culture in Romani culture (Romanipen), and they certainly exist. But the most evident characteristics reflect the sojourn in Europe differing between those populations tied to the land in slavery and those who were kept on the move elsewhere in Europe because of laws that gave them no option, laws that also made it dangerous to rely upon shopkeepers and the European peasantry as a source of supply. This was true even recently. In November 1973 a villager in Pfaffenhofen, Germany, opened fire upon a Gypsy family who had come to his farm simply to try to buy produce, killing three. The sympathies of the police were with the farmer.
It might be argued that because of the compactness of their population and their complete social isolation from their European owners, the gypsy slaves in Moldavia and Wallachia were able to retain more of the core culture than has been preserved elsewhere. Certainly it is among the descendants of those Vlax Rom (Wallachian or Romanian) Gypsies that the most rigorously upheld cultural beliefs about food prevail. On the other hand, Vlax culture also incorporates much that is traceable to Balkan and other non-Gypsy origins--perhaps more so than among other populations. This has not, of course, "diluted" Vlax culture; such influences become incorporated into Romanipen (called Romaniya in the Vlax dialect) just as pizza, fajitas, and cooking in a work have been incorporated into mainstream American
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