Gypsies, wars & other instances of the wild

Curatorial Note

Mattijs van de Port’s Gypsies, Wars & Other Instances of the Wild is an ethnographic study of Serbian society during the conflicts of the 1990s, examining the relationship between war, national identity, ideas of civilisation, and the symbolic position of Roma musicians in Serbian popular culture. Based on fieldwork in and around Novi Sad, the book pays particular attention to taverns and other spaces of musical sociability in which Roma musicians accompany forms of celebration, emotional excess, and the temporary suspension of conventional social order. Van de Port analyses how the figure of the “Gypsy” functions within Serbian cultural imagination as a marker of alterity, authenticity, disorder, and the perceived boundaries of civilisation. Although Roma and Romani musicians occupy a central position in the book’s analytical framework, the study is primarily an ethnography of Serbian representations and social experience rather than of Roma communities themselves. Originally published in Dutch in 1994, the English edition was translated and adapted for Amsterdam University Press in 1998.