The time of the Gypsies

Curatorial Note

Michael Stewart’s The Time of the Gypsies is a major ethnographic study of Vlax Roma life in socialist Hungary, based on extended participant observation within a Rom settlement during the 1980s. Examining work, trade, domestic life, settlement patterns, music, gender, morality and relations with the Hungarian majority, Stewart explores how Rom cultural identity was reproduced despite state policies aimed at incorporation into the socialist working class. Rather than treating Roma marginality as evidence of cultural isolation, the study analyzes the social and economic relationships through which difference is continually produced and maintained. Particular attention is given to Rom concepts of work, exchange, brotherhood and musical sociability, as well as to the tension between assimilationist institutions and the cultivation of an autonomous moral world. Published in 1997, the book became an influential contribution to the anthropology of Roma and to debates concerning ethnicity, marginality, resistance and cultural continuity in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe.