The Roma and itinerant communities

[nadadoll]

I've been reading about the Roma lately, and I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for good ethnographies about the Roma and other modern nomadic cultures like the Irish Travellers. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between itinerant communities and the state societies they come in contact with. Thanks in advance for

Comments

[ibid]

The Traveller Gypsies - Judith Oakley is great.

[svenjaliv]

"The Time of the Gypsies" by Michael Stewart is pretty good, he writes about the Roma...
And yep, Oakley's book is really good as well. They're the two I've read.

[dorantherook]

If you have access to a university library with dissertation databases, I know that there has been some recent work on the Irish Travellers such as Irish travellers: On writing orality, representation and belonging
by Walsh, Christine, M.A., Concordia University (Canada) (2007). I havent read this one myself however.

[thebohomama]

If you google you will find a lot of Irish newspapers that have reported on interactions with the traveling community-- from health care to road side clean up when caravans move on. I was trying to find a local article recently talking about a 10k clean up bill for a local site that had been abandoned but I couldn't find it. There are definitely some interesting interactions between the state and these communities-- and I think there are further separations between settled travelers (descendant) and active travelers (and the borderline criminal element in much of the active travelers that I wasn't aware of until I lived here).

[morleigh13]

"Bury Me Standing" by Isabella Isabel Fonseca is pretty good. She's not an Anthropologist, so there's not the kind of analysis you'd normally want, but it is a first hand account of a stay with Roma, coupled with a bit of a history lesson.