The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics. By Zoltan Barany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 384p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Extract

Whoever has spent some time in the Indian state of Panjab and is to some extent acquainted with the East European Gypsies must have concluded that this was their original home. But as in Europe, so also in Panjab, even at the local Chandigarh University where an international conference debated the problem, little is known and understood about Gypsy ethnopolitics or ethnoculture. European interest in the Gypsies at the university level goes back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century, but it focused on regional languages and folklore as, for instance, can be seen in the correspondence between Bogdan P. Hasdeu (Ghijdeu), a Romanian academic, and Franz Miklosich, an Austrian philologist.