| Summary: | In the public discourse, Roma people are usually described as an ethnic minority, and their collective identity is supposed to be rooted in a substantive “ethnos”. A critical assessment on the history of groups targeted as “gypsies”, however, shows that the s.c. “Roma ethnical identity” is a social construction: in early modern Europe, for instance, public authorities considered the Gypsies as vagrants and peripatetics, not as members of a particular ethnic group.
This article tries to define “Roma identity” as a social, historical and political construction: racist theories, administrative procedures, public discourses, as well as ethnic mobilizations of the Roma activists, have contributed to define the collective identity of Romani.
|
|---|