Abstract
In this chapter Elisabeth Tauber tells of a process of integration in another society that is probably the most comprehensive of all cases presented. As a gaği, a female ‘outsider’, she married a Sinti husband and became intimately connected to her relatives-in-law living in a caravan site in an Italian town. She describes her gradual integration in a world sustained mainly by a female conducted economy of begging and peddling, in which she naturally must play her part too. But it is a death in the family binding her personally to an immediate ancestor that grants her the unreserved status and respect as a Sinti person.
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Notes
- 1.
See for marriage by escape: Tauber (2014 [2006]).
- 2.
- 3.
The merchandise had been bought from Italian factories.
- 4.
See for detailed description of this specific elopement, Tauber (2014 [2006]: 119–179).
- 5.
Only Marcio Vilar (2019) has introduced this terminology in his monograph on the Romani Calon people in Brazil.
- 6.
Hence the English title of Williams’ (2003) monograph in English aptly reads Gypsy World: The Silence of the Living and the Voices of the Dead.
- 7.
Similar to what Rane Willerslev describes, ‘Spirits are ready to hand’. The author has opened an important discussion in which he distinguishes between language and cognitively present spiritual concepts. In this, ‘language would not be essential for conceptual thought about spiritual beings’ (2004, quotation from abstract).
- 8.
The event was particularly dramatic, because two married Sinti had eloped leaving their respective partners with their children behind. This caused deep unrest and the left husband cursed the eloped couple. At this point, every family had to decide whether they would accept the curse and shun the adulterers, and thus initiate their social death.
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Tauber, E. (2019). Becoming a Sinta: Learning to See Dreams and Relating to the Dead. In: Platenkamp, J., Schneider, A. (eds) Integrating Strangers in Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16703-5_2
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