Respectable and Masculine Livelihoods: Roma Stories of Horse Trading

Abstract

Until the mid-twentieth century, the Finnish Roma supported themselves by small-scale itinerant trade, such as peddling and market trade. This chapter traces Roma’s strategies of survival in the first half of the twentieth century by analyzing interviews with Finnish Roma. The analysis demonstrates how horse trading carried out by men was experienced as the most important, profitable, and respectable form of livelihood. Women’s versatile work tasks also required trust and aid from the majority population, yet both women and men emphasized the worth of the masculine form of livelihood. The chapter investigates in detail how gender operated in narratives of horse trading and how the construction of a masculine self was taking place in certain spatial realms, like the marketplace.

This chapter examines the livelihoods of Finnish Roma/“Gypsies” (Finnish Kaale¹) by looking at strategies of survival and economic practices at a time when Roma primarily supported themselves through itinerant trade. In so doing, I analyze interviews with Roma from the late 1990s that deal with memories of market trade and peddling from the 1920s and onwards. Although research on Roma in the social sciences and the humanities is extensive, often addressing the negative and racist views held by the majority population, Roma’s means of subsistence, particularly from the viewpoint of the people themselves, have received little attention.² This dilemma of not finding Roma voices pertains especially to historical explorations, which can be partly explained by the oral tradition of Romani people, but also by the majority’s seeming disinterest in Roma’s narratives. However, anthropological research has explored contemporary settings, Roma livelihoods and experiences, offering important themes, and underlining Roma’s innovative trading strategies and specialized skills.³

I will focus on how Roma’s itinerant trade, especially horse trading practiced by men, has been recollected and narrated. I underline performativity in economic practices when investigating how gender and notions of respectability operated in narratives of horse trading, and how the construction of a masculine (Roma) self was taking place in certain spatial realms, like the marketplace. This chapter follows Michel de Certeau’s conceptualization of space and tactics in two ways.⁴ First, I look at how a particular space and economic practices were narrated (“spatial stories”); second, I highlight performative tactics in Roma livelihoods as forms of resistance. These livelihoods were discredited by society, the majority population, and not regarded as decent livelihoods—or rather as not even livelihoods at all. I argue that stories of successful and honest horse trading reflect struggles for those in disfavored social positions to gain respect and value. Drawing on Beverley Skegg’s notion of gender and respectability,⁵ I suggest that Roma masculinity is constructed in relation to respectability and, concomitantly, respectability is gendered as masculine.

Since the Roma as an ethnic group⁶ have been marginalized and often stigmatized, I will address issues of power and agency in relation to Roma livelihoods. Considering the subjugated position of Roma in Finnish society, it is relevant to trace the economic strategies Roma have employed to make a living, and to explore how the Roma minority mobilized social, cultural, and economic resources in a context of vulnerability, dependence, and financial insecurity. I suggest that Roma voices and experiences can be understood as subjugated knowledges and counter-narratives, enacting creative resistance to structures upholding their subordination.

Dishonest Livelihoods: A Problematic Master Narrative

The Finnish Kaale are a Roma population living in Finland and officially recognized as a traditional minority in the country.⁷ The Kaale community in Finland dates to the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Finland was part of Sweden.⁸ At present, there are approximately 10,000 Kaale living in Finland, and 3000 more in Sweden. Today, the Finnish Roma comprise a sedentary population, living mainly in cities in southern Finland. Unlike many of the Roma communities in Eastern Europe, who speak a variant of the Romani language, most Finnish Roma speak Finnish as their mother tongue. The use of the Finnish Romani language among the Kaale (henceforth Roma) has deteriorated greatly over centuries of forced assimilation attempts and interventions by the Finnish state.⁹

Scholars in the field have demonstrated how industrialization, rural migration, urbanization, the wars, and later assimilation and housing policies led the Finnish Roma to abandon their itinerant lives and livelihoods from the 1940s onwards.¹⁰ As a consequence of major societal changes, traditional Roma livelihoods, like itinerant trade, slowly came to an end in the 1950s–1960s. Still in the 1950s, after the Second World War, horses were needed in the reconstruction, particularly in forestry in eastern and northern Finland. However, cars, tractors, and buses were slowly replacing horses as means of transportation and in agricultural work. The mechanization of agriculture and modernization of transportation resulted in a diminishing need for work horses (for both the peasantry and Roma). This drastically affected Roma livelihoods, as horse trading was one of the most important means of sustenance. In the 1960s–1970s, the state initiated so-called “Roma social policies,” with the aim of assimilating and integrating Roma into mainstream society. Housing and educational policies were seen as crucial in integrating Roma and urging them to abandon their mobile lifestyle.¹¹ Today, Finnish Roma continue to practice what is recognized (by the Roma community and the majority) as age-old customs, purity rituals, and community norms that differ from those of contemporary Finnish society, such as specific dress codes (especially for women), age, kinship and gender hierarchies, and particular sexual taboos. All these elements have been argued to constitute reasons for continued marginalization by mainstream Finnish society.¹²

When tracing Roma livelihoods in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, there are two interconnected research-related and ethical problems. First, it is difficult to find sources that explicitly deal with Roma livelihoods, and second, the sources and materials are very biased and produced by the majority population, not by Roma themselves. As I turned to public writings at the turn of the nineteenth century, it became quite clear that the majority did not regard the trade and commerce that Roma families pursued as legitimate livelihoods or “normal” work, but as shenanigans and disguised begging. Late nineteenth-century newspaper articles identified “the Gypsy” as devious, lazy, and incompetent, as seen in the following (1895):

In the villages, women acquire money by fortune-telling, stealing, etc. The men do mostly nothing, but they always take care of the money earned. In horse trading, exchange and theft, the gypsies have achieved surprising skills. To make their horses beautiful, they give them arsenic and alum. At times, someone may pursue farming, yet it always leads to bad results. Some gypsy women do needlework, whereby they exhibit laces and ribbons as proofs. Generally, gypsies foster great contempt toward any systematic work.¹³

Besides ethnic otherness, one of the biggest concerns surrounding Roma involved their mobile lifestyle, which was related to assumed criminality and dishonesty. The discourse on “the Gypsy” as a criminal and vagrant, avoiding “decent work” at any cost, can be traced back to the vagrancy legislation in the nineteenth century and the so-called “Gypsy Question.” During this period, Finland, like other European countries, initiated various vagrancy laws, particularly targeting itinerant gypsies, equating all gypsies with vagrants. In addition, “gypsy clauses” led gypsies to be punished more severely than other vagrants.¹⁴

The condescending view regarding Roma and their economic activities correspond with Anton Blok’s notion of “infamous” or “pariah occupations,”¹⁵ or even worse, as Roma livelihoods were not regarded as “occupations.” A deeply embedded master narrative, the view of “the Gypsy” as unreliable and not cut out for regular (agricultural ) work recurred in newspaper texts. To paraphrase Stuart Hall, this narrative unfolded the “Spectacle of the Other”,¹⁶ in which the majority population had the prerogative and power to define the “spectacle.” Postcolonial scholars and critical race theorists have defined a master narrative, like the one of “the Gypsy,” as “an all-encompassing and authoritative account of some aspect of social reality that is widely accepted and endorsed by the larger society.”¹⁷ The discourse on “the Gypsy” had gained societal authority by its cultural acceptance through mechanisms of social, political, and institutional structures of power.¹⁸ Thus, these sources were problematic, as they were prejudiced, and Roma’s own interpretations and narratives were missing.

Interviews and Nostalgic Narration

To find Roma narratives of livelihoods, I turned to a collection of interviews with Finnish Roma, conducted by Roma activists and collected by the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura/SKS) in 1998–2000. These interviews are part of a larger collection, consisting of approximately 200 interviews, transcribed, and archived in the SKS archives. In the 1960s, interviews with Roma were first initiated by Finnish folklorists, ethnologists, and anthropologists, and in the late 1990s by Roma themselves as part of the extensive ROM-SF interview project. In the ROM-SF project, the interviewers were Roma laypersons. In this project, 107 Roma (born in 1907–1980) were interviewed. The interview questions are organized around Roma’s lives and experiences, with the overall aim of charting and surveying the Finnish Roma culture(s) and customs in the way Roma themselves have experienced it. A recurrent interview question pertains to encounters between the majority population of “the whites” (kaajeet ) and Roma (mustalaiset/kaaleet ).

In the 92 interviews I reviewed, I looked for questions pertaining to “the old days,” “the Kaale way of life,” “market days,” “peddling”, and “trade,” where itinerant trade and livelihoods were discussed. These narratives unfold a bygone era, depicting childhood and adolescent memories of market days in the past, with the oldest ones reflecting the 1920s–1940s. The informants recall how families until the 1960s were in constant movement (being non-residents) and practicing itinerant trade, both peddling (visiting private homes) and trading at marketplaces and fairs (public spaces). These interviews convey experiential aspects and meanings behind varied economic practices, as well as give information on how the Roma community was socially reproduced.¹⁹ I look at how the informants narrate and (re)construct their experiences by tracing particular narratives and discourses. In line with Michel de Certeau, I approach the interviews as “treatments of space”.²⁰ They are “travel stories,” a spatial practice. These spatial stories travel like buses or trains; “they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.”²¹ In this way, stories transform “places into spaces or spaces into places.”²² This everyday practice of telling stories maps a geographical structure in which places are linked together. Hence, narration—the interview in this case—is not only a description of something but a practice or act that connects the present with the past and the future.

Memory, writes de Certeau, is part of storytelling, and a story changes the real by making “detours” as it travels in time.²³ The interview questions call for memories and experiences of the market (“How were the market days in the old days?” “Do you remember market trade and peddling?” “How did the Kaale make a living back in the day?”). Although not all Roma families were engaged in peddling and itinerant trade, as some were stationary and working on farms, for example, the interviewees present the past in nostalgic terms as an itinerant “Gypsy life,” traveling around by horse and cart. By the time of the ROM-SF interviews in 1998–2000, itinerant trade—such as market trade —was a distant phenomenon, yet memories thereof remained, or at least were narrated. Spatial aspects of Roma livelihoods turned out to be important; the marketplace in particular was narrated as a space that encompassed different meanings for Roma. Stories like these interviews can be understood as comprising part of that space; according to de Certeau, “there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences.”²⁴

Not all informants had their own memories of market trade or “itinerant Gypsy lives,” yet this fact did not hinder them from retelling stories and memories that their parents or older generations had told them. Thus, these nostalgic narratives are not only individual memories but also based on the stories and emotions of older Roma generations; that is, informants retell, take over, and reconstruct experiences of the past. The former market days are depicted as “a joyous time,”²⁵ a festivity. The nostalgic feelings are both personal and collective, stretching over generations—and time.

One male informant²⁶ details three major meanings of the marketplace, which aptly represents how many other interviewees presented this space. First, the market offered a venue for meeting relatives and old acquaintances, but also for making new Roma friends. Second, the market was a space for business, that is, selling and swapping horses. The third aspect of the marketplace was consumption; the market offered an opportunity to acquire commodities and necessities, such as clothes and shoes. In other words, the informant stressed the social (e.g., relationships, networks) and economic meanings (livelihood and consumption) of the market, and these meanings were connected. In the narratives, the marketplace as a distinct space is presented as an important gathering venue and a fixed space for families, who normally were scattered around the country. While finding overnight accommodations was usually a constant battle for survival, during market days it seemed to be effortless. According to the informants, Roma families worked together and helped each other find overnight shelter.

Gendered and Specialized Livelihoods

In her pioneering work on British Roma, Judith Okely describes Roma as nomadic service providers and entertainers who exploit opportunities that are not covered by the mainstream, formal provision of goods and services.²⁷ Okely, as well as the comparative collection Gypsy Economy: Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century, edited by Micol Brazzabeni, Manuela Ivone Cunha, and Martin Fotta, underline performativity in economic practices.²⁸

The division of labor, trade practices, and commodities were strictly gendered. Roma women and men followed a clear distribution of work, with different tasks being associated with shared understandings of femininity and masculinity. Roma’s most important commodities and barter goods included horses, horse-related gear, and the equipment that men manufactured. Additionally, needlework—particularly the laces that women knitted—was sold and swapped. Laces could be traded for a piece of bread and fortune-telling for an overnight stay. Roma women also provided their customers with entertainment, doing palm reading or reading cards, providing gossip, telling stories, singing, and so forth. Leo Lucassen et al. refer to these practices as “emotional services”; Roma women talked about the joys and sorrows of life, and about future fortunes (like marriage) and misfortunes.²⁹

With the help of trade and barter goods, Roma families could secure food for their families. The strategy of “walking” and “asking” for food—begging—was a female task. Women’s versatile work tasks (e.g., securing food for the family, palm reading, selling needlework, entertaining customers, domestic services) required trust and assistance from the local residents. Women’s work guaranteed the continuity of Roma society, ensuring that members of the family had enough to eat, while male labor maintained the place of the household in society. In particular, horse trading created and developed relationships with the domestic majority group. It was of great importance that both horse trading and women’s handicraft barter trade succeeded, as it was easier the next time around if good relations with potential customers were already established. Such relations were critical both in peddling (i.e., door-to-door activities) and in market trade and fairs (see Fig. 11.1).

Fig. 11.1

A peddling Roma family in Muhos, Finland, 1945. (Photo by Antti Miikkulainen, 1945. The Finnish Literature Society)

Although peddling was the most common form of livelihood for Roma, being practiced all year round, market trade was an essential source of income, particularly when it came to horses. The informants remember their fathers coming home with delicacies and money after successful horse deals. Income and livelihood were thus gendered, and horse trading was conducted solely by men.

Well, my father always visited the marketplaces […] was there and swapped horses. Did business and always got some money from there… Yes, those marketplaces were such, where you did business.³⁰

The men went to the market to swap horses and normally women did lace business and palm reading. It was a form of livelihood.³¹

Interviewer: Well, how did the gypsy get his bread besides horse swapping?

Informant: Women used to do fortune telling.³²

Women talked with women, and men with men, men usually talked about horse trading and gave each other advice, and there was no envy involved. Women talked amongst themselves. Whatever they talked about, they did not talk about rags or aprons, they had much more important things to talk about—there was less talk about what kind of cloth you had bought.³³

The livelihood narratives expressed and shaped gendered social relations and practices. Gendered networks were established between the minority and majority populations, the Roma and the “whites.” Male networks were organized around horse trading, both amongst Roma men and between Roma men and white men. Female networks seem to have been wider and their livelihood practices largely depended on good social relations with the majority population.

As opposed to public writings with the racist master narrative, Roma informants described their encounters and experiences with the majority population in (surprisingly) positive terms.

• Interviewer: What were the whites like in those days if you compare to how they are today?

• Informant: Well, in those days, back in the day, they were good, because they helped us and gave to gypsies when gypsies were begging, and they were much more understanding than they are today, and the help did come from the whites, similarly as today. Well, in the past, they gave whenever somebody asked. There was nothing to it. The whites did give in the past. Quite honestly.³⁴

The kaajeet offered help in many ways, and they treated Roma well, giving them food and shelter. Roma accentuated that they themselves had been behaving courteously and had been honest in their commerce activities. Some informants openly admitted, however, that the Roma were completely dependent upon help from the whites.

• Interviewer: Were whites better, back in the day?

• Informant: Whites were better to the gypsy back then. If you think about it, quite truthfully, gypsies lived at the expense of the whites. Gypsies did not understand anything about work at that time.³⁵

In contrast to scholars who have emphasized reciprocity in interethnic relations and mutual dependencies between the majority population and Roma (or other itinerant groups) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,³⁶ I maintain that the dependence was clearly one-sided: Roma needed the customers, food and shelter provided by peasant families. The relations between the white majority and ethnic minority cannot be regarded as “equal,” not even reciprocal. It is undebatable that without the help from the peasantry, the survival of Roma families would have been compromised.

The Horseman

While Roma women were handcrafters, palm readers, “askers”, and fortune-tellers, the “Gypsy man” was a horse trader and/or horse swapper. Horse trading was one of the traditional “Gypsy” forms of trade, being a form of livelihood often associated with Roma, and thus it was an ethnicized practice. Horse trading, as well as the handling of animals and veterinarian-related activities that the Roma practiced, demanded specialized knowledge. Traditional know-how passed from father to son enabled Roma to establish themselves as skillful horse traders, sometimes giving them a monopoly. In their comparative study of Roma livelihoods, Brazzabeni et al. address the notion of “Gypsy specialization” as a “Simmelian social form,” which arises “through the replication, standardisation or repetition of activities and through the production of conceptual apparatuses related to this specialisation.”³⁷ Horse trading was a specialization, exclusively a male form of entrepreneurship, and regarded as the most lucrative and important source of income.

If we look at the actual commodities, goods, or “things” for sale, two artifacts—the horse and lace—were associated with and understood in relation to Roma. Lace was obviously regarded as a female artifact, crafted, sold, exchanged, or bartered by women, and thus marked as “feminine.” The horse was intimately linked to Roma men. While a living horse may not be a “thing” or artifact in the traditional sense, it still functioned as a commodity. Donna Haraway understands the dog as a hybrid (figure): humans have shaped the dog throughout history, but the dog has also shaped humans.³⁸ The same applies to the horse, and its meanings for the Roma were multifaceted. The horse was a vehicle, commodity, status symbol, and companion. The horse enabled itinerant trade and the livelihoods of Roma. The horse cart not only carried Roma families, but also all the daily necessities (clothes, pans and pots, tents to sleep in, horse tools and gear, and so on) that the family needed for its survival, as well as the goods for sale.

In Roma culture, the horse and its harness, gear, reins, and water container belonged to a symbolically pure category, which further manifested the importance of the horse. Naturally, the horse was also important to the majority population in a rural society. Up until the Second World War, horses were used in agricultural work, forestry, industries, and for transportation. For the peasantry, horses were a crucial asset all year round. In addition, farmers needed horse gear, for workhorses needed regular maintenance, care, and attendance. After the war, however, the need for workhorses declined as an effect of agricultural mechanization, something that greatly affected Roma livelihoods.

The horse was gendered, as it was associated with masculinity. The Roma man did not own land but owned one or more horses. In Finnish, there is an expression, “Hevonen on mustalaisen pelto” (“The horse is the Gypsy’s field”), which dates back to the eighteenth century.³⁹ The horse was a man’s property, and his status was measured on the basis of his horse(s) and his skills as a horseman. The horse cart was also a status symbol. Roma carts were different from those of the majority population, being lower and painted in vibrant colors. The majority population referred to these as “Gypsy carts.”⁴⁰ When Roma families gathered, the horses and carts were critically evaluated in relation to the status of the Roma man, including his economic position and his “commercial talent and status.”⁴¹ Hence, the symbolic value of the horse cannot be overstated. By means of horse selling, swapping, and bartering, male networks were established both among Roma and between Roma men and white men. Such horse trading was of particular importance for minority–majority relations. Both male and female informants regarded horse trading as decisive in terms of conducting successful business, but also for good relations with the majority population (see Fig. 11.2).

• Informant: I do remember the markets and fairs, because my father had the best horses of all Finnish Gypsies. And my father looked a lot like a white [Finn], a white Gypsy, so he helped other Gypsies. [Sometimes] other Gypsies could not sell or swap a horse by themselves, so they had to give the horse to my father [who then could sell it].

• Interviewer: So, he was, like, better at it [horse trading]?

• Informant: Yes.⁴²

In these encounters, Roma men who resembled the majority population—like the father in the quote above, called a “white Gypsy”—could sometimes assume a special position and higher status because of their appearance. This fact made him a more successful horse trader, as he did not look like a “typical” Roma man, and this appearance could help other Roma horse traders, who needed the white Gypsy’s assistance in selling horses. In postcolonial research, this has been referred to as “passing” (i.e., when a non-white person can “pass as” white).⁴³ Through this “racial transformation,” the person “passing” can gain privileges belonging to whites. It seems obvious that the “white Gypsy,” resembling the majority population, was more easily accepted and trusted by the majority, because of his appearance. This in turn entailed that he had the upper hand in horse trade with the majority population, compared to Roma who did not have such a complexion. In this way, the “whiter” Roma man became more economically successful and was depicted as a “more skilled” horseman.

Fig. 11.2

A Finnish Roma (Kaale) man selling and swapping horses in 1958. Horse trading was one of the traditional Roma livelihoods and was practiced by men only. Competent salesmanship, knowledge of the local communities, bargaining and social skills, allowed Roma to become successful in their economic activities. (Photo by Erkki Voutilainen: Horse market on the Hyrylä racetrack in Tuusula, Finland. The Finnish Heritage Agency)

Michael Stewart’s analysis of the Vlach Rom horse trade in socialist Hungary looks at how Roma men framed and understood selling, swapping, and bartering horses. For instance, Roma distinguished “selling” to Gázos from “swapping” with other Roma, thereby also maintaining ethnic boundaries. Horses were treated as commodities, and it was through Roma men’s skills of speech and the ability to hustle that they were able to convince and “dominate” the Gázos (“whites ”) in trading encounters. A deal was regarded as successful when Roma achieved a price that was good enough, which in turn implied that the seller was “lucky,” a criterion for success. Moreover, a Roma man was considered “lucky” if he constantly reconstructed himself as a true Gypsy.⁴⁴

In the Finnish case, however, the interviews underlined honesty and decency as characterizing men’s horse trade, rather than themes of “dominating,” “convincing,” or “deceiving” the customers. Even when poor, the means of livelihood was considered decent. Roma masculinity was again established in relation to successful horse trading.

I had my own true he-man. He traveled around to markets and fairs and did horse business, and he earned a living out of it.⁴⁵

The female informant’s husband was depicted as a “he-man” for earning money from horse trading when on the road. Some Roma horsemen were famous all around the country as the best horse sellers, and they were respected both in the Roma community and by white men. Indeed, this form of livelihood was considered respectable and was highly appreciated. Both women and men emphasized the worth of the masculine form of livelihood. Although Roma informants emphasized decency and respectability almost as “innate” characteristics, trading encounters and practices can be seen as involving various strategic performances, such as passing for non-Roma (role-playing), impression management, knowing the local economy and the local people, establishing good contacts with resident communities, and having extraordinary social skills. Such techniques were fundamental in allowing Roma to master and become successful in their economic activities. Judith Okely points to the importance of “manual dexterity; mechanical ingenuity; highly developed memory; salesmanship and bargaining skills.”⁴⁶ She also addresses role-playing, through which Roma related to Gorgios (the British Roma term for non-Gypsies) in different ways in economic interactions. Depending upon the context and situation, Roma variously hid or promoted their “Gypsyness,” sometimes adapting, fitting into or even internalizing stereotypes produced by non-Gypsies. It seems plausible that Finnish Roma also manipulated “ethnic,” non-Roma, stereotypes, tactically, according to the occasion and their needs. Okely sees a discontinuity between, on the one hand, Gypsies’ representation of themselves to non-Gypsies through manipulating attributes of “ethnicity” and, on the other hand, the “real” Roma way of being and living in a consistent way with their “ethnic identity.”⁴⁷

Honest Livelihoods and Subjugated Knowledges

The nostalgic narration of the “good old days” depicted Roma livelihoods of the past as upstanding, the relations between kaajeet and kaaleet as friendly and respectable, and economic activities as professional and honest. Compared to sources produced by the majority population, these interviews tell a quite different story. While Roma believed they conducted respectable professional trade, the majority population did not regard it as proper work or business but as involving trickeries and disguised begging.⁴⁸ Following Richard Jenkin’s notion of ethnicity, it is clear that the minority’s self-perception (identification) was related to—and constructed in relation to—the racialized derogatory view of the majority and the public space (the external categorization).⁴⁹

Roma as an ethnic minority and a collective identity have been portrayed as unworthy in relation to the majority population since their arrival in Finland in the sixteenth century. The “Gypsy Question” of the late nineteenth century established a persistent image of Roma as vagrants, beggars, criminals, and immoral in general.⁵⁰ Although politically speaking, the “Gypsy Question” slowly faded over time, the discourse itself prevailed. The itinerant life of Roma and their economic activities were regarded with suspicion and the notion of the “Gypsy” as incapable of (agricultural ) work had been established. Thus, Roma broke established social norms and ideals according to which work not only served as a sign of decency, dignity, and decorum, but also normative citizenship.⁵¹ This seemingly static representation of Roma as non-respectable with regard to the white majority population (with the power to define diligence, honesty, citizenship, etc.) reveals the racialized boundaries of citizenship that may have been inclusive—or in this case exclusive, depending on the context.

In his introductory lecture Il faut défendre la société (“Society Must be Defended”), Michel Foucault describes genealogy as “the insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” According to Foucault, genealogy can offer the history of the struggle of one knowledge against others, showing how certain knowledges (épistémès ) gain dominance in certain periods and how certain other knowledges (“subjugated knowledges”) are suppressed. As with master narratives, certain knowledges “win” over others. Therefore, when we discuss “knowledge,” we mean “the victorious knowledge,” “the knowledge that defeated and subjugated other knowledges.”⁵²

Subjugated knowledges are not only forms of knowledge that are hidden or deliberately corrupted, but also knowledges that have been dismissed and disqualified, as in the case of Roma’s own perspectives and accounts. By bringing back those subjugated knowledges, other possibilities of knowledge open up, and new thinking can recommence. Still, herein lies a challenge. For the scholar, it may be appealing to fall back on statements of the subjugated subjects and to regard these as more “true” or more reliable than the ones given by the majority population (the épistémè ). However, the narratives of marginalized individuals are also constricted; hence, genealogy does not strive to replace authoritative histories with more “authentic” or absolute historical truths. Rather, the aim is to demonstrate how all truths and knowledges are situated in specific social and historical contexts. Genealogies are biased and partial as much as authoritative histories; they are also written and produced from a particular position. Interviews are shaped by context, discourses, expectations, and conventions. Thus, I do not claim to convey Roma’s realities, instead, my aim is to make visible how the informants revoke and understand their experiences by identifying different narratives and by taking them seriously.

If the materials produced by the majority represent a powerful épistémè, or a master narrative, would it be possible to regard the Roma narratives as an insurrection, a mutiny against the image that the majority population has forced upon them?

Respectable Masculine Livelihoods as Resistance

According to Beverley Skeggs, social groups are differentiated by their possibilities to exhibit respectability.⁵³ Respectability contains judgments of class, race, gender, and sexuality, and different groups have varying degrees of access to the mechanisms for generating, resisting, and displaying respectability. For Skeggs, respectability is foremost a marker of social class and can be used as a means of “othering” deviant codes of individuals and behaviors. Respectability is a desirable symbol of dignity and morality, a type of cultural capital which historically has been granted the upper social classes . Therefore, striving for respectability has been stronger among social groups that have not been seen as respectable: working-class and black women, ethnic minorities, and other subjugated groups. Roma have repeatedly been portrayed as unreliable, unfit for work, dirty, uncivilized, anti-social and dangerous; in other words, as the opposite of propriety and respectability—the cultural capital defined by—and given to—the whites by themselves.⁵⁴ Postcolonial scholarship has demonstrated how the colonized person always carries the image of the Other as a part of themself and has to respond and relate to that representation.⁵⁵ Still today, a lack of respect is something that many Finnish Roma experience and have to manage in their daily lives. Camilla Nordberg discusses how Roma regard their citizenship and belonging from below: they perceive themselves as an underclass in Finnish society, particularly regarding schooling but also employment.⁵⁶

My dad pursued horse trading and supported us by honest horse trading, and he was not chased by gypsies or whites for doing something wrong or for having been sneaky or lying. So, in that way it felt good that we were poor, but honest. […] Dad swapped horses and he always had good horses, and he swapped better horses, and then we were begging at places where people gave us food. But no violence anywhere. People gave of their own goodwill, and nobody was afraid of us. They welcomed us with open arms. We lived honestly and did nothing wrong.⁵⁷

For Skeggs, the working class aims to become respectable by aspiring for middle-class social status and cultural capital. Roma, however, did not wish to become like the majority; rather, they wanted to be respected as Roma. Patrick Williams, in his analysis of French Roma, Manus, maintains that they live “in the world of the Gadzos” (non-Gypsies) but not “in the same world as the Gadzos,” and that, while co-existing with the Gadzos, the Manus detach themselves from them, “which precisely cause them to become Manus and the Gadzos to become Gadzo.”⁵⁸ So, while Finnish Roma mirrored themselves against the whites, they took pride in being Roma. Nevertheless, they actively resisted negative stereotypes of Roma. While Skeggs’ focus is on women—namely, working-class women—and respectability, in the case of Roma, women remained in the shadows; thus, men were the ones striving for respectability and presented as respectable.

For the non-respectable to become respectable, they need to distance themselves from the unrespectable position and emphasize—and even exaggerate—respectable agency. Skeggs writes that working-class women set themselves in opposition to class-based accounts that present them as poor, deprived, depriving, or dangerous, thus defining themselves in terms of what they are not, as opposed to “who they are.”⁵⁹ For the Roma, disidentification entailed disassociation from racialized stereotypes as “non-workers,” “unreliable,” “lazy,” and “aggressive,” while instead maintaining their diligence, honesty, worthiness, and dignity. Also of importance was to stress inclusion, not exclusion and otherness. These can be regarded as tactics employed by Roma who were subjugated in the public space and othered by powerful discourses. For de Certeau, tactics are by nature defensive, used and seized momentarily within spaces that are both physical and psychological. Hence, interviews as counter-narratives resist “stories of domination,” and Roma stories of successful horse trading seem to be defying “an oppressive identity and attempt to replace it with one that commands respect.”⁶⁰ These performative accounts and tactics are critical for understanding subjugated groups, and they have particular significance for the Roma, marginalized within dominant discourses.

In their nostalgic narration, Roma emphasized respectability, inclusion, and belonging in terms of livelihood, thus defying the persistent view of “Gypsies” as beggars and swindlers rather than legitimate traders. In the context of Roma patriarchal culture, emphasis was placed on men and masculinity in relation to worth and work. Although Roma women’s contributions to the family household were crucial, women’s labor was presented in modest terms (by both men and women), whereas the masculine form of livelihood was underlined, being the one that gave respectability not only to the Roma man but the whole family. Hence, respectability was strongly gendered and related to horse trading. In spatial stories,⁶¹ horse trading was seen as symbolizing male “Gypsyness,” which was something to be continuously performed and embodied. The construction of Roma masculinity often took place in a certain spatial realm, like the marketplace. Masculine respectability was constructed in relation to successful horse trading and social relations with the majority population. Successful trade and its underlying strategies were often narrated with respect to male non-gypsies, such as when Roma men were able through their skills of speech and sometimes appearance (e.g., looking “white”) to sell horses or swap them with whites.

Analysis of Roma livelihoods raises an important ethical question pertaining to notions of agency, subjugation, and power. How does an exploration of economic practices recognize the position of individual Roma communities in the societies they live in, a position that includes racism and poverty, while leaving the possibility for acknowledging, as Brazzabeni et al. so aptly formulate the dilemma, “a self-defining capacity to determine for oneself a posture vis-à-vis the workings of states, markets, money and so on?”⁶² While social deterministic analyses have rightly been criticized for overlooking people’s capacities to shape their own lives, the unproblematized stress on agency has also come under fire for its tendency to individualize action and overstate the range of choices people have at their disposal, something which is particularly problematic when it comes to marginalized social groups.⁶³ I believe that both power (domination, master narratives) and resistance (subjugated knowledge, counter-narratives, tactics) should be addressed without falling back on individualizing accounts of agency. According to de Certeau, stories can be regarded as spaces of resistance, meaning resistance to the narratives of instituted power.⁶⁴ Genealogical readings and counter-narratives open up and acknowledge the lives and livelihoods of marginalized individuals without disregarding the social structures upholding their subordination. James Staples notes that “people embody elements of the social structures that simultaneously oppress and enable them, their actions undertaken in the context of that embodiment.”⁶⁵ The researcher’s and genealogist’s task is to question and deconstruct truths that are taken for granted, to offer alternative understandings, and to analyze excluded knowledges that have been ruled out. The aim is to trace how certain knowledges emerge and are legitimized, while at the same time listening to the voices that have been marginalized. The interviews and stories examined in this chapter can be understood as both counter-narratives and subjugated knowledges that actively resist the master narrative (the épistémè ) and its negative representations of Roma. This becomes apparent in the way Roma informants underline the worth of livelihoods, encounters, and relations with the majority population. I suggest that this agency can be understood as resistance of the collective monolithic identity imposed upon Roma. Herein lies a possibility to alter or even reverse the majority view of Roma.

In conclusion, this chapter has tried to understand, analyze, and interpret economic activities of Finnish Roma at a time when they primarily supported themselves by itinerant trade. Using Roma’s own narratives, I have approached the interviews as “spatial” and “travel” stories (per de Certeau), looking at how Roma recalled their livelihoods in the past. The marketplace (and its trade practices) is constructed as a particular space with different meanings (e.g., economic, social, nostalgic). The market was a pivotal social place in the public sphere, to which Roma had legitimate access and where Roma families could come together and interact amongst themselves. Thus, spatial aspects shaped feelings of belonging and worth. Through memories, emotions, interpretations, and associations that travel across generations, honest livelihoods—but also financial insecurities and dependencies—are disclosed in the narratives. It is obvious that the economic arrangements and strategies of Roma were complex and embedded in local social positions, as well as being historically specific. My intention has been to explore gendered and specialized trading practices, focusing on horse trading (swapping and selling) as a traditional Roma livelihood. In a subversive way, Roma performed respectability by maintaining honest livelihood practices, successful horse trading and good relations with the majority. Respectability was nevertheless strictly gendered, as it was linked to masculinity and to a form of sustenance which had been pivotal and was still important in the early postwar period, that is, after the Second World War. In addition, Roma trading practices demonstrated different meanings of work, informal economies, ethnic relations, performative tactics, and ways of economic strategizing. Although it cannot be denied that the Roma minority largely remained dependent upon help and goodwill from the majority population, this chapter suggests that the economic practices of Finnish Roma did not involve passive adaptation but active responses to wider socio-economic structures.