Status Updates From All Change!: Romani Studies...

The Afterword and his talk of why he is against Roma unification and what they should rather focus on was a bit of a saving grace for this book.

Gosh this guy is the worst of them all here. If this guy hadn't turned out to have "gypsy" ancestry he would have latched on to something else to adress his alleged always felt feeling of estrangement which he seems to assign to his ancestry. Which is pretty racist if you ask me. You can feel estrangement for all sorts of reasons over time. And you can modify your memory, very easily.

I know that persecution exists, but this here sounds as if they took it as their identity.

Ok, now I am confused, how did he get from diapsora to notions of gypsy purity? That is odd.

Oh, so this is the younger of the Le Bas man. Oh boy, this guy and other English Romani like him will be so dissappointed when they realize that India will never welcome them. In fact, if you ask me, this guy dislikes being from England and is blind to the danger a movement like Zionism can bring; a strengthening of antigypsiism, not safety from it, as such a movement needs racism to thrive.

Oh great, this was exactly what I feared I would get to hear from this Le Bas guy the moment he mentioned his interest in Jewish history. He only mentioned the Roman power and so suggests that prior to 70 AD most Jews lived in Judea, when in fact, most lived outside of it and had done so for a very long time. Even the BBC show Rome already mentioned Jews in Rome and that one played when Julius Cesar was alive.

I have the suspicion that this author who allegedly wants to write about the history of Roma in Russia is more concerned with finding some mythic romani homeland. I don't think he could take it if it turns out that there is none, respectively that there is a homeland, the one he lives in.

So the early soviet state recognised Roma as a national Minority with the right to be educated in their native language.

Wy hshould Roma accept India as their motherland? Their "ethnic" identity did not form there. It was formed in Europe and the Byzantine Empire.

I think he is a tad naive about the Black Panthers.

Ok, this has gotten a bit better now an he talks mainly about his dislike of other defining his "gypsy identity" and so on, but this still feels like way too much talk, way more than is necessary.

Ok, this has gotten a bit better now an he talks mainly about his dislike of other defining his "gypsy identity" and so on, but this still feels like way too much talk, way more than is necessary.

Even though I do agree with this author about the nature of ever changing identity and reasoning, considering that he gave an example were a man straight up had given him two different names and two different live and family stores, I do wonder whether the author isn't just excusing lying and spreading falsehoods.

Ignoring that he, unlike Hancock, considers Rom, Dom and Lomlar the same, it is ironically to read this and think of how Erdogan claimed the superiority of Turkey by claiming that they don't discriminate against Roma.

Oh great, he ends in full blown victim and we must defend ourselves against "them" mode. You can see this by the way he talks but also in the way that he mentions only anecdotes when it comes to non-Romani speaking for Romani and no data and no examples of Romani emancipation... which is odd, since he mentioned the Sinti, who in 2010 already had several german-wide organizations.

Now Hancock is in full blown victim and double standard mode. Not only does he ignore that several Romani ethnicities also find the Vlax Romani custom of arranged early-teen marriage reprehensible, he downright ignores the criticism of the practice in India and against that in prior European royal marriages. In each cases the criticism clearly exists but he claims that only Romani are treated as such.

Sometimes Hancock can be really confusing. I remember him speaking of a single Romani identity but here he straight up says that the population has been a composite from the start and was back than occupationally rather than ethnically, that the basic identity and language was acquired in the Byzantine Empire, and the migration into Europe was by several waves with no true shared identity.

I wonder whether there is any connection with this possibly military connection of some of the ancestors of the Romani and the later often military occupation of Sinti in the german speaking area.

Hancock's writings can be annoying on social issues but his chapter on language and history and origin of the Romani are so far interesting.

What is it with Hancock and not acknowledging his European ancestry? Has the guy ever looked into a mirror? No way are all of his ancestors from "India."