HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS AMONG THE ROMA
HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS AMONG THE ROMA

Summary/Abstract: We cannot begin to understand Roma culture without first knowing something of the history of Roma communities. Much of this history, however, is invisible, as much of Roma culture is a non-written culture. A leading historian once asked me why the Roma, unlike other European peoples, have little or no historical consciousness. “Because”, I told him, “they have an oral culture in which memory and the approach to time and space take a different shape, and this determines inter alia the conception of history among people of the culture in question.” I was thinking, in the meantime, that the question itself illustrated how once again an erudite expert raised and socialised in a written culture is surprised by the existence of a perception of time and a form of collective memory different from that of his cultural background. In written cultures, remembrance is the apperception of the past. As part of the experienced events, actions are denoted as text and attached to dates, becoming then further points of orientation. This is how history is born.

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