TRIBAL IDEOLOGY – THE TRUTH BEHIND THE GYPSIES’ ANCESTRAL LAWS
TRIBAL IDEOLOGY – THE TRUTH BEHIND THE GYPSIES’ ANCESTRAL LAWS

Summary/Abstract: The paper sets out to analyse the gypsy’s representation in literature as a tribal member. For a gypsy, the tribe functions as a social nexus, symbolizing the unity of a race of wanderers who have always roamed the world and lived on the fringes of society. The tribe represents the social family, encompassing small units of separate families linked together by a common past and a shared culture and traditions. Furthermore, the tribal identity reveals the truth of lineage and of racial belonging, linking an individual to a group with whom s/he shares common physical and psychological traits, and also a common set of values. I am discussing here the gipsy image and the image of the enslaved tribe as it is reflected in the Romanian epos Ţiganiada (1875) by Ioan Budai-Deleanu and in the Victorian dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy (1868) by George Eliot. In both works, the gipsy’s tribal identity appears as a cultural construct and as a racial sign, reflecting the non-gipsy’s mentality and also the ideological truth behind the ethnic identity. Due to a long history of oppression and constant subjection to prejudices and also because of ancestral laws and old truths embedded in the gipsy’s traditional heritage, this ethnic group continues to be both a source of fascination (the Romantic perspective) and of distrust and suspicion (the Racialist perspective). And that is why the identity of the gypsy has often been misrepresented, showing the non-gypsy’s negative hetero image and consequently a stereotypical truth about the gypsy race.

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