Between Two Fires

Lemon Alaina Lemon

Description

Since tsarist times, Roma in Russia have been portrayed as both rebellious outlaws and free-spirited songbirds-in each case, as if isolated from society. In Soviet times, Russians continued to harbor these two, only seemingly opposed, views of "Gypsies," exalting their songs on stage but scorning them on the streets as liars and cheats. Alaina Lemon's Between Two Fires examines how Roma themselves have negotiated these dual images in everyday interactions and in stage performances.Lemon's ethnographic study is based on extensive fieldwork in 1990s Russia and focuses on Moscow Romani Theater actors as well as Romani traders and metalworkers. Drawing from interviews with Roma and Russians, observations of performances, and conversations, as well as archives, literary texts, and media, Lemon analyzes the role of theatricality and theatrical tropes in Romani life and the everyday linguistics of social relations and of memory. Historically, the way Romani stage performance has been culturally framed and positioned in Russia has served to typecast Gypsies as "natural" performers, she explains. Thus, while theatrical and musical performance may at times empower Roma, more often it has reinforced and rationalized racial and social stereotypes, excluding them from many Soviet and Russian economic and political arenas. Performance, therefore, defines what it means to be Romani in Russia differently than it does elsewhere, Lemon shows. Considering formal details of language as well as broader cultural and social structures, she also discusses how racial categories relate to post-Soviet economic changes, how gender categories and Euro-Soviet notions of civility are connected, and how ontological distinctions between "stage art" and "real life" contribute to the making of social types. This complex study thus serves as a corrective to romantic views of Roma as detached from political forces.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Ethnic studies
• Cultural studies
• 20th century
• Russia
• History of Europe
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822381327
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

between two fires

Between Two Fires

gypsy performance

and romani memory

frompushkintopostsocialism

A L A I N A L E M O N

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

d u r h a m & 2 0 0 0l o n d o n

∫erssD0002UnivuketyPersi

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$

Typeset in Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

‘‘Roma’’and‘‘Gazhje’’:ShiftingTerms

247

Notes

271

Index

Dialect Di√erences

appendix a

1

appendix b

3

6

8

0

124

‘‘What Is Your Nation?’’ Performing Romani Distinctions

241

RomaandOtherTsyganeintheCommonwealth

The Hidden Nail: Memory, Loyalty, and Models of Revelation

237

TheGypsyStage,Socialism,andAuthenticity

194

Vlax-LovariRomaniGlossary

1

3

Pushkin,The GypsiesRudan,lgiaostalaNepirnmIssai

Acknowledgments

Note on Orthography and Transcripts

Conclusion:AtHomeinRussia

166

appendix c

Bibliography

Roma,Race,andPost-SovietMarkets

1

C O N T E N T S

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56

239

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226

5

2

4

of Independent States

293

7

Introduction

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

I want to express gratitude first to those Roma in Russia who made time for me, namely the Jankeschi family, and to the Saporronji and Rruvoni, to whom I owe hospitality and grateful thanks. I am also beholden to Lev N. Cherenkov, Vladislav Petrovich Demeter, Nadezhda Demeter, and Olga Stepanovna Demeter. I am especially grateful for the guidance of Irena Tarasova and the companionship of her family. The Russian State Human- ities University (rggu) sponsored me as a scholar, and the Moscow Ro- mani Theater generously allowed me access to the auditorium and back- stage. Thanks there go to the Theater’s director, Nikolaj Slichenko. I want to also thank musicians Lena and Oleg Novoselov in Perm, for all manner of help there, and in Moscow, Alena Tsvetkova and Aleksej Uxlovskij. Romologists Ian Hancock and Thomas Acton o√ered invaluable advice and comments at many stages of research and writing. I want to convey my deep gratitude to all the members of my dissertation committee at the Uni- versity of Chicago for originally encouraging me in this project: Sheila Fitz- patrick, Victor Friedman, Paul Friedrich, Michael Silverstein, and finally Sharon Stephens, who is missed greatly. I much appreciate the labors of others at the University of Chicago who read later drafts; they include David Althshuler, Matti Bunzl, Keith Brown, Piya Chatterjee, Lauren Derby, Kriszti Fehervary, Susan Gal, Anne Lorimer, Dale Pesmen, Cather- ine O’Neil, Stephanie Platz, Katherine Trumpener, and Miklós Vörös. Enormous thanks to all those who read chapters or papers: Marjorie Balzer, Richard Handler, Caroline Humphrey, Valdemar Kalinin, Martha Lamp- land, Maria Montoya, Gloria Goodwin Raheja, Peter Rutland, Daniel Se- gal, Michael Stewart, and Bonnie Urcioli. I am also indebted to commenta- tors at conferences: Judith Irvine, Elizabeth Povinelli, Alfred Rieber, and again Martha Lampland and Dan Segal. The participants of the 1995 Social Science Research Council (ssrc) Summer Workshop in Soviet Studies gave the work rigorous attention, and I thank most particularly Barbara Anderson, Elena Ivanova, Michael Kennedy, and Yuri Slezkine. I am grate- ful to the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan, especially Jane Burbank, William Rosenberg, and Katherine Ver- dery. Warm thanks go to participants in the Linguistic Anthropology lab at

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Acknowledgments

the University of Michigan, especially Lisa Lane and Bruce Mannheim, and to students in the University of Michigan Anthropology Department, in particular Helen Faller and Morgan Liu, who read drafts. For pressing me to frame this work in a way that can communicate across disciplines, I am obliged to the Michigan Society of Fellows, especially Paul Anderson, Jochen Hellbeck, Barbara Ryan, Adam Smith, Michael Szalay, and James Boyd White. Finally, I am most warmly beholden to Midori Nakamura, who codirected and coproduced our documentaryT’an Baxtale.And im- mense thanks go to Maria Lemon and Lee Lemon, for reading drafts but mainly for many other things. The work leading up to field research for this project was supported by a graduate training fellowship from the Joint Committee on Soviet Studies of the Social Science Research Council (funded by the Soviet and East Euro- pean Research and Training Act of 1983, title VIII). Fieldwork was sup- ported by both long-term and short-term grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board (irex), with funds provided by the Na- tional Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Information Agency, and the U.S. Department of State, which administers the Russian, Eurasian, and East European Research Program (title VIII), and a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Writing in the dissertation stage was sponsored by the Joint Committee on Social Sciences of thessrc, and at the manuscript stage by the Michigan Society of Fellows. I thank all of these organizations for their financial support. Part of chapter 4 was previously published in a di√erent form as ‘‘Hot Blood and Black Pearls: Society, Socialism, and Authenticity at the Moscow Romani Theatre,’’ inTheatre Journal(Johns Hopkins University Press) 48, no. 3 (December 1996): 479–94. All photographs were taken by the au- thor, unless otherwise indicated in the caption line. All persons who wished to be publicly known through this publication are named in the text as they prefer to be called. Others remain anonymous or appear under changed names.

N O T E O N O R T H O G R A P H Y A N D T R A N S C R I P T S

Because of the need to transliterate both Russian and Romani with the least amount of confusion, transliteration follows the guidelines of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (aatseel), except for conventional spellings, such as ‘‘Maxim Gorky,’’ and bibliographic entries, which reproduce Library of Congress entries if they exist. Other exceptions include (in Romani only) an H following the voice- less stops K, T, or P, to mark aspiration; (in both Russian and Romani) an H after Z, S, or C, which stands in for a hachek diacritic [ ˇ ] to indicate strident and velarized fricatives or a√ricatives; an ‘‘Hj’’ after these same letters stands in for a [ ´ ] to mark mellow palatalization of consonants (fol- lowing Russian orthography as applied to written Romani). Some dialects of Vlax-Romani (such as Kelderari) deploy variant pronunciations of rolled and uvularr(marked respectively by ‘‘r’’ and ‘‘rr’’), and of stop and fricative g(marked by ‘‘g’’ and ‘‘gg’’). These variations are marked in transcripts, but not in already conventionalized spellings (‘‘Roma’’) since not all dialects in Russia (such as Lovari and Xeladytka) would deploy them. In transcripts containing both transliterated Russian and Romani, roman typeface indicates the matrix language (speakers’ ‘‘original’’ choice of lan- guage for the situation), italics the language code-switched into. Tran- scripts and translations from both tape and video as well as from dialogue reproduced from field notes appear throughout. These are distinguished from each other by parenthetical remarks, such as ‘‘audiotape interview,’’ etc. Not all dialogue gives the original Russian or Romani: excerpts that illustrate code-switching between Romani and Russian, or that include special poetic or performative speech, give original Romani and Russian transcripts as line-by-line translation. A double slash (//) in some dia- logues signifies a point where the speaker is interrupted or resumes speak- ing. The author is responsible for all translations, with special thanks to Ian Hancock and Victor Friedman.

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