Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt

Alexandra Parrs

Description

A sociological study of Gypsies in modern-day Cairo and Alexandria
Little is known about Egypt's Gypsies, called Dom by scholars, but variously referred to by Egyptians as Ghagar, Nawar, Halebi or Hanagra, depending on their location. Moreover, most Egyptians are oblivious to the fact that there are today large numbers of Gypsies dispersed from the outskirts of villages in Upper Egypt to impoverished neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria.
In Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt sociologist Alexandra Parrs draws on two years of fieldwork to explore how Dom identities are constructed, negotiated, and contested in the specifically Egyptian national context. With an eye to the pitfalls and evolution of scholarly work on the vastly more studied European Roma, she traces the scattered representations of Egyptian Dom, from accounts of them by nineteenth-century European Orientalists to their portrayal in Egyptian cinema as belly dancers in the 1950s and beggars and thieves more recently. She explores the boundaries-religious, cultural, racial, linguistic-between Dom and non-Dom Egyptians and examines the ways in which the Dom position themselves within the limitations of media discourses about them and in turn differentiate themselves from the dominant population. This interplay of attitudes, argues Parrs, sheds light on the values and markers of belonging of the majority population and the paradigms of nation-state formation at the governmental level.
Based on extensive interviews with government workers and ordinary individuals in routine contact with the Dom, as well with Dom engaged in a variety of trades in Cairo and Alexandria, Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt is about the search for the fragments of identity of the Egyptian Dom.

Sujets

• Minority Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617978487
• Langue: English

Extrait

This electronic edition published in 2017 by The American University in Cairo Press 113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt 420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018 www.aucpress.com
Copyright © 2017 by Alexandra Parrs
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 977 416 830 7 eISBN 978 1 61797 848 7
Version 1
Contents
Introduction
The Paradigm of Diasporic Identity
Essentialization
Literature on Middle Eastern Gypsies
Official Invisibility
Rural and Urban Dom
Methodology
Naming of the Group
Outline of the Book
1 The Eternal Quest for Roots
Language and Roots
Orientalists’ Perceptions of Gypsies in the ‘Orient’
Impact of Orientalists in the Construction of Eastern Gypsies
Alternative Narratives and Myths of Origin
Ethnogenesis by Outsiders
2 From Belly Dancers to Thieves
Ghawazi and Orientalists
Current Views
Cinematic Depiction
Toward the Impossible Union
Muhammad Ali, the Baladi, and the Construction of Modernity
Homogenization, the National, and the Foreigner
Female Representations
Depicting the Other
3 Uncrossable Boundaries?
Religious Boundaries
Cultural Boundaries
‘Racial’ Boundaries
Linguistic Boundaries
Spatial Boundaries
Occupational Boundaries
Building Rigid Boundaries
4 Identity Negotiation: Ignoring, Passing, Changing, and Exchanging
Gypsies and Their ‘Origins’
Denial of Identity
Group Divisions and Occupations
Overemphasis and Underemphasis of Identity
Identity Management in Social Interactions
Fluidity
5 Underground World: Crime in the Blood and Secret Language
Media Discourse
Conflictual Opposites, Sensationalism, and Blaming the Victim
They Can Only Be Criminal: Rigid Boundaries and Confrontation of Perceptions
Fluid Boundaries: The ‘Saved’ Ghagar
Begging Skills
The Language of Crime
Sensuality in Crime?
6 Matriarchy and Bride Price: Ghagar Traditions?
“What Are Your Traditions?”
Endogamy
Divorce and Separation
Bride Price, Polygyny, and Early Marriage
Female Circumcision and Sexuality
Matriarchal Features and ‘Kin Contract’
7 Conclusions: The Fragmented Construction of Egyptian Gypsies
Beyond Western Mimicry
Cultural Performance and Social Failure
What Will Happen Next?
National Identity and Gypsies
Umm Khalas: Where Are You?
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
I n a busy street of central Cairo, I was once approached by a woman dressed in a long black abaya selling packs of paper tissues. She had tresses of very blond hair coming out of her dirty headscarf, and she was looking intense and desperate. The Egyptian friend I was with gently pulled me away from the woman: “Be careful, she is a Ghagar. She is a thief.” Later, I learned that Ghagar are considered a tribe of Middle Eastern Gypsies. Their women like to dye their hair yellow. Most of them are supposed to be beggars or thieves. They are fortune-tellers or dancers or prostitutes. It is better to avoid them, as they will not bring good fortune to anyone, and they will ask for extravagant amounts of money to rid you of the evil eye.
So much of this first encounter and the discussions that followed illustrate the perceptions and misconceptions associated with Gypsies in general, and Egyptian Ghagar more specifically. Interestingly, Ghagar seem to be ascribed an alienating alterity—as if they were others by essence while at the same time being denied any kind of history or even the right to own a precise identity. They may be that dangerous other , from another tribe, or from another social class (a deep underclass). As the ethnomusicologist Kevin Holmes cynically noted about Egyptian Ghagar: “No one really knows where they are from, and no one really cares.” Somehow, this ignorance cruelly reminds one of the ignorance of medieval Europeans who attributed Egyptian roots to the ‘Gypsies,’ dark foreigners coming from some place in the Orient—scary and fascinating others .
Middle Eastern Gypsies are called the Dom, as a mirror name to the European Roma and the Armenian Lom, but that name is mostly used by scholars and rarely by Egyptians or by members of the Dom communities themselves. They are also called Ghagar, Nawar, or Halebi in Upper Egypt. In urban centers, they are called Hanagra when referring specifically to members of the community who commit crimes. The terms all have negative connotations in Arabic.
Many stories circulate about the Egyptian Ghagar, which is the term I will mostly use as it is the most widely acknowledged one in Egypt, particularly in the urban centers of Cairo and Alexandria. There are stories of Ghagar training their monkeys to steal from unsuspecting Egyptians or to kidnap Egyptian children, as well as stories about Ghagar women traveling to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia to rob pilgrims, or of Ghagar disrupting public order during mulid s, the popular saint festivals in Egypt. There are also stories about their origins: Ghagar may have descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel, or perhaps they were slaves who arrived with Roman legions more than two thousand years ago and then stayed in Egypt to form a lower class, akin to a caste. They may also have been the thieves who stole some of the large nails used to crucify Jesus Christ: according to some narratives, this brought them good luck because they alleviated his suffering; according to others, it brought them bad luck and turned them into eternal, rejected wanderers. There is a plethora of stories, legends, stereotypes, and very little else. The Ghagar, the ‘Egyptian Gypsies,’ seem largely invisible in academia, forgotten in public policy, and perhaps only existing as parcels in popular imagination. Or are they? My initial goal in starting this research was to answer that question and to explore who the Ghagar are and why they seem, at least superficially, so strikingly socially absent in Egypt.
The Paradigm of Diasporic Identity
It is a conspicuous fact that talking about Gypsies or Gypsiness is in itself controversial, as the group(s) bears many origins and possesses flexible boundaries and subclassifications. Establishing a framework of analysis is also a complex task. Scholars have sometimes tried to use the paradigm of ‘diaspora’ to show both that Gypsies actually do not constitute a diaspora in the classical sense of the term and also that some more constructivist dimensions of the concept of diaspora can nonetheless be used for analytical purposes (Toninato 2009; Renard, Manus, and Fellman 2009; Willems and Lucassen 2000). The primordialist definition of diaspora given by William Safran (1991, 1999) attributes to diasporas a few essential traits: they are dispersed groups that suffered from a traumatic departure, have constituted collective memories that serve as an anchor for the group identity, create strong boundaries that prevent their full integration into the host society, rely on a myth of return to the (often-idealized) homeland, and engage in certain political actions such as those of long-distance nationalists (as defined by Benedict Anderson [2011]). While some of these attributes fit Gypsies—departure from a homeland, dispersion among many other nations, and the creation and maintenance of boundaries between Gypsies and outsiders—the groups also lack some of those crucial features, and it would be dangerous and unproductive to try to fit them into a model that their very existence seems to negate. For instance, the notion of trauma in the departure from a homeland, which could be a basis for diasporic identity, may be absent. The departure may not have been brusque but progressive, made up of successive waves and motivated by a variety of elements such as war, poverty, entertainment, and religion, not necessarily persecution or violence.
Secondly, the ‘homeland’ is traditionally not a core part of Gypsy/Romani identity. Linguistic research may point toward India as a possible country of origin—nearly a millennium ago—of at least part of the contemporary Gypsy population. But that does not mean that all the Gypsies of this world live in awareness of a homeland from which they once moved or were dispelled and suffer all the traumatic consequences: “There is no collective, cherished memory, no developed or documented mythologization of an ancestral home to which they hope to return one day” (Willems and Lucassen 2000, 268). The homeland is not a clear component of Gypsy/Romani identity itself, either. While differences are not anchored in a precise nation-state which would contribute to fostering diasporic practices in their most traditional definitions, their perceived foreignness still anchors Gypsy groups in an ‘elsewhere’ (which is not in the land where they live), and the identified Indian origins serve to unify the group and give substance to its otherness, more than they legitimately create a true Indian origin. The concept of collective memory is not associated with a homeland, even if some cultural traits distinguish members of the group from the cultural majority of the countries where they live—for instance, the use of the Romani language and to a lesser extent the Domari language, or some essentialized cultural characteristics.
The theories of a migration out of India were mostly established by non-Gypsy linguists who attempted to connect Gypsies to a specific point of departure in order to make sense of t