Cikánská rodina a příbuzenství (review)

Cikánská rodina a příbuzenství (The Gypsy Family and Kinship) is the penultimate production by Marek Jakoubek, recently together with Lenka Budilová, the most prolific of a group of what has been called "heretical" anthropologists based at the University of Plzeň in the Czech Republic (Barša 2005: 4). Their overall project appears to be impatience with - and taking aim at - a series of what are deemed to be naked emperors including 'Romani nationalism', Romani activists and leaders, the Romani studies circle around the late Milena Hübschmannová at Charles University in Prague, multiculturalism, and a row of other bogies. Insofar as Jakoubek and his colleagues are closely involved with Czech social work with Roma and are widely published in mainstream venues, their views carry weight far beyond the halls of academia and are currently establishing and/or retrenching mainstream Czech views on their Romani neighbors.

The publication under review is a collection of essays beginning with an introductory note by the editors and then a documentary essay by Budilová and Jakoubek themselves concerning Romani kinship, drawing on work that appeared previously in English (Budilová and Jakoubek 2005, 2006). Thereafter follow ten essays, most of which are translations of works by a number of leading names in Romani studies appearing at various times since 1964 and presented in most cases for the first time to a Czech audience. The linking theme is kinship, family, marriage, social relations among Gypsies, whom Jakoubek and his colleagues decline to call "Roma" for reasons elaborated at length in the subsequently appearing Gypsies and Ethnicity (Jakoubek 2008) and which are also touched on here.

By way of introduction, the editors contend that there is no Czech tradition of anthropological investigation of kinship of Roma, despite the fact that "this is a field in which the majority of qualified foreign authors regard concerning this group as key" (Budilová and Jakoubek 2007: 12). Following a summary of some strands of kinship theory, the introduction explains that the essays appearing in the present collection "more-or-less proceed from 'classical' anthropological theories of kinship and under the term kinship are understood (explicitly or implicitly) a complex of relationships, statuses, rules and requirements derived from genealogical relations (which are established on the realities of siring and birthing of children)" (Budilová and Jakoubek 2007: 13). Thereafter, several pages are devoted to systematically demolishing an essay by Jana Horvathová, the director of the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno and herself Romani, for her efforts to assert usage of the term "Rom" over "Gypsy".

The next fifty pages of this handsomely designed volume are devoted to "Kinship, Marriage and Matrimonial Patterns: The Gypsy Kinship Network", an essay presenting Budilová and Jakoubek's research into kinship networks among a particular group of Roma in rural eastern Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The primary work of the essay is, on the strength of evidently meticulous documentation of a series of "wider kinship" or "kindreds" (their terminology - as used by Budilová and Jakoubek, "kindred" is not translated from English), to overturn the contention that "Roma" (the authors place the term in quotation marks) are exogenous. Budilová and Jakoubek go particularly to work on several passages from a study by Milena Hübschmannová, whom they refer to sarcastically as a "guru" of Romani studies, for apparent gullibility over her interlocutors' assertions that they take measures to avoid marrying close relatives (Budilová and Jakoubek 2007: 23).

Having established a straw man of denial of endogamy among Roma and apparently interested defenders, the authors detail a series of carefully documented family types apparently arising in the course of their research. As presented, this involves examination of 318 marriages. They appropriately do not distinguish between official and traditional or common law marriages. These 318 marriages they divide into the following categories:

1. 1. Fifty-five marriages involving persons who are unequivocally directly related, "that is, between persons who, at some point in the past had one or...