La stirpe di Cus: Costruzioni e storie di un' alterità [The race of Cus: Constructions and histories of otherness] (review)

With regard to knowledge of the world of the Rom, few authors today can boast the competence of the Italian anthropologist Leonardo Piasere, who, beginning with his ethnographic training, has over time extended his gaze into complementary fields including history, literature and linguistics. The volume under review is a demonstration of this wide range of interests and expertise. It adopts a strong anthropological slant, while at the same time it is informed by an interdisciplinary approach. Published as part of a series on Gypsy studies edited by Piasere, Romanes, the volume is structured around nine chapters which correspond to nine essays, articles and contributions produced by the author between 1986 and 2010. It thus represents a collection of Piasere's work over a long period of time. As in an earlier volume (Piasere 2006), it brings together studies that have not hitherto been easily available, making them accessible to a wider public, and it also contains an updated bibliography. The richness and complexity of the contributions make them worthy of individual analysis but, for reasons of brevity, this review will focus only on some chapters chosen as being the most illustrative.

It is not by chance that the title of this new volume evokes that of the famous book by Bronislaw Geremek, The Race of Cain (1988). The Polish historian, through an analysis of literary texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, demonstrated how European society of the ancien régime stigmatized the condition of vagabonds and of the poor by identifying such groups with the emblematic biblical deviant Cain. Piasere delves further into the complex game by which contemporary scholars reconstructed the origins of the Gypsy populations in Europe - in the various names assigned to them (e.g. zingari, cingari, cingani, egiziani); he shows that their supposed biblical descent was not an end in itself but followed a wider agenda which, at the time, was applied to all non-European nations, in particular those of the New World (Gliozzi 1977). As Piasere points out, the attempt to hierarchically classify groups and individuals who were external to the Christian world or were reckoned to be so, had serious consequences given that a biblical affiliation could evoke associations of the group with either freedom or slavery. In the chapter that gives its title to the volume, Piasere identifies in the figure of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, the German alchemist, astrologer and esoteric philosopher of the sixteenth century, the principal author of the theory of the descent of the so-called cingani from the race of Cus, son of Cam. For having ridiculed his father, Noah, Cam and, by extension, his descendents, were compelled to wander the earth. Piasere demonstrates that this punishment was rather a prerogative of the descendents of Cain, while the curse that applied specifically to the descendents of Cam and Cus was their enslavement by others.

Agrippa was also one of the first scholars who, using and compiling different sources, identified the continent of Africa (and not Asia) as the true homeland of those he called cingani and, in fact, said that they came ex regione inter Aegymptum et Aethiopiam. The classification used by the German philosopher in the early 1500s is in line with that of contemporary elite scholars and was used in attempts to expel and enslave the Gypsy population who had been charged with apostasy and was considered to originate from outside Christian Europe. However, as Piasere shows, not everybody shared this view. At the end of the 1500s, using the same material offered by the biblical tradition, Bonaventura Vulcanius and Joseph Giustus Scaliger, representatives of the prestigious Dutch University of Leiden and close to Calvinist circles, contradicted the arguments adopted by writers of the Catholic cultural environment. For example, Vulcanius labels the Nubiani inferioris Aegypti partibus (Piasere 2006: 28), who come...