I recently published a post about the Hungarian Roma. To recap, Roma, also known as gypsies, are the largest ethnic majority in Europe without its own country, most prevalent in Eastern Europe.
Except, as I will claim by the end of this post, the best way to think about them is not as an ethnic minority at all. Gypsies are best understood as an “ethnicized”, partially endogamous subculture, which is probably how all groups of people who specialize in niche social roles came to be.
In my previous post, I highlighted something I hope you find mind-blowing: even though “Roma/gypsy” is literally one of the ethnic categories you can tick in Hungary’s decennial censuses, it’s not clear how many gypsies there are in the country. This is because there is an understanding that there are people who are Roma because they follow a stereotypical “gypsy” way of life which qualities them as members of this group even though they don’t openly identify with it. I sardonically referred to these people as “phantom gypsies”. While for me this is not unlike somebody on 4chan slurring rival trolls from all countries east and south to his own country as a “gypsy”, the assumption that being a gypsy is ultimately about living a filthy, destitute lifestyle it is not an extreme, “based” or right-wing view. It is openly adopted by many sociologists. If anything, it has a slight left-wing activist flavor to it, like how sexual minority activists try to blow up the numbers of the “LGBTQ” by binning all kinds of weirdos together with bona fide homosexuals. A good liberal supports minorities, and the bigger the minority, the better the cause.
In that post, I looked at Youth Research, a very special dataset of 8000 Hungarians interviewed in their homes. They reported if they identified as Roma, and the interviewer also noted his judgement of the same fact. I found that interviewers are not good at figuring out who is Roma: they see many more gypsies than there are self-reports of Roma identity, but they also make false negative errors. Being a gypsy or falsely being seen as one depends on very similar factors, which mostly have to do with speaking languages gypsies speak, having accepting attitudes to the Roma who are generally not liked very much by Hungarians, but also with low socioeconomic status and a fast life history characterized by reproducing early and a lot. My post was based on the 2020 wave of Youth Research: now, let’s look at the 2016 wave, also with 8000 participants.
These are the variables most strongly associated with self-reporting Roma identity (variable names are machine translated so sorry for any screw-ups):
These are almost literally all variables that have to do with 1) poor SES (houses rated as dark and run-down by interviewers) or 2) fast life history (dropping out of school early, marrying and having kids early, generally living together with many people, especially children).
What about false positives – being seen as a gypsy by interviewers, even though you said you weren’t one?
Overall, pretty similar variables pop up. Interviewers seem to pay more attention to labor market outcomes: a history of unemployment and low income. Other than that, it’s mostly low SES and a fast life history with young people having many kids again.
How about false negatives – say that you are a gypsy but the interviewer having a different opinion?
These are, just like in the 2020 wave, completely different variables. Interviewers look for something else than the absence of typical Roma traits. It’s hard to classify many of the variables that pop up here, but if I’d have to do it, I’d say that Roma who were stripped of this identity in the eyes of their interviewers have more of a modern middle-class way of thinking, such as defining their identity based on attachment to pop culture.
This scatterplot confirms my intuitions:
Just like in my previous post, what we see here is the similarity of which variables are associated with 1) self-reporting Roma identity (SRep), 2) a false positive Roma identity (FPos, meaning that you didn’t say you were a gypsy but the interviewer did), 3) a false negative Roma identity (FNeg, meaning that you said you were Roma but your interviewer did not. The correlation between the first two is 0.71, which basically means that interviewers give false positive IDs to very “gypsy-like” people (those whose psychosocial characteristics are similar to those who also self-report Roma identity). The similarity with false negatives is very slight: as I said, interviewers mostly look for something more than just the absence of typical gypsy characteristics when they misidentify a Roma.
You can find the full list of variables and effect sizes here. Some methodological details are in my original post.
These analyses show just how particular a minority the Roma are. They come from the Indian subcontinent, they have clear anthropological and genetic characteristics, and some of them even speak a separate language, so they are usually considered an ethnic minority. However, in the eyes of others they are mainly identified based on a certain lifestyle. Ethnic minorities may, on average, have different lifestyles, but this is usually not how we identify them. Minorities which are defined mostly based on their lifestyle are usually religious minorities (such as the Amish or Orthodox Jews), or subcultures (such as punks or metalheads).
I think gypsies are between the two and I want to use a thought experiment involving the Juggalos to illustrate what I mean.
If you didn’t know (and you absolutely should), Juggalos are fans of the horrorcore band Insane Clown Posse. I’m positively fascinated by them. ICP’s shtick is that they are “serial killer clowns”, basically the hillbilly characters from Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses in clown paint, and their fans adopt a similar image.
Juggalos are in many ways similar to a nascent ethno-religious group, like Orthodox Jews or early Christians. I’m only half joking here. Juggalos have many of the things that defines such a group: traditional garb (clown paint), dietary preferences (the soft drink Faygo), festivals (the Gathering of the Juggalos, a music festival involving ICP and associated bands) and even an arguable religion in which The Great Milenko, a supernatural magician stands in for God and true believers get to party with the others forever in Shangri-La, the Juggalo heaven. I’m assuming Juggalos are not fully endogamous (this is why half of this is a joke after all), but there are Juggalo weddings and there has been at least one (very tragic) Juggalo funeral. The only thing Juggalos lack is a traditional occupation, although looking at pictures of them I’m wondering if collecting welfare can be characterized as one.
Imagine if Juggalos became more endogamous, for example, because they took this serial killer clown stuff a little more seriously so no town of normal people would welcome Juggalos and nobody outside of the group wanted to marry a Juggalo! Shortly, you’d have a generation of children who grew up in an exclusively Juggalo culture, making their way in life by whatever means a Juggalo can. I think this is basically how the Travelers, Ireland’s own, genetically unrelated gypsies came to be, split off a few hundred years ago from the main population to form their own endogamous subculture-nation.
Now, imagine: what if the Juggalos were so disliked that they were collectively exiled from the US to Liberia? Virtually all Juggalos are White and there are not really any other White people in Liberia, so Juggalos would become more than just an endogamous subculture: they would become an ethnic minority. But it would be an ethnic minority without much social stratification: every White person in Liberia would be a Faygo-drinking, clown paint wearing redneck. Eventually, some ethnic Liberians would be drawn to these Faygo-scented clown ways, so there would be intermarriage and eventually Juggalos who could pass as ethnic Liberians. They would probably also mostly adopt Liberian English, while retaining some Juggalo or standard American lingo. In a few hundred years, even though everybody would recognize a Juggalo if they saw one, Liberian politicians and sociologists would debate who is a Juggalo and what kind of a social group Juggalos even are. Are they an ethnic minority? There would be anthropological and genetic markers associated with being a Juggalo (this would also arise on its own given enough endogamy if they were not migrants), and there would be a Juggalo patois, even if not a full-blown language. But there would be no real Juggalo nation: no Juggalo poets, scientists or political activists, no separatist movement and no history of statehood. Juggalo identity wouldn’t mean much once somebody stopped listening to ICP, drinking Faygo and started speaking coherent English. Are they a subculture? This would feel derogatory, and most people living like Juggalos would be born into this life, not choosing it. To complicate things, many Juggalos would not own this identifier, sociologists would agree that there are many more pale-looking people wearing clown paint than the 1% who admit it in a census, and some Liberians and Juggalos would feel that if a Juggalo wears a suit and only listens to classical music he is no longer a Juggalo at all.
I think this is pretty much where we are with gypsies. Gypsies came from a distant land and were mostly endogamous, so they have a typical anthropological and genetic profile. But, unlike in case of proper ethnic minorities in Hungary, it was not a nation that migrated, only members of a subculture. There are German peasants, German merchants, German thieves and German professors in Hungary (or at least there were before the expulsion of the Germans after WW2), but Roma identity is hard to define outside of the stereotypical way of life that characterizes most members of this community. I think the best way to understand gypsies is as an “ethnicized” or “racialized” subculture: somewhere between a subculture and a racial minority, a group of people who are mainly distinct because of their way of life like a subculture, but who – almost by accident – also have very specific anthropological-genetic characteristics, like a racial minority.