Egil Asprem: “Magic, Gypsy Stereotyping, and Roma Agency: How European Magical Traditions Shaped a Transnational Minority”

ABSTRACT:

The image of the fortune-telling “gypsy” woman is a well-known cliché, endlessly repeated in art and literature. It has also been central to stereotyping of Europe’s diverse Romani minorities, with destructive consequences. Historically, their association with magic, divination, and “superstitious” practices has served to justify repressive policies of deportation, forced assimilation, even execution of “gypsies”.

Its role in European antigypsyism notwithstanding, I argue that the reputation for magic also afforded a precarious form of agency. One part of this is entrepreneurial. By performing the expected role––and dazzling customers with persuasive displays of occult power––Romani women carved out a niche in the European magical service economy. Moreover, doing so also enabled a form of resistance by temporarily altering relations of power and dependency: through ritual deception and dissimulation, the hyperbolic performance of “enchanted gypsyness” served to expose the prejudice, superstition, and credulity of the otherwise dominant outgroup––while creating narratives of defiance for the ingroup.

The seminar explores these aspects through new evidence of a Nordic Romani tradition known as summipá, a Scandoromani term with the dual meaning of “sorcery” and “deception”. This material––which includes early Romani language samples as well as an artefact that has survived to the present day––constitutes our richest evidence for a tradition of resistance that must have been common to the Northwestern Romani groups (i.e. Sinti, Manouche, Romanichal, Kale, Calé etc.). On a general level, the tradition of summipá offers opportunities to theorize service magic as a contested zone of interaction between dominant and minoritized groups.