I am literally referring Romani, that's the group we have in Poland here, at least they are the vast majority of "those guys" (to avoid using that term we're not allowed to use since WW2) in this country and specifically the ones whose integration our government is trying to achieve (I mean, they DID know that language to print those schoolbooks in and what kind of school to found). I know that over the centuries they have split into dozens of different groups but I think that when I'm talking about Romani I'm allowed to just refer to them as Romani.

From Paola Tininato's Romani Writing: Literacy, Literature and Identity Politics:
"In the Liber vagatorum, Martin Luther warned the German population against the tricks of such "false beggars". It was in this category that public authorities placed the Gypsies, accusing them of turning mendicity from a state of real need into "a sort of free art" with its own secret language, the beggars' cant (Luther 1528)."

And that stereotype has appeared consistently in literature over the centuries. Now, while I'm aware that historical sources like those have to be read with care and it is too easy to find preposterous claims there it would be quite ballsy to deny a claim about a certain group from the 16th century as baseless propaganda while descendants of said group, who largely remain in closed societies which undoubtedly continue many ancient traditions, have been confirmed to behave in a similar manner as the one described there.

Oh really. And they literally do have castes and they are widely attributed to their scientifically proven Indian origins. And please note that I did not say that Romani originate from an Indian caste of beggars and I don't really know when that mendicity thing started. But clearly it is something they have been associated with at least since the 16th century.

I have provided two of those above and disproved two of your claims with them. You should be more careful using the expression "check your facts" and lecturing others on using sources.

Look, certain ethnic groups have certain traditions and habits. It's often hard to discern stereotypes from actual patterns but the latter do exist. And that such a cultural pattern has a generally negative connotation does not mean that whoever is acknowledging said pattern is judging the group, persecuting the people just by mentioning those things. You need to acknowledge and be able to mention these problematic cultural phenomena if you wish to deal with such social problems. Starting with the claim that no ethnic group has any baggage and defending that stance with every fiber of your body downright denies you the ability to understand serious problems and do anything about them.

Well, I believe that if you haven't ever seen begging Romani children you haven't seen too much of the Romani at all and may have a hard time accepting some uncanny truths.

Again, I don't.

The main problem with the rom category, is that it serves to describe as one blob a multitude of different societies and cultures, and you illustrate very well the confusion that it allows. You claim to designate only a specific romanian group (romani ? that is the collective language, spoken in majority, that is supposed to link these groups), and yet you jump to a german lutherian citation about gypsies, with zero context, simply postulating identity. First of all, the politics of mendicity and mobility in the middle ages were in a huge crisis as the legitimacy of charity was being strongly redefined through geographic boundaries. There was an explosion of edicts and discourses narrowing the "okay to give to" versus "okay to slaughter" categories of beggars, and non-locals were designated as the big no-no, unholy on all levels. This meant people coming from other regions, and of course, all nomads. Should a beggar be a gypsy, of course he'd be on the "bad beggars" list. He wouldn't be alone. But that's not even the main point. The point is that you cannot hop from middle ages gypsies to romanian rroms and infer cultural identity (the ongoing tradition of mendicity), because not only you hop from one geographical era to another (from german gypsies to your i-only-talk-about-local-romani), but you also hop above centuries (no logical inference of european traditions of witch burning ?).

This shortcut jump is possible because you use "rom" as some intemporal homogeneous abstract entity. Negating all it means, in favor of one stereotype which is far from reality : the nomad beggar. And this is what skips the fact that 95% of rroms are sedentary. And it skips the fact that most of them rely on other means of subsistance than mendicity. ecause most of the people who belong to the 'rrom' category do not correspond to the very stereotype that the word evokes to the general public.

As for the caste thing, I assume that you looked for it the same way you looked for the Luther quote - a quick google to a sentence with no context (a trocated footnote down the googlebooks page of a book you never opened), and possibly stumbled upon the touristic tzigana site that shoehorns indian castes into rrom socioculture (diversity doesn't mean castes) for the very same reason you attached that middle age quote : random cultural inferences sound super awesome.

But what matters, and what you should rather turn your attention to, are contemporary ethnographies of 'rrom' groups. That is, accounts of actual long-term participant observations, describing from within the actual "contents" of rrom everyday life, and the actual life trajectories of real individuals and families. Or else, you stay at the exact same levels as contemporary greeks who only describe themselves, their country and their societies, through references to ancient greece and byzatium (studying ancient greece will tell you absolutely nothing of the current greek society, no matter how many romantic cultural inferences one would like to draw). Either that, or you stay at the outside level, projecting various stereotypes and popular discourses on whatever glimpse of 'romani' society you see (dirtectly or through news).

As for child beggars, no, they are very rare in Switzerland and possibly west Europe, even though they are more frequent to the East (in Greece for instance), which doesn't meant they are victims of exploitation (nearby gypsies camps, squads of kids enthousiastically play "get coins from the tourists", and in many other contexts they are simply accompanying their parents - though you can raise the issue of obligatory schooling and its costs/benefits). The only kid I've seen in Switzerland was accompanying his brother, pretending to be mute in a typical (but minoritary) NGO fund-raising scam.

You can relate mendicity as one traditional venue for certain subgroups (for instance the largely minoritary nomadic ones). It is also a survival strategy for a certain category of jobless people from post-communist east europa. But attaching mendicity as a core cultural feature of the abusively blurry "rom" category does not describe anything else than an enduring, reductive and essentialist stereotype. Even in Romania, where the agricultural Gabori used to work as blacksmiths, tinkers, day labourers, workers on building sites, etc.

And there are actually two issues with that. First, in political discourses, mendicity gets often assimilated to rrom identity, regardless of local beggars. This merges the "illegitimately foreign" stigma with the "pauper" stigma, and to further stigmatize poverty. The other issue is that, even without that, mendicity itself is declared illegitimate and immoral. That is an underlying conception that further fuels anti-rom sentiment (dirty beggars, all of them), in addition to make things even harder for fragilized people. This has its sources on other cultural elements (the life-earn-through-"real"-work ethics, the scandal of visible misery as better hidden symptom of society's failure, the breaching of the sacrosanct street indifference that should allow us to ignore each others outside, etc), but it is still an arbitrary judgement that complicates the stakes of rrom-related discussions and policies. And it has been largely illustrated in this thread.

Maybe a certain distanciation from this judgement on mendicity would be as important as an actual assessment of "what it means to be rrom" (in practice, and for whom) nowadays. Because both issues seem to strongly enter in resonnance...

Sigh, I used a random quote to disprove a very specific point of yours, one of many I could have chosen but I picked this one because it was about a comparably early source from a comparably central region and from a notable person everyone knows and with special mention of the professionalism of said mendicity. And who the fuck cares that I didn't read the particular book I quoted from? Your point was that Romani haven't been associated with mendicity before the 1970's at all which was ridiculously utter bullshit and it took me literally seconds to disprove that. And I could easily go further and choose sources from many regions over many centuries and demonstrate that the mendicity is a consistent pattern among Romani in general, at least up to a certain point. And by "general" I don't mean among absolutely all of them, just that it's very widespread.

Then you are accusing me of not distinguishing them. Look, first off, again, there's no better term. I could specify the guys we have here as Polish Romani but I'm talking about more than them, still not all of them including all subgroups in the entire World. Secondly the differences between the subgroups evolved over centuries. Something reported repeatedly by different sources as early as the mendicity, some sources dating back to the 15h century, means that this particular feature was present in the ancestors of probably all modern Romani, no matter which group. It's not like they suddenly POOF separated in the 15th century and everyone has been going their entirely own ways ever since, no features in common. And that the Sinti in Italy practice similar things as the Polish Romani today further confirms that not only the professional mendicity is very widespread but sadly even the connected child abuse (not saying that the latter is traditional, just that it's a result of the former). And as I said, the article I researched for was many years ago, back in 2009 actually, now I see that in 2010 the same professional begging + child abuse was confirmed in France on a huge scale. Literally, the French government reported the EXACT things that have been observed here, including children being used as beggar slaves with very specific instructions what to beg for and intentional undernourishment. But hey, there's no connection there. It's all random. It does not at all confirm that it's all widely culturally deeply rooted. Neither historical written sources nor analogies between geographically notably separated modern Romani are evidence of anything, no sir.

As for the caste system, I don't even know the website you mentioned, it's something I read about a long time ago and I sure as hell wouldn't base on some tourist website. And rather than throwing around wild accusations that all I know about Romani is based on quick google searches I made today you maybe should focus on getting YOUR facts straight. It blows my mind that after getting disproven all you can do is make these baseless accusations to discredit me. That's just nasty. And no I am no expert on this matter but at least the facts I have provided were correct and backed by evidence.

And that "it's bad, thus not true" logic you are demonstrating, aaargh. I mean really, your main argument against the evident beggar traditions is that because it's a bad thing saying that thing will enforce that thing and thus it should not be said. And did I say anywhere that begging is completely the only way how Romani get by anywhere, that it's the only thing they do? No. But this entire discussion started when Kennethor rejected something that is a well-documented and serious problem (even larger than I assumed when this started) as a myth and all I've been really trying to do here was demonstrate that it's a very real and major problem and then I was forced into explaining how that particular problem has deep cultural roots to prove that it's not just a right-wing stereotype but something grander which can be backed historically and explained culturally so it doesn't appear that evil to say these things. That the things I said appeared THAT nasty is because it was a very specific and nasty topic. I wasn't trying to say everything there is to Romani, I wasn't trying to discuss everything about them, and accusing me now of being one of those people who enforce certain stigmas just by touching this topic is downright moronic.

And the most absurd thing is that ultimately we're on the same side here and surely we all want well-being of those people, so the fuck are we doing here?

Never mind.

But you're wrong. Begging is something relatively new for the Romani. It is not in their culture. It simply isn't. There are Romani who steal, beg and do other crimes, just as there are amongst the rest of us. The thing that stands out in the crime statistics for the Romani is that they are victims of crime much more often then the rest of us. What you refer to isn't begging, it's trafficking, slavery and child abuse. Not cultural or what most begging is.

They used to travel around, tell fortunes, repair things and work for people they met. Playing music for others and getting paid isn't begging either, it wasn't then. These stereotypes were true. As the world changed, with WWII and more industries, the Romanis help wasn't wanted anymore. You seem to know some things but turn a blind eye to others. I know that there are homeless children and that some people use their children as workers etc, that we have laws against that in sweden and that we take care of kids more often than in Poland isn't me not accepting truths.

You and many others share these myths and lies about the ones "below" us in society, you have no ansers as to what ´can be done. Just "make begging illegal" and the like. What good would those laws do?

Likewise.

That's why we're born with two eyes. So we can look in two different directions at the same time. I've been ordering drinks from large breasted women for years. Never had a problem making EYE contact. XD

I'm not going to continue this. I just find one thing odd. You jump on me and claim that I don't know anything about these people, but you don't get off at the other guys in this thread who say racist shit based on absolutely nothing but their own ignorance. It is okay to attack people who aren't around but to defend people who aren't around is bad. Riiight.

Have a good one.

Sides have nothing to do with that, and my last point about the articulation of "mendicity" and "alterity" stigmas is related to the general discussion, and not to your posts in particular (i don't know how you react to mendicity itself).

But the issue here is the fallacy of culturalist reductionism, and reasonings based on some sort of mystical understanding of "culture", acting as some sort of collective dna, or some magical abstract force determining individual behaviours throughtout centuries. This is a comfy, low-res, easy-to-digest explanation of the world, but it is descriptively false, is only sustained by filtering out massive amounts of data (that is, the quantity of rroms who do not life through mendicity and who do not travel), and leads to misleading expectations and qualifications of the rom category. This simplistic mecanist view (mendicity culture) that you have simply exclude from your horizon the realities that contradict it. It invisibilize the majority of roms (or conflats them with that stereotype), and, even amongst those who do survive through begging, it evacuates the categories which life trajectories do not match some "we beg from one generation to the other because we are programmed for that" cliché - in particular the late 20th century waves of migration and mendicity, which has seen formerly sedentary rom populations resort to seasonal mendicity abroad it after ages of "regular work", because of various recent factors (economical, societal, etc). When a family loses their regular income and decides to seek revenues in western europe, either directly through begging or by seeking work which access is rendered near impossible due to local policies, going "oh you are begging because you are rom and it is your culture" is simply off the point. It has no descriptive value because it replaces the actual chain of events by some abstract determinist mystical fatality. It also shortcuts the actual socio-economical circumstances (including recent re-marginalizations) that has lead to such decisions and survival strategies. It jumps over recent history, skips it, to seek causalities in ancient history through abstract identity categories. And pointing out some rom sub-categories which are traditionaly mobile (and therefore forced to subsist through informal activities from windshield washing to mendicity) or pointing out some gangsters amongst roms (even without relying on dubious publicity stunts by xenophobic french politicians) does not change anything to that. Once you use the umbrella term of "rom" to attach some obvious intemporal cultural determinism to it, you cease to be descriptive. You cease to account for the diversity of the rom realities, and for its actual causalities.

And this is not a matter of sides, because broad mystically culturalist arguments, blurry as they are, can serve any discourse. "It is just cultural", in and by itself (without case by case investigation of contemporary sociocultural mechanisms), means nothing, explains nothing, justifies nothing - it only implies an "elves dwarves and goblins" interpretation of the world, and stops reflexions (especially self-reflexions, because such discourses are very often held by societies stereotyping their own selves for purposes of identity construction) at a quick, ready-made, mythological level. "Don't look further, they simply have this in their culture" and "don't look further, they simply have this in their blood" end up being the same reductivist fallacy. This is just a red herring. With here the consequence of implying (about the vast majority of sedentary roms, and about those amongst them who work as seasonal beggars) that "hey, they're not seeking jobs anyway, so why bother, they are simply implementing their cultural programming". Which is false both historically (the masses of long "integrated" roms, the separate communities with other revenues, etc), and sociologically (actual contemporary rom discourses and revendications).

And as a rule o f thumb, whenever you come accross an explanation of the type "ah it's just their/our culture, look at 1000 years ago", your alarm bells should immediately go off. Even in the most innocent contexts, and regardless of "sides".