Marriage and the reproductive regime of a digitally connected Roma diaspora

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the marriage, family, and reproductive regimes prevalent in a Roma group that, in the post-socialist period, has moved from Romania to over 16 countries in Western Europe and North America. It is based on a long-term collaborative ethnography that allowed the detailed reconstitution of 807 unions held from 1938 to 2021. Family networks in this diaspora have today a transnational character and maintain an intense social interaction by digital means. The paper will show how a partly autonomous social order is constituted and reproduced by a marriage and kinship system that involves gender formations and autonomous domestic development cycles. At its core is an implicit and successful reproductive regime that is often assumed to be biologically determined, and of no value to cultural analysis. Marriages tend to be universal, adolescent, pronatalist, and endogamous (often consanguineous) within this “community of understanding.” They are also negotiated and arranged by paterfamilias following a literal patriarchy or father rule. However, young people often act on their preferences influencing their parents or eloping. Marriages as household exchanges are launched by three major economic transactions. These transactions open the horizontal “circulation” of women and wealth between households following viri-patrilocal residence norms that generate patrigroups and fraternal coalitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Marriage
• reproductive patterns
• Roma
• Romania
• Transmigration
• ethnic minorities

Acknowledgments

The research leading to this paper began with the project: “Migrom: The immigration of Romanian Roma to Western Europe”, funded by the 7th Framework Program of the European Union (GA319901). We have tried to extend the pioneering ethnographic work of Giuseppe Beluschi-Fabeni in the same Roma subgroup. We acknowledge and thank him for his contribution to this project. Elisabeth Gómez Oehler, Nuria Morales, and Fran Ogáyar helped with the transcription of the interviews and made useful suggestions. Stela Rostas provided a much needed femenine perspective on her culture over the years. Remus Anghel, Antonio Espín, Laszlo Fosztó, Elena Marushiakova, Veselin Popov and Julieta Rotaru read previous versions of this paper and helped to improve it. The remaining errors are our sole responsibility. We sincerely thank all the Roma friends and relatives who answered our nagging questions over the years.

Disclosure statement

We have, to the best of our knowledge, no conflict of interest to declare.

Notes

1. In this group, a rasa (more rarely a vitsa) is a named category of people who descend from an eponymous ancestor by male links. It is a patrilineal descent construct. Some descendants by females are accepted because “they grew up with us.” Rase names denote primarily categories of identification, not interactive, cooperative or corporative groups, that is, patrilineages. Cooperation, solidarity, and support are not always expected between members of the same rasa. For instance, closer relatives from the mother’s line may be more supportive and esteemed than distant relatives from one’s rasa.

2. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, commonly the mangaimó and the wedding (abiav) were fused into a single ceremony to expedite the dangerous and forbidden meetings.

3. Out of 224 cases documented in detail, we found only one case in which the garanția was returned to the xanamik, and another in which a large part of it was given to the bori by her father.

4. Strictly only Roma women who had had only one husband should put the dikhlo in the head of the bori.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the 7th Framework Program of the European Union, and Ministerio of Universidades of Spain, Research Grant PRX21/00746.

Notes on contributors

Juan F. Gamella

Juan F. Gamella is an anthropologist and professor of Anthropology at the Universidad de Granada. He has done fieldwork in Sumatra (Indonesia) on cultural and ecological change brought up by the growth of the oil industry, as well as in several regions of Spain and the US on drug use and trade and the spread of AIDS. Since 1993 he has been studying the culture and history of the Gitano/Calé of Spain. Since 2003 he has researched the transnational migrations of Romanian Roma. Gamella is interested in the contrasting forms of culturally organizing reproduction in minority/majority populations, that is, the interfaces between kinship, gender, and fertility regimes, and how they shape and are shaped by larger political and economic transformations. He has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for the Study of National Minorities in Cluj Napoca (2022), the University of California at Santa Cruz (2010-2011), the University of Cambridge (2001-2002), and the Johns Hopkins University (1998). He is the author of seven books and over 90 scientific papers and chapters, the most recent: “Breaking secular endogamy. The growth of intermarriage among the Gitanos/Calé of Spain (1900–2006)”, with Arturo Álvarez-Roldán (2023).

Vasile M. Muntean

Vasile M. Muntean is a Romanian Roma young man who migrated to Spain in 2001 and has lived in Andalusia until 2022. From 2014 to 2021 he worked as a research assistant, first within the Migrom Project of the 7th Framework Program of the European Union, then in a research group of the Department of Social Anthropology of the Universidad de Granada. Presently Vasile lives and works in New York. Vasile has been trained in the job and developed considerable competence and understanding as a young ethnographer. He is the co-author of several papers and chapters of books derived from this collaborative research. Among these, is the chapter: “Founder Effects and Transnational Mutations” (2017, Routledge) with Juan Gamella and Giuseppe Beluschi-Fabeni.