Dalen Butler\u2019s grandmother didn\u2019t mind being called a Gypsy, in fact, she preferred it. Today, though, Romani people have largely cast off that name, believed to derive from a misconception that the scattered Roma originated in Egypt. For Butler, though, his own family was the inspiration for his scholarly interests.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s how I got interested in it,\u201d he says. \u201cGrowing up, my grandmother had an accent and there was something a little bit different about her, compared to other grandparents. So that was my introduction into the Romanichal culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Romanichal play an outsized role in literature and popular culture, from Victorian literature through reality television\u2019s My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. The reality, though, is somewhat less romantic. Roma have been the victims\u00a0of discrimination and outright persecu- tion in every country they have come to. Despite this, or perhaps as a result, many Romanichals have maintained a unique cultural identity.<\/p>\n
While pursuing his undergraduate degree in environmental studies at Northland College in northern Wisconsin, Butler became interested in the intersec- tion between scientific knowledge and traditional storytelling among the area\u2019s Native American population.<\/p>\n
\u201cI changed from the \u2018hard sciences\u2019\u2014 in quotes\u2014to the social sciences,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I saw them both as interacting together. That\u2019s where I got more involved in the idea of cultural sustainability\u2014 anthropology, history, stuff like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Goucher\u2019s Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability program, Butler decided to focus on Romani culture, specifically the Romanichals who found themselves in America, like his grandmother.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was something I was really always interested in,\u201d he says. \u201cIt became my focus at Goucher, and now my plan\u00a0is to tease out the American experience with Roma, basically throughout the 20th century… looking at it more in modernity, trying to trace the history and the way that Roma cultures\u2014and that\u2019s a broad term\u2014 have either resisted assimilation, attempts to deal with identity and barriers, and how the role of the state plays into that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Butler focused on the so-called \u201cDecade of Roma Inclusion,\u201d an intergovernmental effort to improve the representation of Roma in twelve European member-countries, which ran from 2005 to 2015. The Decade Secretariat\u2019s final report, titled, \u201cA Lost Decade?\u201d largely admitted that the effort was a failure. Butler lays most of the blame to the governments\u2019 unwillingness to involve Roma in their own inclusion, while outside forces like the rise of radical right-wing parties in Europe conspired to make things worse.<\/p>\n
Partly because of that history, Butler believes, it\u2019s hard to say how many Roma currently live in the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people don\u2019t want to self-identify as Roma,” he says, “because if you do, you\u2019ll be treated the way Roma are treated in Europe. And many of the families like my own, they lost language, they lost the cultural things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Butler hopes to continue his studies of this culture in America, a culture that often goes unnoticed in the wake of old stereotypes and a desire to keep itself apart from the mainstream.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have many different Roma groups here,\u201d he says, \u201cand it\u2019s important for us to look at these dynamics, especially in a time of heightened racial tension, and people really starting to tease out the issues in our society in terms of how we look at race, how we look at identity. And it\u2019s not just a black and white issue, or a Chicano and white issue. There are people here who have also dealt with this for hundreds of years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bringing a hidden culture to light<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":1107,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[54973],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[87492],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-spotlight"],"yoast_head":"\n