Roast Chicken and Other Gypsy Stories

Сажетак

Roast Chicken and Other Gypsy Stories by Jelena Čvorović

publisher Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY STUDIES, Series 19 B – Ethnology, Hamburg, Germany, 2010

A book Roast Chicken and Other Gypsy Stories by Jelena Čvorović, views oral narratives from an evolutionary perspective. The book presents a group of tales collected orally in a fieldwork from Gypsies in western Serbia. The stories are a part of a collection (80 all together) made from several different Gypsy groups showing varying degrees of influence from Serbian culture. The significance of an oral tradition is examined from anthropological, ethnographical and historical perspectives. The Gypsy narratives presented in this book explore vital issues relevant for their survival and reproduction, such as marriage, residence, resources, tensions with the surrounding majority, and proper modes of behavior. In an attempt to interpret these stories as instructions for behavior, the author developed a theoretical framework based on anthropology and evolutionary approach that relates the stories to Gypsy culture. In doing so, the author explores the world of Serbian Gypsies in details. The author argues that a variety of Gypsy narratives’ characteristics such as function, scenery, depiction and variation serve the Gypsies to cover and use social knowledge on local surroundings that throughout their history have been relevant to their survival and reproduction. From the stories, other humans, nonGypsies and their surrounding social environment appear to be the main, unpredictable, and latent dangerous aspect of the Gypsy past environment. The narratives originated probably as a response to the life conditions Gypsies met and lived upon their arrival in the Balkans: since their coming to Europe, the Gypsies main concern was how to survive and outwit life obstacles. The conclusion is that the Serbian Gypsy Oral tradition provided models of behavior that has helped to regulate their cognitive and conscious domains through which they negotiated their social and cultural environments.