Author: Anne H. Sutherland

Publisher: Waveland Press

Published: 2016-05-25

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 1478633794

America has always been a land of fascinating cultural diversity. From the extremely wide range of cultural groups on the American scene today, Gypsies, or Roma, are among the most extraordinarily elusive and complex. For more than forty-five years, social scientist Anne Sutherland has researched and objectively written about the American Roma worldview. She honed traditional research methods to study the Roma, who normally obscure the truth about themselves to outsiders, dispelling centuries of misinterpretation, bias, and romanticism that have led to discrimination. In this latest work, Roma: Modern American Gypsies, she succinctly portrays their twenty-first-century lives and identifies how their realities have been shaped by global processes and agents of power. Throughout complex stages of change and adaptation, Sutherland concludes, Gypsies have managed to retain, not lose, their identity. Ideal for classes in introductory sociology and cultural anthropology, Roma is also an excellent supplement in courses on ethnicity, immigration, and American culture since Gypsy culture also vividly illustrates the strength of ethnic boundaries, the channeling of interethnic relations, subcultural differentiation, and adaptation.