Gypsies: What Threat? Threat and Purity in Majority and Minority Relationships

Abstract

Paraphrasing the book Purity and Danger by Douglas (1966), this chapter analyses the relationships between the majority and the minority in terms of threat and purity. The majority will do everything possible to remain pure; in other words, not to mix with the minority ontologised as wild (i.e. closer to nature than to the majority culture). The taboo of contact underlies a whole series of daily practices and discourses. Through such means, the majority socialises its members so that they do not mix with stigmatised minorities. The second part of the chapter focuses on the social construction of the Gypsy minority as a threat to Gadje society. Prejudice, discrimination, and persecution, which the Gypsies have been subject to for centuries, have prevented their integration into the cultural mainstream, forcing many of them into nomadism. The real or symbolic threat attributed to a minority generates prejudice toward it. Complementarily, we present a new experiment in which the opposite is shown—that it is the very discrimination practised by the majority against the Gypsies that leads it later to see the Gypsies as more threatening and dangerous.