Paper short abstract:

This paper studies the practice of wedding among an Iranian minority group, the Ġorbat. The money transfer during the wedding are significant to the group in both micro and macro scales. This study describes this event and the structures involved in a marital union in the Ġorbat world.

Paper long abstract:

This study focuses on wedding ceremonies among a minority semi-itinerant Iranian group, the Ġorbat. The matrimonial rules have a lot to say about this population who has remained unknown for decades from the scientific knowledge. Two main clans (blacksmiths and carpenters) constitute this ethnic group and several lineages form each clan. The matrimonial alliance can happen inside a lineage, between lineages or between clans. However, the wedding ceremonies, especially the underlying money transfer that characterizes this practice, seem to be highly significant for the cohesion of whole ethnic group and to be intertwined with daily practice of money gaining by each Ġorbat individual. This may explain the arrangement of several arūsi during the year even when there is no marital union to celebrate. In fact, for the Ġorbat, the wedding ceremony is not the first neither the most important event to legitimate the union between two individuals. The matrimonial alliance becomes legitimate through several phases (i.e. elopement and procreation) and the ceremony comes as the last phase. Thus, the function of arūsi seems to go beyond the marital union of two individuals. In order to clarify the underlying cultural logics of this ceremony, the present study gives thorough ethnographic descriptions of all the practices, beliefs and values that surround this event and the structures involved in a marital union in the Ġorbat world.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will propose a structural analysis of the kinship of a Romanian Roma community. From this case study, I will discuss, the relation, usually accepted in the anthropology of kinship, between endogamy and marriage preferences.

Paper long abstract:

In my communication I will explore, in the case of the Roma, the hypothesis proposed by Enric Porqueres I Gené, that the specific features of marriage within a kinship network operate to safeguard ties around and within this network, thus ensuring its transmission down through the generations. I took, as a case study, the kinship network of the Cioroman. This Roma group is living in eastern Romania and present themselves as a community of Romane Roma (true Roma), practising a form of marriage that is specific for being endogamous and governed by autonomous rules.

Comparing data from archives with genealogical information collected from the people, I reconstructed descending family trees starting from the members of the network of Romani family heads recorded collectively in the 1920s. I have thus identified the ties of consanguinity and alliance of approximately 1000 people over 6 generations. This data have been processed using the kinship-processing software PUCK (Program for the Use and Computation of Kinship data).

From the census of matrimonial circuits, I will show, firstly that, despite the density of their family ties, the Cioroman have no marriage preferences. They have a complex kinship structure that unfolds preferentially within a small group. Secondly, I will show that the ethnic endogamy claimed by the Cioraman concerns only half of marriages. This imperfect endogamy is structurally able to bridge, generation after generation all branches of the kinship network. The Cioroman thus invented an original way to remain kin in an open world.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that Romanian Cortorari's marriages are an arena of tensions between individual's presentism and the achievement of un unchanging continuity, through the replacement of generations.

Paper long abstract:

For the Romanian Gypsy population of Cortorari, the arrangement of marriages is the most salient preoccupation. To live a meaningful life means here arranging the marriage of one's children and living through seeing one's children bringing forth their own children in wedlock, and arranging the latter's marriage(s). Such an achievement is fraught with encumbrances, given that marital bonds are fragile and unstable: they are whimsically fastened and unfastened being subject both to individuals' spontaneous emotions, to their bodily reproductive capacities, and to monetary calculation. In the centre of marriages stand some material items, chalices, which were bequeathed to Cortorari by their forebears. Chalices circulate as family heirlooms, from father to son, and as such they secure permanence and immutability, and deny creative significance to history. Yet chalices also circulate as ceremonial wealth, in this instance being subject to individual claims and assertions and thus pervasive of the immediate and changeable political world. Drawing on ethnography of a marriage and the accompanying flow of a chalice, I argue that Cortorari's marriages epitomize the lived tensions between the life course of the individual and the reproduction of generations, or among immediacy and unchanging continuity, and the way these are articulated with one another.

Paper short abstract:

Roma marriages are central to the social reproduction of 'Gypsyness' at both individual and collective levels. This paper examines how personhood and intimacy contribute to the maintenance of social organisation, and, conversely, how social norms shape personal aspirations and experiences.

Paper long abstract:

Although not strictly endogamous, the southern Romanian Rom I have worked with view marriage-making as central to the social reproduction of their identity as 'traditional' and 'true' Roma. The norms of behaviour and performance that regulate the topic of marriage make this process contingent upon the couple's performance and their contribution to the social organisation of the group, not on their respective personalities, provenance, or aspirations. In this paper, I examine how these two levels, the individual and the societal, overlap, conflict, and contribute to one another in the social reproduction of 'Gypsyness'. Firstly, I examine the marriage process in several of its constitutive dimensions: courtship, asking for a woman's hand in marriage (called 'coming with the speech', a veni cu vorba), marriage negotiations—or, conversely, elopement and kidnapping—as well as marriage dissolutions through 'Gypsy judgments'. Then, I mitigate this 'structural' account by an emphasis on the subjective dimensions of marriage: the cultivation of mutual feelings, attraction and care among the spouses, their performance as competent and accomplished adults/members of the community, etc. Building on the examination of marriage patterns, as well as on life stories and participant observation into the everyday proceedings of family life at its various stages, my paper describes the points of articulation (and inevitable friction) between collective norms and individual aspirations, and shows how these are realised in marriage as the key arena where one proves oneself both as a person, and as a Rom/Romni.

Paper short abstract:

Marriage is a tool through which Calon Romanies of Brazil construct and maintain social relationships. But it also holds seeds of fragmentation and estrangement. Since parties in feud are almost always those who used to live together in the past, marriages are central to the institution of revenge.

Paper long abstract:

Marriage is the main way through which Calon Romanies of Brazil recognise and manage the fact of their dispersal among the non-Gypsies (*Jurons*). In the past, within the context of colonial expansion, capitalist exploitation and exile, marriage was central to Calon community survival. Today it remains the key site of their differentiation from Jurons -- of Calon self-identification and commonness. It is through marriage that households and *turmas* (groups of households that commonly move and camp together) as well as other forms of connectivity, which they simultaneously presuppose, emerge. At the same time, marriages are also a motor of differentiation, estrangement and fragmentation. It is through marriages that novel lasting relationships between individuals and families are primarily forged. These provide married men and women with the performative contexts through which they singularise themselves as social persons. Marriages allow them to build sets of affective ties that are distinct from those of their parents, siblings and cousins and thus give rise to new relationships and spaces around which individuals re-orient their lives. Marriages also constantly redefine relationships within communities. Relationships between affines are particularly tense and, as a consequence, much interpersonal violence occurs between them. In addition, since parties in feud (*vingança*, revenge), who by rule avoid each other, are almost always those who used to live together, e.g. as a part of one *turma*, feuding and marriages need to be analysed together as belonging to the same system of social organisation.