Why am I passionate about this?
As a stranger in the land I grew up in, I’ve always considered myself a world citizen and have never sought a settled life. My first book, Insomnia: A Cultural History, detailed the often enriching experience of being estranged from those sleeping in the night-time. I researched and wrote Astray out of a sense of frustration. Creative estrangement or the unfamiliar typically precedes—and sometimes helps create—norms, yet it is often judged by them, and humans, too, judge other humans this way. Yet, historically, wandering or being a stranger is the human norm, and in the warming world we have made it will be key to all our futures.
Eluned's book list on being a stranger
Why did Eluned love this book?
I often reread this marvelous book, the result of the author’s 1990s fieldwork with Hungarian Roms, for its relevance to all seeking to live aslant from mainstream culture’s obsession with economic growth and so-called success in those terms.
Stewart shows how the horse-trading Roms he lived among made the market a heroic arena where the movement of money is key, and where the luck Roms typically live by is given center-stage in consummate acts of bargaining.
Historically, the Rom are our only people living without a dream of homeland, and the centrality of interaction—with Gadje, non-Roms—to their lives, where unbelonging drives exchange, and exchanges become futures, is pertinent to all who will have to disinvest from belief in property, becoming traveling strangers in our increasingly unpredictable world.
1 author picked The Time Of The Gypsies as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Offers an intimate view of the Hungarian Gypsies who, despite persecution, hostility, and racism, have managed to retain their rich cultural and communal heritage.. The Time of the Gypsies is about the refusal of one group of Gypsiesthe Romto abandon their way of life and accept assimilation into the majority population. It is a story about the sources of cultural diversity in modern industrial society and about the fear and hatred that such social and cultural difference may give rise to. The core of the book, based on the authors eighteen months of observation of daily life in a Gypsy…
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