Sergio Rodríguez

Gypsyness

Original title:

Gitanidad. Otra manera de ver el mundo

About the book:

Gypsyness

- A book that will radically change our vision of the gipsy world.

- The gypsies are the great unknown of Western cultures. Probably no one has suceded until now in Refining what it means to be a Gyspy.

The author advances a totally ground-breaking thesis: the Gypsies have an Indian way of being and living in this world.
The author lives immersed in the Gypsy World since 1994, which has led him to get to know Gypsy communities throughout Europe and to learn their language.

The author works an alchemic change to distil the essence of Gypsy identity. Going beyond the habitual structures and methodologies of ethnology and sociology, he obtains a state known as  romipēn, a state of being and way of life of clearly Indian origin —although affected by contact over the ages — highlighting Gypsies as a fragment of the East in the midst of the West. This explains the more than ten centuries of contact and isolation, of meeting points and schism, of fascination and discrimination, between Gypsies and non-Gypsies.

About the author:

Sergio Rodríguez (Barcelona, 1970) is a journalist and a director of the Secretariado Gitano de Barcelona (Gypsy Secretariat of Barcelona). He is the author of two other books on this subject, Apuntes de pastoral gitana (Notes on the Gyspy pastoral) and  El pueblo gitano, manual para periodistas (The Gypsy people, a journalists’ manual). He is a lecturer at the Universidad Abat Oliba and consultant for the European Commission. Thought as the basis of identity constitutes his principal line of research.