Arpan Roy, Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference (University of Toronto Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Arpan Roy (AR): This book is the fruit of my fascination with Palestine, its culture, society, and its people, which began in 2004 and became professional in 2012 when I started researching Palestine as a MA student. In the beginning I was interested in more obviously politicized research questions, but it soon dawned on me that Palestine as a political problem, especially in anthropology, very often skips over the cultural and social base of the place. That is to say, the question of who or what is Palestine, beyond a broad geopolitical framing, is very rarely asked. This is not the case, for example, with Egypt and Morocco—the two great loci of anthropology in the Middle East. It was when I was looking for a PhD dissertation topic that I remembered a chance encounter with a far-gone man in a bar in Ramallah a few years prior, in which the man told me about the Romani community in Jerusalem. The memory stayed with me. When I tried looking up basic information about the community, I was surprised to find how little is known about this community besides the occasional newspaper article, and it made me wonder how a community of non-Arabic speaking Palestinians in the middle of Jerusalem’s Old City could be of so marginal interest to scholarly research on Palestine. This made me curious about how difference (whether it be ethnic or religious) in Palestinian society is imagined, and whether the liberal/modern category of “minority” is at all useful besides in top-down frameworks imposed in the postcolonial state (as in Lebanon and Syria). In the end, the book is a product of eight years of fieldwork in the Jerusalem/Ramallah area and Amman between 2016-24, the last period overlapping with the genocide. In lieu of this, especially during revisions, I became conscious of how maybe the book can help preserve informal and native modes of imagining the social before life in Palestine as we know may quite literally be extinguished.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AR: The book addresses the concept of difference in Palestine by looking at informality. It asks how society creates its own categories of difference and imagines the social without formal top-down categories imposed by the state. This is particularly striking in Palestine, which is of course a colonial situation and has never had a sovereign state infrastructure. Based on this basic premise, I put forward two theories: The first is that the basic unit of difference in Palestine is the family (dar), in that each family indexes all kinds of difference and perhaps even deviance, whether it be religious, ethnic, moral, professional, political, etc.—an informal ledger of information that is preserved and transmitted at a very informal level. The second proposition, which I adapt from the work of the Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy, is that these signs and indexes are “mnemonic,” meaning that a pre-modern history of a “thousand little cultures” are internalized in the minds of subaltern populations and reproduced genealogically across generations without registering this heterogeneity in the archive. Nandy suggests that such a mnemonic way of imagining the social permeates the societies of the Global South, and I show how the experience of Romanies in Palestine is true to this general statement.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AR: It is my first book, so it is in some sense a culmination of everything I have been working on over the past decade. Prior to this research, I published an article while still a MA student on urbanism in the West Bank that haunts me by being occasionally cited, but it is very far away from how my interests later developed. Apart from that, this book is very closely connected to articles I have published from my PhD days onward. The book also forms a thematic pair with a volume that I co-edited and was published earlier this year called Naseej: Life-Weavings of Palestine (Pluto Press, 2025), which explores some of the themes of my book among other communities in Palestine.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AR: I hope that this book is read by people of the region. We held the book launch in March of this year at the al-Qattan Foundation in Ramallah, and it was well received. Very often anthropology has an extractive relationship with the societies in which research is conducted, and I very consciously try to produce research that is also interesting for the society itself. As such, I would very much hope to have an Arabic translation of this book at some point. I also hope that the book contributes to South-South theoretical assemblages. I am proud that my book on Palestine is built theoretically around social theory from India, and I would like to continue this line of theorizing from and between the South.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AR: I am working on a new book project called Sadness of the East, which is an ethnography of Christianity in the Levantine region, especially focusing on Arab Christianity’s intertwining with Islam and Arabism, and how this intertwining, in turn, is contextualized by the exceptional duress in the region. I began this research in 2023, and it is centered not only in Palestine but also in Lebanon and Syria. The latter has become much more accessible to researchers since the fall of the Assad government but, of course, new complexities have emerged that affect the nature of my research. I am also working on two other projects, both of which are interrelated: one explores the relationship between militancy and society in the Middle East, and for this I am collaborating with several scholars who I very much respect; the other is an article that draws from the South Asian experience of sectarianism (known as “communalism” in Indian parlance) in helping elucidate the nature of sectarianism in Lebanon and Syria.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter Two: The Ethics of Fragmentary Life, pages 55 to 59)
“We” Out of Bounds
One of the discontinuities of the Palestinian story since 1948 has been the periodical fragmenting and rejoining of Palestinian people territorially. The outcome of 1948 saw the partition of Palestine into three territories – Israel, Egypt, Jordan – only to be “reunited” in 1967, albeit under the Israeli yoke, then mostly fragmented again after Israel imposed a checkpoint system and draconian restrictions on movement during the two Palestinian intifadas that erupted in 1987 and 2000. Continuities between Palestinians in Jordan and the West Bank also persisted in various configurations for several decades after 1967, during which official channels existed for acquiring residency through marriage, until the freezing of “family reunification,” as it is known in immigration law, in 2003. In recent years, restrictions on Palestinian citizens of Israel for travel to the West Bank have mostly eased, allowing for new, dynamic cultural forms. The blockade and subsequent bombings and decimation of the Gaza strip since 2007, however, have created unprecedented divisions. Gaza, even before the genocide, had become what Palestinians call kawkab tani “another planet.” It is a model of what a zone of abandonment looks like in the contemporary world.
In this chapter, I discuss cases of Gaza Doms who have recently settled in the West Bank, specifically in the working-class areas between Jerusalem with Ramallah, as part of an ongoing clandestine migration from Gaza since the blockade was implemented. More specifically, I focus on the last surviving performance of Romani difference still practised by this community – begging as organized labour, and the relation of this labour to kinship. I struggled to make sense of this ethically challenging topic since early on in my research, when I often found myself in the embarrassing situation of running into Dom beggars on the streets of Jerusalem in whose homes I was a regular guest. It is a common sight to see Dom women from Gaza begging in Jerusalem, the cities of the West Bank, and Arab-majority areas in Israel; on street corners, at traffic roundabouts, in busy market areas, and especially near mosques. Soon begging became too recurring of a theme to ignore. It was an endless source of humour during my hanging out in Dom households, and a handful of times I found myself useful in giving Doms rides to and from “work” in my car. Moreover, when I later travelled to Jordan, my knowledge of begging, particularly my casual use of the Domari term for the activity (mangesh), gave me a certain credibility among Romanies as someone who was not entirely an outsider. Given that no manual on ethics in conducting anthropological fieldwork has entries on such situations, I asked around for advice on whether this potentially sensationalist topic should find a place in my ethnography. Comments ranged from those advising me to drop the matter altogether in the interest of not perpetuating Romani stereotypes, to one prominent anthropologist urging me to get over my “middle-class sensitivities,” to more useful advice like the suggestion that my unexpected involvement with Romani begging may be a unique opportunity to explore “occupational caste” in Palestine. It is this latter advice that I heed in this chapter.
The word caste does not come without provocation for an anthropologist born and having lived for many years in India. It is the dominant theme in the anthropology of India – the land of the caste system – and has generated a scholarly literature no less extensive than any other theme in the history of anthropology. As is the case with these other themes, there is no consensus as to what caste is or does. The trouble is that matters are more complex than merely the topic of begging as caste-like labour. Caste is a heady nexus of not only occupation but kinship, religion, class, geography, and more; all of which work together to give shape to a specific hierarchical social formation. As such, if we are to entertain the viability of conceptualizing Romani begging as a caste-like occupation, however tepidly at this early stage, then our investigation would be incomplete if excluding a discussion of other potentially caste-like aspects of Palestinian society. The dar, again, is another instance of an institution that is not caste but arguably caste-like.
I will turn to these matters shortly, but it is important first to state a series of disclaimers: Begging in Palestine is not unique to Doms, although overwhelmingly most beggars are Doms. Nor is Dom begging unique to any particular group of Doms in Palestine, although it is today mostly practised by Gaza Doms. Doms in Jerusalem, by contrast, began a process of relinquishing begging as a labour activity in the 1970s, now mostly complete with only some exceptions, soon after acquiring stability as Jerusalem residents under the restricted rights and social welfare benefits granted to Palestinians in the city by Israel. There is also a gendered aspect to begging: begging on street corners is the work of women, while men generally work in more elaborate alms-collecting schemes. All this being said, we can then specify that most but not all beggars in Palestine today are Dom women from Gaza.
Migration from Gaza to the West Bank is not unique to Doms. Gaza is blockaded by air, land, and sea, but life somehow finds a way, and “illegal” Gaza migrant communities are today found all over the West Bank – the economically more preferable of the two nominally Palestinian-administered territories. A recent study by Kenny Schmitt, for instance, documents such a trend among Gaza Christians, who, together with Doms, are enacting the wholesale transfer of an entire community – religious, mnemonic, consanguineous, or all of the above – from one territory to another, thus perpetuating a dynamic series of tragedies that have unravelled the Palestinian social fabric.
New communities of Gaza Doms in the West Bank are concentrated precisely in some of the areas where Doms from Jerusalem have also settled in recent decades since moving out of Bab Hutta in the 1990s (see the previous chapter). Furthermore, for both groups, Ramallah has become the de facto centre of urban life as Israeli exclusionary policy increasingly estranges Palestinians from Jerusalem. Thus, the two Dom groups now find themselves living, working, shopping, attending weddings, and so on in the same territorial spaces for the first time since the ruptures of 1948 and 1967 severely fragmented Palestinian society. It is worth mentioning that Romani groups regularly intermarried before this fragmentation, a practice part and parcel of the general identitarian ambiguity among Romani groups that persisted into the twentieth century. This continues to be the case with Romani groups inhabiting shared spaces in Jordan. Yet, far from the dynamism that one might expect in a situation of a restored geography, the two Dom groups in Jerusalem and its environs have become anonymous to one another. Anonymous, that is, except when begging and seen begging – an exposure of the self that I frame in this chapter as the problem of recognition, as it appears in phenomenological philosophy.
Given this general backdrop, I will turn at various points in this chapter to the concept of caste as a way by which to anchor my discussion. Rather than arguing that a given social phenomena is caste or is not caste in concrete terms, I am more interested in exploring what work caste does in contextualizing the two following theoretical propositions. The first is that begging, for Doms, acts as a “boundary” between the self and a world imagined by kinship. In other words, to the extent that it is a field of labour that is passed down across generations, begging marks an ethical boundary between the Romani family and other possible types of families, a boundary that implicates the individual subject from birth. Jean-Paul Sartre famously called this unchangeable reality inherited at birth the “facticity” of existence. Who can forget his famous words? – “I am not ‘free’ either to escape the lot of my class, of my nation, of my family … I am born a worker, a Frenchman, an hereditary syphilitic, or a tubercular.” I, however, employ alternative rubrics by which to theorize this tension between the individual and the demands of the social order.
My second proposition in this chapter, less closely pursued but still important, is that begging as labour cannot be separated from a wider Dom ethics of egalitarianism. In lieu of the heightened vulnerability of life in Palestine – vulnerable, that is, in the sense that nothing can be taken for granted, from the sudden loss of one’s home to the loss of a family member, to a sudden sealing off of a given territory to mass expulsion – begging is itinerant labour adaptable to this singularly fragile social. More than this, Dom begging cultivates, in various ways, an ethics of egalitarianism in how those implicated in this labour are positioned as a collective. For instance, in the same way that a day’s earnings from begging are shared among members of an extended family, many other things are also shared, from everyday objects like cigarettes and clothes to mobile phones and Facebook accounts, to the extent that it is unclear where collective life begins and where it ends. Another instance of this is the sharing of the maher “brideprice” among the maternal kin of a Dom bride as if the brideprice were alms to be shared collectively; a reinterpretation of established Islamic laws of marriage and inheritance. Here, too, the notion of caste casts a shadow in that one of the long-standing debates in the study of caste in India is whether a given caste might be an unit of egalitarian ethics within the hierarchal social order to which it belongs. Indeed, Louis Dumont, the greatest anthropologist of caste, was as interested in homo aequalius as he was in homo hierarchichus.
My two propositions position Dom difference, here characterized by caste-like labour and by an ethos of radical egalitarianism, as a kind of counterculture vis-à-vis society at large. Caste-like labour that is a family secret, an egalitarianism that accentuates a belonging to a collective, an ethos of living against the laws of society – these are the entires into the mnemonic ledger that I discuss in this chapter.