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21 Cassell's Book of the household, op. cit. (note 3), p. 31.
22 'The front fence . . . gives no real visual or acoustic privacy but symbolizes a frontier and a barrier'. Amos Rappoport, House form and culture, Princeton, NJ, 1969, p. 133.
23 Augustus Mayhew, Paved with gold, 1858, p. 8, quoted in Myron Brightfield, Victorian England in its novels, vol. 4. Los Angeles, 1968, p. 349.
24 Keith Thomas, The double standard. Journal of the History of Ideas, April 1959.
25 R. P. Utter and G. Needham, Pamela's daughter. New York, 1972.
26 Meliora, vol. 7,1858, p. 75. Patrick Colquoun in his treatise Police of the metropolis (1797) refers to prostitutes as brazen lower-class hussies who should be kept from the sight of respectable women by the police. The classification of 'good' and 'bad' women is, of course, made by men in the masculine interest.
27 'The details of a control over prostitution need not form the subject of a separate bill,' argued the British and Foreign Medical Chirurgical Review in January 1854, 'any more than the Commissioners of sewers require a new clause for each clearage. The object would be completely accomplished by its being enacted that prostitution, meaning the demanding or receiving money for sexual intercourse, is a criminal act; and that as a punishment, the individual shall be placed under the control and surveillance of a commission, and that the commission be authorized to make such arrangements as may be considered necessary for the public safety.'
28 The magdalen's friend and female homes intelligences, June 1860, p. 93.
29 Elizabeth Burton, Gardens. The early Victorians at home, 1837-1861. Longman 1972.
30 Edward Hyams, The English garden. Thames & Hudson, 1966, p. 273.
31 Robert Kerr, The gentleman's house or how to plan English residences from the parsonage to the palace, 3rd edn, 1871, p. 66. The most influential builder of country houses of the period was also a Scotsman, William Burn. The influence of Scotsmen in architecture and landscape gardening was part of the growth of these pursuits; a separation of the expert and the consumer. M. Girouard, The Victorian country house, Oxford University Press, 1971.
32 J. C. Loudon, An encyclopaedia of cottage, farm and villa architecture and furniture, containing designs for dwellings from the cottage to the villa, 1833, ch. 2, pp. 780-82.
33 R. Gill, op. cit. (note 16), p. 112.
34 Sir Gilbert Scott, Secular and domestic architecture, 1857, quoted in M. Girouard, op. cit. (note 31), p. 2.
35 R. Gill, op. cit. (note 16), p. 15.
36 One of the most famous and enduring was Mrs Sherwood's The Fairchild family, which was first published in 1818, ran to fourteen editions before 1847, and was still in print in 1913. The book begins: 'Mr and Mrs Fairchild lived very far from any town; their house stood in the midst of a garden . . .'. The Fairchild rural paradise is inhabited by the family of parents and children, the devoted servants and assorted loyal villagers.
37 A few well-known examples from the nineteenth century are Samuel Butler, The way of all flesh. Penguin, 1947; Florence Nightingale, Cassandra. In Ray Strachey, The cause, London, 1928; Betty Askwith, Two Victorian families, Chatto & Windus, 1971; Ruth Borchard, John Stuart Mill, London, 1957; Cynthia White cites the year-long correspondence in the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in the 1850s on the subject of corporal punishment of children 'in the course of which the corrective measures employed were fully described, throwing a new and sadistic light on the concept of the "pious" Victorian mother'. Women's magazines: 1693-1968, Michael Joseph, 1970, p. 46.
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38 W. Peterson, The ideological origins of British new towns, American Institute of Planners Journal 34, 1968. D. Thorns, Suburbia, MacGibbon & Kee, 1972; and Planned and unplanned communities. University of Auckland Papers in Comparative Sociology no. 1,1973.
39 P. J. Schmitt, Back to nature: An Arcadian myth in urban America. Oxford University Press, New York, 1969, p. xvii; and see John Betjeman's poem on Letchworth.
40 Eugene A. Clancy, The car and the country home. Harper's Weekly, 4, 6 May 1911, p. 30; cited by P. J. Schmitt, op. cit. (note 39), p. 17.
41 William Smythe, City homes on country lanes. New York, 1972 p. 60.
42 E. Howard, Garden cities of tomorrow, quoted in B. I. Coleman, The idea of the city in nineteenth-century Britain. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, pp. 197-8.
43 A. Jackson, Semi-detached London: Suburban development, life and transport, 1900-1939. Allen & Unwin, 1973, p. 136.
44 Ibid., p. 143; L. Hanson, Shining morning face: The childhood of Lance. Allen & Unwin, 1949.
45 C. White, op. cit. (note 37), pp. 99-100.
46 D. Paterson, The family woman and the feminist: A challenge. Heinemann, 1945, p. 37.
47 P. Berger and H. Kellner, Marriage and the construction of Reality. In H. P. Dreitzel (ed.), Recent sociology. Patterns of Communicative Behaviour no. 2. Collier-Macmillan, 1970.
48 Domestic servants, agricultural labourers and married women were the last categories (bar children) to gain citizenship rights in the twentieth century. Married women are not quite full citizens to this day; see L. Davidoff, Mastered for life: Servant and wife in Victorian England. Journal of Social History, Summer 1974.
49 For example, in a writer like Dylan Thomas, middle-class and middle-aged women are seen as life denyers: men are perpetual boys, escaping their moral strictures, glorying in sexual and alcoholic adventures. See Under Milk Wood. This is simply a variation of the 'woman as saviour' theme; whichever is emphasized, women embody in themselves the moral order.
50 'It should be noted that the particular and peculiar pairing of "passivity" and "responsibility" may account for many aspects of the behaviour of adult women'. Harriet Holter, Sex roles and social structure, University of Oslo Press, 1970, p. 60.
'Outsiders in Society and Space'
Reprinted in full from: K. Anderson and F. Gale (eds), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, Chapter 7. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire (1992)
Introduction
Dirt, as Mary Douglas (1966) has noted, is matter out of place. Similarly, the boundaries of society are continually redrawn to distinguish between those
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who belong and those who, because of some perceived cultural difference, are deemed to be out of place. The analogy with dirt goes beyond this, however. In order to legitimate their exclusion, people who are defined as 'other' or residual, beyond the boundaries of the acceptable, are commonly represented as less than human. In the imagery of rejection, they merge with the non-human world. Thus, indigenous minorities like the Inuit (Eskimo) and other native North Americans have been portrayed 'at one with nature', as a part of the natural world rather than civilization. Similarly, in racist propaganda, social groups have been dehumanized by associating them with, or representing them as, animals which are widely considered to be unclean or polluting, like rats or pigs. As Frederick Douglass, an American slave, observed in his biography, the slaves of an estate were valued together with 'horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination' (Boime, 1990, p. 211). Such associations effectively put the group outside society and, although mythical, the images become a part of common knowledge.
In this chapter, I will be concerned with the social construction of the outsider, examining both the stereotyped images which have entered popular consciousness and have confirmed marginal or residual status in advanced capitalist societies, and the nature of the spaces to which outsiders have been relegated. The perception of minority cultures as being beyond the boundary of 'society* is associated not only with characterizations of the group but also with images of particular places, the landscapes of exclusion which express the marginal status of the outsider group. I will illustrate my argument with reference to Gypsy communities in Britain, other European countries and North America, but the ideas could also be applied to groups other than racialised minorities. There are some similarities in the response to minority cultures, like Gypsies, and to groups who are inappropriately lumped together as 'deviant', particularly the mentally ill and mentally handicapped (Wolch and Dear, 1987;Philo, 1989). Here, we have asimilar problem of misrepresentation and a desire to exclude in a social and spatial sense, expressed, for example, in the construction of isolated asylums in the nineteenth century. As Philo (1989, p. 284) observes: 'In the long term the practical consequence of having a network of "closed spaces" devoted specifically to mad people was to produce and then continually to reproduce a population designated as different, deviant, and dangerous by "mainstream" society'.
In order to understand how socio-spatial constructions of the minonty have been shaped in the case of Gypsy communities, I will first look at the question of conflicting world views, the difference between the perceptions of Gypsy culture shared by members of the minority group, and the generalized and distorted representations which result inevitably from interpreting visible elements of the minority culture in the context of world views characteristic of the dominant society.
The romantic, the deviant and the other
In cultural geography, there is a growing concern with difference and otherness, with a recognition that relationships with other social groups and the
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environment are conditioned by shared perspectives which are quite diverse. This reflects a wider concern, evident particularly in feminist and post-modem literature, that general descriptive categories used in social science, such as 'class' or 'woman', neglect significant social cleavages and forms of oppression. Michelle Barrett (1987, p. 30), for example, has argued to this effect, suggesting that to treat a category like class as essential or universal does violence to the range of collective experiences which are actually or potentially significant in a political sense. She suggests that 'the claims of nation, region and ethnicity, as well as age, sexual orientation, disability and religion are being pressed as important and politically salient forms of experiential diversity'. An increased sensitivity to difference is necessary if experience is to be represented authentically, and this sensitivity is apparent in some academic writing, for example, where feminist theory has engaged with postmodern social anthropology (Mascia-Lees et a/., 1989). However, it is more generally the case that difference is viewed as deviance because it is set against some notion of the 'normal'. This is evident, for example, in responses to travelling people in Britain (a term which includes both Gypsies and Irish and Scottish Travellers). A commonly held view of travelling people as not just different but deviant is expressed in a comment on Irish Travellers in a letter to an English local newspaper, the Walsall Observer. 'Why, in heaven's name, don't [these] members of a foreign republic stay in their own country and live in nouses there, like normal people?' (Sibley, 1981, p. 23).
Acknowledging that there are a number of 'salient forms of experiential diversity', as Barrett puts it, or differences in world views, it is still difficult to register these differences because the world views of others are in varying degrees inaccessible or muted. Others may communicate in a different idiom and employ different categories to make sense of their world (Ardener. 1975), and even without a language barrier it may be difficult to represent world views authentically. If the world views of others are partly hidden, there will be a danger of misrepresenting them and constructing stereotyped images. Clearly, this can work both ways. A minority's perspective on the larger society will also be partial and distorted, although in a practical sense this is not a problem in the way that it is for the majority. It is State agencies and antagonistic communities in the dominant society who have the power, the capacity to affect the lives of minority groups, and State policies for minorities may be oppressive because they are informed by partial and stereotyped views. This is the case for current policies for British Gypsies, for example, as I will attempt to demonstrate in this chapter.
The misrepresentation of Gypsies is evident in academic writing, novels and the media. They are portrayed both as romantic and deviant. The romantic image, which appears in cultural forms as different as opera {Carmen) and tourist brochures advertising the 'natural' attractions of the Camargue in the south of France (wild bulls, white horses, flamingoes and Gypsies) fits a world view in which Gypsies are seen as a part of nature or of an imagined pre-industrial rustic existence. The deviant consists of visible elements of Gypsy culture, associated with work, shelter and so on, which are seen out of context.
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That is to say, in deviant representations there is no understanding of the practical needs of a semi-nomadic people whose survival depends partly on recycling materials discarded by the dominant society. The people and their material culture are viewed as malignant and polluting. They comprise 'matter out of place', as Mary Douglas (1966) puts it. The romantic image is essentially mythical, associating nomadism with freedom, with escape from the constraints of settled society and 'the Gypsy personality' with passion, colour and mystery. This is expressed, for example, in Hermann Hesse's poem, 'Glorious World':
Sultry wind in the tree at night, dark Gypsy woman World full of foolish yearning and the poet's breath
and rather more prosaically in advertising and the presentation of consumer goods. For example, a picture in a recent catalogue for Monsoon clothes, a firm with shops in trendy locations like Covent Garden, London, shows models dressed in 'ethnic' fashions draped around a bow-top Gypsy wagon (Figure 14.1), and the same romantic image has been used in a British advertisement for a bra and on the wrapping of Gypsy Cream biscuits.
Ironically, a mythical, romantic Gypsy culture is identified as real in popular responses, as distinct from the 'they are not real Gypsies' reaction to those actually encountered. Visible features of modern Gypsy culture, such as modern, chrometrimmed trailers parked on waste ground in cities and surrounded by piles of scrap metal and wrecked cars, pram wheels and milk-churns for storing water (Figure 14.2), do not fit the romantic stereotype, so, in this sense, the people observed are not 'real'. At the same time, they violate accepted notions of the appropriate use of land in cities. The 'real' Gypsy is seen as belonging in the past and usually in rural surroundings, part of a cosy image of rural life (Figure 14.3), whereas the people camped on waste ground are perceived as violating urban space, the world of the majority population. This is suggested in characteristic reports in English local newspapers, describing opposition to urban Gypsy sites. Consider for example 'City could be gipsy dump' {Hull Daily Mail, 7 November 1990), and similarly: 'A spokesman for [York] corporation said it was a long standing policy to clear the site and tipping refuse was part of that policy. "If you don't tip, you will get more gipsies", he said' {The Guardian, 4 September 1975). There is an association implicit in these media representations between residual matter, refuse and a residual population. In Britain, the urban Gypsy population, a large majority of the total Gypsy population, is often referred to in coded terms which signify their perceived deviance and illegitimacy, particularly 'tinker' and 'itinerant', and these ascriptions reinforce the view of the group as residual.
In popular perceptions of the Gypsy presence in modern English cities, the appropriate context for understanding Gypsy culture, that is, the world views which Gypsies articulate themselves, remain largely hidden. Gypsy beliefs about social organization, about work and cleanliness, which make their use of land comprehensible, are viewed negatively because they do not correspond to
Fig. 14.1   Use of the romantic Gypsy image in advertising (courtesy of the author). Advertisement produced by Phyllis Walters Ltd, London, for Monsoon Fashion Catalogues
Fig. 14.2   Illegal Gypsy encampment in Hull, 1979 (courtesy of the author)
■I
Fig. 14.3  Gypsy encampment near Hull, 1972 (courtesy of the author)
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notions of social and spatial order which prevail in the larger society. Their behaviour is viewed as 'anti-social', rather than reflecting an alternative conception of social order.
It is notable that in many respects the values of the dominant society are reversed in Gypsy culture, providing an instance of symbolic reversal associated with many minority cultures (Cohen, 1985). Thus, the integration rather than separation of work, residence and recreation are valued; ritual taboos about cleanliness require defecation in an outside toilet or in the open air, not in a trailer; some domestic animals valued as pets by gaujes (non-Gypsies), cats for example, are considered mochadi (unclean). Thus, the boundary between Gypsy society and the larger society is confirmed through a series of reversals. While Gypsies are seen as polluting spaces controlled by the dominant society, gauje practices pollute Gypsy space. While the boundary is strong, the social distance between Gypsies and others is maintained and it remains difficult to uncover the hidden areas of Gypsy culture.
This is not to say that relations between Gypsies and the dominant society are entirely static or polarized. Some British Gypsies interact freely with gaujes and there is a long history of intermarriage. In the recent past, that is, since the early 1970s in England and Wales, there has been some recognition of the demands of Gypsies for education and secure settlements (with the gradual implementation of Part 2 of the Caravan Sites Act since 1970), and programmes designed to increase the social welfare of Gypsy families have prompted research which may have increased the awareness of Gypsy culture among officers of local authorities (Worrall, 1979; Hyman, 1989). In conflict situations, however, where the presence of Gypsies is perceived as some kind of threat to property or amenity, a different kind of knowledge - the partial, distorted view of Gypsy culture - is commonly articulated. The media, particularly the local press, continue to represent Gypsies as a deviant group.
This example demonstrates an important general point in regard to the mutedness of some social groups. Because they are muted, they remain partly invisible. This partial perspective on the 'other' renders them deviant in the sense that they do not fit into the categorical schemes of the dominant groups in society. This applies to some aspects of the relationships between adult and child, women and men, the able-bodied and the physically disabled, for example, where children, women and the physically disabled may be represented as 'other', as well as to instances of cultural difference defined by race or ethnicity. Lack of awareness of other world views is not only a question of knowledge, however. It is also a source of oppression.
Landscapes of exclusion
Space is implicated in the cultural construction of outsiders in two respects. First, marginal, residual spaces, places with which groups like Gypsies are often associated (Figure 14.4), confirm the outsider status of the minority. They may be places which are avoided by members of the dominant society because they appear threatening - a fear of the 'other' becomes a fear of place.
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Fig. 14.4 Gypsies camped under a motorway in Aries, south of France, 1990 (courtesy of the author)
Associations are made between place and the minority community, and both the image of the place and the image of the group are founded on mythologies. This is evident in press reporting of events in British inner cities, for example, with the effect that 'inner city' itself becomes a coded term for the imagined deviance of black minorities (Keith, 1987; Smith, 1989). The labelling of places as threatening confirms the otherness of the minorities with whom the places are associated, and relegation to marginal spaces serves to amplify deviance. Press reporting of supposedly deviant behaviour similarly has an amplifying effect (Cohen, 1973). If social and spatial distance are maintained by the exclusion of the minority, it is likely that stereotyped views will persist.
A second role for space in the constitution of the outsider group concerns the arrangement of spaces in the built environment. Spatial structures can strengthen or weaken social boundaries, thus accentuating social division or, conversely, rendering the excluded group less visible. In order to understand the role of space in this process, it is necessary to think about space in relation to the exercise of power. Space represents power in that control of space confers the power to exclude, but some spatial configurations are easier to control than others. I will first examine this general problem, and then consider the outsider issue as one instance of the exercise of power over space.
Historically, we can recognize an association between priestly, military and civil power, and built form. The design of cities has in various periods had an instrumental role in the exercise of power. Thus, in early urban societies, such as the meso-American civilizations, in cities like Teotihuacan in Mexico, the
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bounded, enclosed, central space was the centre of priestly power and one which could not be profaned. Similarly, Neusner (1973) suggests that in ancient Israel, the rabbis could proscribe a wide range of things as polluting and this effectively gave them the power to exclude from the temple and from the land of Israel. The list of pollutants included some animals, women after childbirth, skin ailments, and other bodily conditions deemed unclean. More recently, military power was expressed in the extensive central spaces of the Baroque city. Challenges to authority in the form of popular uprisings were conspicuous if they violated the purified spaces of authority and were more effectively put down than they would be in the winding alleys of pre-Baroque cities (Mum-ford, 1961, pp. 369-70). These symbolic forms are echoed in the modern city in the highly ordered spaces in centres of government power, whether in Bucharest under Ceauescu, Canberra, Brasilia, Washington DC, or the centre of Baghdad. Power is expressed in grand designs and a simple geometry.
More generally, spaces which are homogeneous or uniform, from which non-conforming groups or activities have been expelled or have been kept out through the maintenance of strong boundaries, can be termed pure in the sense that they are free from polluting elements and the purification of space is a process by which power is exercised over space and social groups (Sibley, 1988). The significance of such purified spaces in the construction of the 'other' is basically that difference is more visible than it would be in an area of mixed land use and social diversity. Residents in a socially and economically homogeneous suburb, for example, may erect barriers to those who are different because they pose a threat to the homogeneity which the residents have been conditioned to value. Dear (1980) examines this problem with specific reference to the rejection of the mentally ill and mentally handicapped by North American suburban communities, and the issue is discussed in socio-psychological terms by Richard Sennett in The uses of disorder (1970), where he argues that the North American suburb, as an ideal type of social area, is both exclusive and repressive. I think that the problem is more general than Sennett recognized, however. We can begin to understand it by looking at an analogous problem in education.
Spaces, boundaries and control
In an attempt to understand the relationship between the content of school curricula and control systems in education, Basil Bernstein (1967) has developed a number of schemata which focus on subject boundaries and content. As a control problem, the structuring and organization of the transmission of knowledge is analogous to the question of regulating spatial boundaries and locating objects or social groups in spatial units. In 'Open schools, open society' (1967), Bernstein distinguishes between an open curriculum, which emphasizes the interconnections between different branches of knowledge and thus the blurring of boundaries, and a closed curriculum in which knowledge is compartmentalized and boundaries between subjects are clearly defined. The former he associates with a democratic approach to
s
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learning, where students participate in making decisions about what is taught, and the latter with a hierarchical, centralized system where decisions are made at the top and transmitted downwards, with little opportunity for reconstituting knowledge through interdisciplinary work. In fact, it is in the interest of those in control of the closed curriculum to encourage the maintenance of boundaries between subjects. Their position is secured by the retention of strong boundaries around "pure' subjects because this discourages new thinking across traditional subject boundaries which would present a challenge to authority.
Bernstein later formalized these ideas, describing the organization of knowledge in terms of its classification and framing (Bernstein, 1971). Classification, according to Bernstein, can be either strong or weak. With strong classification, boundaries are clearly defined and the knowledge contained within the boundaries is identified in unambiguous terms. Homogeneity is valued and a blurring of boundaries would be seen as a threat to the integrity of the subject. Thus, strong classification is characteristic of the closed curriculum. Weak classification, by contrast, signifies weakly defined subject boundaries and a concern for the integration of knowledge. Similarly, within subject areas, strong framing means that there are clear rules about what may and may not be taught, whereas weak framing means that many possible relationships and interconnections are explored.
Open/closed or strongly classified/weakly classified curricula could also be seen as alternative models for society, one where power is diffuse and the other where power is concentrated in the hands of a few at the top of a political hierarchy. In applying Bernstein's ideas to the organization of space, it is the connection with the distribution of political power which should be recognized.
Strongly classified spaces have clear boundaries, their internal homogeneity and order are valued and there is, in consequence, a concern with boundary maintenance in order to keep out objects or people who do not fit the classification. Weakly classified spaces will have weakly defined boundaries because they are characterized by social mixing and/or mixed land uses. Difference in this instance will not be obvious and if mixture and diversity are accepted, policing of the boundaries will be unnecessary. Generally, strongly classified spaces will also be strongly framed, in that there will be a concern with separation and order, as there is, for example, in many middle-class suburbs. Weak framing would suggest more numerous and more fluid relationships between people and the built environment than occur with strong framing. Buildings may have multiple uses, either simultaneously or at different times of day, for example. Using this schema, it is possible to see how space contributes to the social construction of the outsider.
The spatial context of the outsider problem refers to the presence of a non-conforming group in strongly classified space or the fear that such a group will intrude into a space which is strongly classified. To give an example of the latter, Sennett (1971, pp. 280-305) describes a middle-class suburban community in Chicago in the late nineteenth century, 'Union Park', where there was a panic following a spate of armed robberies in the city. Whatever the real circumstances of these crimes, in Union Park 'everyone knew immediately
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what was wrong, and what was wrong was overwhelming: it was nothing less than the power of the "foreigner", the outsider who had suddenly become dominant in the city'. The 'folk-devils' in this case were Italian anarchists. In response to this imagined threat, 'only a state of rigid barriers, enforced by a semi-military state of curfew and surveillance, would permit [the suburban community] to continue to function'. External threat, however, may also lead to internal cleansing, an urge to expel anyone who appears not to represent collective values. This need to purify space and society is evident both in Sennett's example of the threatened suburban community and in earlier cases of witch crazes, such as the infamous Salem witch trials in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, when any woman behaving in a way which appeared to depart from an ever more narrowly defined set of community values was in danger of being accused of witchcraft.
I would argue, therefore, that there is a connection between the strong classification of space and the rejection of social groups who are nonconforming. Further, there is evidence that minorities who are obliged to live in strongly classified and strongly framed environments characteristic of planned settlements, which includes approximately half the Gypsy population in England and Wales and many groups of indigenous peoples in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, in Canada, Greenland and the former Soviet Union (Osherenko and Young 1989), may find the organization of space in settlements, or on official sites in the case of English Gypsies, constraining and alienating. This is implied in a comment by a Dene (Canadian Indian) at Fort Macpherson, a planned settlement in sub-Arctic Canada (Berger, 1977, cited in Sibley, 1981, p. 72):
Look at the housing where the transient government staff live. And look at housing where the Indian people live. . . . Look at how the school and hostel, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and government staff houses are right in the centre of the town dividing the Indian people into two sides. ... Do you think this is the way the Indian people chose to have this community?
To summarize, space is an integral part of the outsider problem. The way in which space is organized affects the perception of the 'other1, either as foreign and threatening or as simply different. The strong classification of space, as in the archetypal homogeneous suburb, implies a rejection of difference so the presence of minority groups in such spaces accentuates their difference and outsiderness and the likelihood of exclusion is increased. Similarly, when a minority which does not make separations between activities like home and work is relegated to a strongly classified space and subjected to socio-spatial controls, its cultural practices are likely to appear deviant to the control agencies in the dominant society. In weakly classified space, minorities will be less visible, they may not be identified as non-conforming and, consequently, the potential for conflict over the use of space is reduced. Because behaviour is less likely to be recognized as deviant, control will not be so much of an issue. Thus, we can generally anticipate an association between the strong classification of space and the identification of outsiders as a social category.
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Exclusion and adaptation: relationships between Gypsies and the dominant society
The aspects of Gypsy culture cited in this chapter so far have referred primarily to communities in the British Isles and I will make more detailed reference to a British example later in this essay. It would be inappropriate to generalize from these cases to the whole Gypsy population, however, because Gypsies exhibit considerable cultural diversity. Gypsies comprise a minority population in all European countries, parts of the Middle East, including Egypt and Iran, and in India and Pakistan. In addition, they have dispersed to the Americas, particularly Brazil and Argentina, the United States and Canada, and to Australia and New Zealand as a part of the large-scale intercontinental migrations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, they have had to adapt to a variety of dominant cultures. These adaptations have been one source of difference within the Gypsy population.
Although Gypsies have an ethnic identity secured by language, economy and other cultural attributes, they have intermarried with other nomadic groups and with the settled population. Indeed, it is meaningless to talk about a racial identity although Gypsies have been racialised in the sense that aspects of their way of life viewed negatively have been described as racially inherent. This has provided legitimation for discrimination and exclusion.
In Britain and Holland, in particular, there are also culturally distinctive semi-nomadic groups with whom Gypsies compete for resources but who are similarly seen as outsiders by the dominant society. These are Irish and Scottish Travellers, living in England and Wales as well as in their native countries, and Woonwagenbevoners (caravan dwellers) in Holland. Within the European Gypsy population, communities distinguish themselves by kin-ties, place associations and occupational traditions which have contributed to the emergence of distinctive cultural identities, although migrations have complicated any regional patterns which might have existed. Some of the larger groups include the Kalderas, traditionally metal-workers from Russia but subsequently settled in Paris, Gothenburg and other West European cities, and in the United States, notably in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles; the Boyash, from Hungary and Romania, but also settled in Western Europe and North America and with strong traditions in entertainment; the Sinti and Manus, in Southern Europe; and the Vlach in Hungary. However, self-ascriptions are complex and refer to different groupings within Gypsy society and different national identities. Also, Gypsies may not refer to themselves as Gypsy because of the pejorative use of the word by gaujes. It is for this reason that most British Gypsies usually refer to themselves as Travellers while Rom or Roma, meaning 'the people' in Romany, are self-ascriptions more commonly used by continental European Gypsies. As Liegeois (1986, p. 46) observes: 'Gypsies... are defined as such by the views and attitudes of others'.
The Gypsy economy is one of the most significant features distinguishing the minority as a distinctive culture. It is not occupations which are particularly distinctive but attitudes to work. Thus, it is possible to talk about the Gypsy
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economy as an aspect of culture, while recognizing that the particular niches in dominant economies occupied by Gypsies in different places and at different times vary considerably. In general, Gypsies avoid wage labour where possible and try to maintain a dominant position in any transaction as a matter of ethnic pride. They value flexibility and opportunism, with several money-making activities often being pursued simultaneously within one family, such as scrap metal dealing, horse trading and hawking. To some extent, the economy confirms the boundary between Gypsies and gaujes. Okely (1979, p. 20) suggests that self-employment is crucial in defining this boundary but there are circumstances in which this may not be possible. In Hungary under the Communist government, for example, men were obliged to work in factories, but the Vlach Gypsies combined factory employment with horse trading, scavenging and cultivating their own plots of land. Even social security payments can be viewed as one acceptable source of income, for example, in the United States and England (Sutherland, 1975; Okely, 1979), because taking money from the gaujes does not signify dependency. It is essentially no different from begging, which is still practised by Gypsies in Spain and by Travellers in the Republic of Ireland, for example. Whatever their transactions with the dominant economy, however, Gypsies see gauje society as exploitable.
Living on the margin allows Gypsies to exploit the residual products of the dominant economy, such as domestic scrap, and to provide services where mobility and minimal capital outlay are advantageous. Examples include the repair of supermarket trolleys or car bumpers (fenders) by Kalderas in the United States (Sutherland, 1975). These occupations put Gypsies on the outside but, at the same time, they are highly dependent on urban society. Theirs is an urban culture which popular imagery locates elsewhere, in rural settings. This false image has important consequences for Gypsy communities, creating opportunities but also constraining their activities. If Gypsies are not thought of as an urban culture, it may be possible for them to pass as non-Gypsy traders in the city. In some occupations, a Gypsy stereotype of unreliability would be bad for business so the failure of gaujes to recognize the ethnic identity of urban Gypsies - who 'belong' in the countryside - can be economically advantageous.
The Kalderas in the eastern suburbs of Paris, for example, find that presenting themselves as gaujes, which is made easier by living in small houses or bungalows (pavilions) in working-class districts, helps in getting contracts for building repairs and other work which is not usually associated with Gypsies (Williams, 1982). By contrast, when Gypsies are a highly visible urban minority living in trailers, the rural stereotype accentuates their 'deviance' in the eyes of antagonistic house-dwellers. In this sense, they are polluting because they do not belong in an urban setting and hostile communities attempt to exclude them. Gypsies are not accepted in rural areas either, however, because the visible features of their culture, the chrome-trimmed trailers, piles of scrap and so on, still render them deviant. There is no 'proper place' for Gypsies because, according to the romantic stereotype, they are always distant in space and time.
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Prejudice in practice: separation, containment and control
In Europe, there is a long history of attempts by the State, or by local groups with government sanction, to remove Gypsies from national territory. The Nazi government in Germany was the last to attempt this, through genocide. In modern industrialized societies, the more general objective is to settle and contain Gypsies, to remove them from locations where they are perceived as a non-conforming outsider group, violating space valued by the settled society, particularly residential space. Separation rather than integration is the unstated goal of most settlement policies (Sibley, 1987). An alternative response, evident in several East European countries, has been to deny that Gypsies have a cultural identity and to house them with other workers. In Romania, for example, Gypsies are not recognized as a 'nationality' or minority group, although the country has the largest Gypsy population in Eastern Europe.
Liegeois (1986) documents attempts by European states to eliminate or remove Gypsies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sanctions included the hanging of Gypsy men, in Slovakia in 1710 and Prussia in 1721, for example; the mutilation of women and children; flogging, branding, forced labour and banishment, including deportation from Britain to North America and Australia. In France, a common sentence for being a Gypsy in the seventeenth century was to be sent to the galleys for life. The harshest penalties were eventually seen to be ineffective, however, and other measures were substituted, with the same objective of removing Gypsies from sight, through physical expulsion to remote locations, cultural annihilation or assimilation.
Local responses: the case of Gypsies in Hull
There is a connection between this history of exclusion and response to Gypsies in modern societies. Attitudes to Gypsies in the developed world still suggest that the minority constitutes a threat to social order and, in some countries, a threat to spatial order. Thus, in a country like Britain, where the land use planning system reflects widely accepted notions of spatial order and amenity, unregulated Gypsy settlements constitute deviant landscapes. The response of the State to this deviance is to impose order on Gypsy communities through the medium of official sites, to isolate and transform in a controlled environment. The way in which these controls are exercised locally can be demonstrated with reference to the recent history of the Gypsy population in Hull, in north-east England.
Gypsies have lived in Hull for at least one hundred years. In the 1970s, old people recalled spending the winter months during their childhood in rented houses in the inner city, and migrating for agricultural work in the summer. While some families maintained this pattern of movement and settlement until about 1975, most had by this time settled in the city. They camped, illegally, on roadsides or in fields close to a large peripheral housing estate, or on land cleared of housing in the inner city.
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This was a period of persistent conflict. Evictions by the local authority were frequent, and antagonistic comments by local politicians were publicized in the local press in a series of alarmist articles. One demonstration in the summer of 1973 by local authority tenants demanding the removal of a Gypsy camp close to their estate illustrated the enduring negative image of Gypsies projected by hostile communities. Some placards referred to the deviant form of settlement: 'How much longer do we have to put up with this shanty town on our estate?'. Others alluded to unregulated industrial activity: 'Smokeless zone - Gypsies burn car tyres, we would be fined1. Residents interviewed by the local press at this time made adverse comments about the Gypsies' lifestyle: 'They smell, they have rats, they make a noise'. This particular protest had all the elements of a moral panic but there were also more routine acts of violence and harassment, like bricks and iron bars thrown through caravan windows.
The conflict was defused by the construction of two sites in the city, both locations reflecting the local authority's desire to distance the Gypsies from the rest of the population in order to minimize conflict. The first was built in a heavily polluted industrial area which had been cleared of residential development. The second site was built in an old quarry, used for dumping rubbish, on the edge of the city. It could be argued that, through site development, Gypsies were consigned to residual space- a morally polluting minority was associated with physically polluted places. In a change of policy, a third site is now planned for a residential location in the inner city. The attitude of the settled population has not changed, however: 'Anger over Gypsy camp decision: estate residents plan protest to MP' (Hull Daily Mail, 13 March 1991).
Existing sites have reinforced the boundary between the Gypsy community and the rest of the city's population. The isolation of existing sites is coupled with site designs which represent a geometry of control, or strong classification, in Bernstein's terms. Both site layouts are based on models developed by a central government department (the Department of the Environment). Spaces for trailers are arranged in regular rows and this residential space is clearly separated from the warden's space. There are no work areas or play areas, although these are included in the model designs. Single-use zoning, characteristic of the Hull sites and most others built in England by local authorities, is important as a means of controlling residents. Families have been evicted from one site for 'misusing' space, for example, by erecting sheds in the residential zone. This kind of boundary enforcement causes discontent because the boundaries and imposed by authority and they are not those recognized as important in the Gypsy community, where work, play and residence are spatially integrated. A frequent comment by site residents is: 'You might as well be in a house as living on this site'. Boundary enforcement depends on effective policing. On the other site, the boundaries have been blurred through the construction of chicken runs, dog kennels and storage sheds around some of the trailers. Wardens have not attempted to maintain the separation of uses and, probably because of this, there appears to be a higher level of satisfaction with the site. Thus, while it seems legitimate to characterize official Gypsy sites as landscapes of control, at least in intention, it must be acknowledged that the
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dominated minority can act subversively and frustrate the efforts of the social control agencies.
These sites have been the only home for about forty Hull Gypsy families for a decade. Although there is some evidence of social change which may be attributed to site environments, they do not appear to have fundamentally affected the Gypsies' way of life. Extended families still interact intensively, usually occupying adjacent pitches, but less time is spent outside, talking around a fire, for example. Fires are banned but, in practice, they are simply lit less frequently. More time is spent watching television and videos. Satellite dishes and decoders have widened the range of viewing for a few families but with no noticeable effect on family values. There has been no transformation of Gypsy culture but it is clear that sites are constraining. They limit work opportunities and discourage social interaction beyond the family. They contribute to a resentment of authority, but it is the warden and other council officials rather than the police who serve as the agents of control. The Gypsies are occupying gauje space and have only limited success in making it their own.
Conclusion
The socio-spatial construction of certain groups as outsiders is a complex process but I have suggested that the problem can best be understood by focusing on boundary processes, the ways in which distinctions are made between the pure and the defiled, the normal and the deviant, the same and the \ other. Drawing on social anthropological concepts developed by Mary Dou- [ glas (1966), outsiders can be defined as those groups who do not fit dominant models of society and are therefore seen as polluting. In social space, such i groups disturb the homogeneity of a locality, and a common reaction of the hostile community will be to expel the polluting group, to purify space. For i Gypsies, both their unregulated occupation of land and the controlled environ- t ments to which they are increasingly relegated, as in Britain and Holland, constitute 'deviant' landscapes which confirm their outsider status and reinforce the boundary between the minority and the dominant society.
Mythology plays an important part in the representation of the minority as deviant and not belonging to 'society'. In order to establish the threatening nature of the outsider group, it is necessary to attribute to it mythical char- I acteristics which dehumanize and legitimate exclusion or expulsion. If the group is distinguished by culture and physical characteristics, racist myths become an important part of the negative representation of the minority. The case of European Gypsies demonstrates the importance of racism, but the ; sense of non-conformity is magnified by a fear of the nomad, notwithstanding \ the fact that many Gypsies are sedentary.
Perceptions of an outsider group, however, are also conditioned by its visibility. While an inability to gain a complete understanding of the world view of the minority is part of the problem of stereotyping which academic research may hope to rectify, to remain hidden, out of sight of the dominant society, may also be to the advantage of the minority. In the case of Gypsies, attempting
Geographical Identities 297
to survive in a modern urban society, to maintain an economic system without state regulation, depends on retaining a degree of advantage. In the city, the myths may help them to disappear. Visibility is also affected by structural factors, however, because to assume outward conformity depends on opportunities related to the management of the housing market and the built environment, and these opportunities vary over space and time. Because their relationship to place varies and because of their cultural diversity, there can be no single representation of Gypsies as an outsider group. Gypsy territory might be 'invisible', a house or an apartment in the city, or it might be highly visible, a patch of waste land or an official site - a landscape of exclusion. While a consciousness of the boundary with the gauje world is a defining characteristic of Gypsy cultures, this boundary takes many shapes.
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'Street Life: The Politics of Carnival'
Reprinted infullfrom: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6,213-27(1988)
Introduction
In this paper, I aim to bring together some themes from Caribbean history and social anthropology with some ideas from contemporary social geography about the territorial basis of British racism (see Jackson, 1987). I develop Cohen's notion of Carnival as a socially contested event whose political significance is inscribed in the landscape (Cohen, 1980, 1982) and argue that London's Notting Hill Carnival is a contemporary British event with deep roots in the colonial past. Understanding its contemporary significance requires a knowledge of Caribbean history and of the changing geography of British racism. Although the present-day form of Carnival originated in the Caribbean, its meaning has changed over time. Like racism itself (Sivanandan, 1983), Carnival has changed shape according to the material circumstances and social relations of black people both in Britain and in the Caribbean. The meaning of Carnival in Trinidad and in Notting Hill is as different as the meaning of Rastafarianism in Jamaica and in Brixton. Neither Carnival nor Rastafarianism can be understood as a passive cultural import from the Caribbean. Both involve 'a creative construction of a new cultural tradition, saturating and modifying culture symbols and practices from [the Caribbean] with a specifically English experience' (Miles, 1978, p. 2).1 Also following Cohen, I shall argue that the ritual and symbolic aspects of
Carnival are not autonomous from, or independent of, their political and economic context, while at the same time they are not reducible to it. The cultural is not separable from or in opposition to the political; it is fundamentally political. Carnival is a contested event that expresses political and ideological conflict. It therefore makes considerable sense to refer to Carnival in terms of the 'cultural polities' of British racism (Gilroy, 1987) and as an aspect of the social construction of 'race' in general (Jackson, 1987).
Indeed, the Notting Hill Carnival has been associated with some of the key events in the politicization of 'race' in Britain. The 'race riots' in Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958 were central to the ideological construction of 'race relations' as a political phenomenon in the period leading up to the imposition of immigration controls in the 1960s (Miles, 1984). The empirical evidence presented below suggests that the Carnival riots in 1976 had a similar significance, reflecting a radical shift in representations of black people in the British press and a similarly dramatic shift in relations between black people and the police. This is not to suggest that the riots themselves redefined British 'race relations' but that representations of the riots form a kind of prism through which the broader context of social change can be observed. Together with the social construction of 'mugging' as a 'racial' crime in the mid-1970s (Hall et al., 1978), the Carnival riots presented an opportunity for the ideological construction of 'black youth' as an implicitly male, homogeneous, and hostile group, leading to the subsequent 'criminalization' of black people in general (see Gutzmore, 1983; Gilroy, 1987). The political context in Britain is therefore at least as important to an understanding of the contemporary symbolic form of Carnival as its Caribbean origins. In order to reflect this dialectical structure, the analysis will tack back and forth between Britain and the Caribbean, starting with a discussion of the changing significance of Carnival in Trinidad.
Carnival in Trinidad
Trinidad's Carnival has been described by one Trinidadian as 'the greatest annual theatrical spectacle of all time' (Hill, 1972, p. 3). Although the event has been greatly commercialized since then, Hill's account from the mid-1970s reports how, each year, more than 100,000 people participated in masked parades on the streets (playing mas), dancing, feasting, and engaging in general revelry, playing steel drums (beating steel), drinking, and smoking marijuana (ganjd). Before the abolition of slavery in 1834, Carnival was celebrated in Trinidad exclusively by the white elite, particularly by the French-speaking Catholic middle class. Blacks were present, if at all, only as spectators (Pearse, 1956). After emancipation, the liberated slaves took over Carnival as a way of celebrating their delivery from slavery and, in the words of one contemporary observer, it 'degenerated into a noisy and disorderly amusement for the lower classes' (Pearse, 1956, p. 539). Carnival then gradually began to represent all the social, political, and 'racial' tensions of Trinidadian society. As one recent commentator expresses it, 'in bringing normally distinct and distant groups of the population together, carnival serves only to highlight the differences and hostilities between them' (Burton, 1986, p. 8).