Tsiganologie: the expert view of the “Gypsy question” in France

Abstract

This article explores tsiganologie, a form of expert knowledge about the Tsiganes (Gypsies) that developed in France after the Second World War. To do so, I take as a case study the Études Tsiganes Association, founded in Paris in 1949, which became the centre of production and dissemination of such knowledge in France. It is argued that tsiganologie can be understood as a territoire savant and that the academics and amateurs who shaped it constituted an epistemic community with the authority to establish the scientific, social, cultural and political meaning of Tsigane issues. The discourse of the tsiganologues is examined, revealing how much of it they owed to nineteenth-century thought and showing how they moulded their strategies to the intellectual context of the 1950s and 1960s. Section I provides an overview of the background to this expert knowledge from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth; section II focuses on the foundation of Études Tsiganes and its intellectual activity during the first two decades of its existence, and section III, on its rivalry with the Romani movement (which arose in the early 1960s) and the way that it affected tsiganologie.