The circumstances for research

Social anthropologists have usually selected as their object of study people geographically distant from their home country or institute of learning. The more apparently isolated from western industrialisation, the more apparently appropriate. In practice, the majority of these islands, villages and tribes were under colonial rule, and experienced trading relations with outsiders, but such influences were usually peripheral to the analysis. The people in this study are within the geography of the anthropologist's own society and western industrialisation. Exotic quality cannot be measured in mileage, since Gypsies so close to ‘home’ are a subject of exotic image and stereotype. In every continent there are people classed as, or similar to Gypsies. In every continent non-Gypsies have notions about them and encounters with them.

Some space will be devoted to the methodology and background to this research, both because it is still relatively rare for anthropologists to do fieldwork in their own country, and because such information should be regarded as integral to the final presentation. The context and funding were not, until a later stage, those of the conventional postgraduate, but initially as part of a ‘policy-oriented’ project in a team which included a social administrator and an educationalist. The circumstances affected the methods and content. Constraints could sometimes be turned to creative advantage.

The political implications of the research could not be easily avoided. The appearance of a social anthropologist in the midst of Gypsies coincided with a change in the Gypsies' relationship with the state, namely the implementation of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act.