Relative Strangers

<P>Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, <EM>Relative Strangers</EM> sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic portrait of Dom Romani communities living between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working-class neighborhoods, and under conditions of perpetual war and instability.</P><P>The book focuses on how Doms are able to sustain ethnic difference through kinship, even when public performances of difference are no longer emphasized; a kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference, nor detected by the antennas of the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman, Roy makes a case for such ¿other¿ alterity for Romani people and other groups in the region.</P><P>Analyzing intimate ethnographic scenes through anthropological theories of kinship, psychoanalysis, social theory from the Global South, and more,