ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role that emotions play in the construction of communities of particular kinds. It concentrates on love towards kin and grief at the death of close relations, and on what these reveal about the particular Gitano way of linking the self and the group, and of positioning them in time and within the world at large – a world that is seen as including a large contingent of latent threats originating within and outside the Gitano collective. The chapter explains how the ‘Gitano people’ as an imagined community is built on centrifugal social relations shaped by dispersal, conflict and distrust of non-kin. It argues that, in spite of the radical fragmentation that characterizes Gitano communal life, the sense that the people of Villaverde have that they share who they are with each other and with Gitanos everywhere is extremely strong. The Spanish Gitanos face enormous and often overtly hostile pressures to assimilate into the dominant majority.
