ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the most important social context in which Rom song was produced, the mulatsago, or “celebration.” Song was the medium in which the Rom expressed their deepest feelings and attachments. The sharp distinction that we make between speech and song did not exist for the Rom. The songs sung in the mulatsago concerned the stereotypical, ideologically stressed moments of Gypsy life. Although men predominated in the mulatsago singing, Gypsy women knew all the songs that cropped up there. There were few songs of romantic love among the Rom, no plaints of unrequited passion. The successful performance of a song was a moment in which the habitual “agonistic egalitarianism” of settlement life—the refusal to admit that any man was a better Gypsy than another—was momentarily replaced by a positive, lived equality. Through singing in the mulatsago, the Gypsies transcended the opposition between themselves as individuals and as brothers.
