Horror Infiniti. Die Zigeuner als Europas Trickster

Abstract

The figure of trickster is well known to all folklore traditions round the world, even among Romani speaking groups as beng (devil) like in the Mediterranean and Balkan context. But the focus of the article concerns the transformation of Roma and other Gypsies themselves into tricksters, which can be shown in three examples: 1) Gypsies in the literature of the Italian Renaissance, 2) Gypsies in the Rumanian Ţsiganiada of the early 19th century and 3) the Gypsy cliche in the ethnography of the 20th century, which comes near to the bricoleur of Levi-Strauss or to an indefinable entity comparable with the irrational numbers in mathematics.