Marriage and the reproductive regime of a digitally connected Roma diaspora

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes the marriage, family, and reproductive regimes prevalent in a Roma group that, in the post-socialist period, has moved from Romania to over 16 countries in Western Europe and North America. It is based on a long-term collaborative ethnography that allowed the detailed reconstitution of 807 unions held from 1938 to 2021. Family networks in this diaspora have today a transnational character and maintain an intense social interaction by digital means. The paper will show how a partly autonomous social order is constituted and reproduced by a marriage and kinship system that involves gender formations and autonomous domestic development cycles. At its core is an implicit and successful reproductive regime that is often assumed to be biologically determined, and of no value to cultural analysis. Marriages tend to be universal, adolescent, pronatalist, and endogamous (often consanguineous) within this “community of understanding.” They are also negotiated and arranged by paterfamilias following a literal patriarchy or father rule. However, young people often act on their preferences influencing their parents or eloping. Marriages as household exchanges are launched by three major economic transactions. These transactions open the horizontal “circulation” of women and wealth between households following viri-patrilocal residence norms that generate patrigroups and fraternal coalitions.