Re: [Callers] Advice about "gypsy"

On Oct 24, 2015, at 5:05 PM, Alan Winston via Callers <callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote: I think apologizing for unintentionally offending is good but I don't think you have to take on all of what your correspondent is offended over. Your correspondent made up the idea that it's so named because of the idea that Romani women are oversexualized. Here's my take on this: - the use of the term "Gypsy" is inherently offensive to some of the people to whom it refers in just the way the use of the term "Indian" is inherently offensive to some Native Americans. It's a name they don't accept (a) because it incorrectly ascribes an incorrect geographical origin to them (Egyptian for Gypsies, India (well, East Indies) for Indians) and (b) was assigned to them by outsiders and became the terms used for them by people who wanted to move them along / kill them. (Although the term the Nazis used, Zigeuner, derives from a Greek root meaning "untouchable" rather than "Egyptian", according to the US Holocaust Museum website.) - The term "Indian File" for walking in a line, one after another, doesn't suggest anything particularly derogatory about Native Americans; I think it's an observation or speculation that the way East Coast (forest-dwelling) indigenous people walked through forests on minimal trails was in single file. We can point out that white society thinks there are many admirable things about native peoples - the whole "Indian Guides" thing shows that - and that the use of the world "Indian" in that isn't intended to be offensive, etc, etc, and yet the obviously right thing to do was to start saying "single file" instead, because the benefits of not pointlessly offending people vastly outweighed the benefits of continuing to use a non-descriptive term. It's virtually never effective and rarely kind to tell people they shouldn't be offended. - By me, the same logic suggests that we should stop calling the figure gypsy. We can go at length into why it's not named after Gypsies, why "Gypsy" is a superset name that includes Rom and other traveling people, some of whom don't mind it, the use of gypsy to mean "traveler" (from which dance gypsy, Gypsy moth, etc, derive), the admiring use of gypsy to mean free spirit ("gypsy in my soul"), etc, but none of that actually matters in this context. What actual benefit do we derive from calling it "gypsy", other than the sunk cost of having a community of people who know it by that name? It's not descriptive. (It is evocative and we have a bunch of dances with "gypsy" in the name; not sure what to do about those.) (I had been thinking that it would be very difficult to get a universal change of name for the figure in the absence of a Callerlab for Contra, but Yoyo's post (where he says he'll just drop the name and prompt by which shoulder you go around) opened my eyes to the possibility of effective individual action by callers; you don't need universal agreement on a new name. That does open the door to a dancer on the floor saying "you mean gypsy?" but I guess you can say "that name is offensive to some people".) I'm going to have to think more about this for my own practice as an English and a contra caller. - I'm personally interested in the history of things and how they got their names, and I'm convinced that gypsy in contra was picked up from gypsy in English which was picked up from "whole-gyp" and "half-gyp" in Morris and that there's not necessarily any relationship of the name to any group of people in origin, and I do not believe that in naming the figure anybody was saying anything about the stereotypical characteristics of any people. I really, with all the intellectual honesty I have available, don't believe that. (And I've heard different stereotypical characteristics assumed to be the origin - sexuality, untrustworthiness, tendency to do non-touching dances, so I think these are all just-so stories, ex post facto rationalizations.) I don't think this blameless origin is a reason to keep the name, and I know it's absolutely ineffective to point out the blameless origin to somebody who's offended. That's the end of my argument, but I have more thoughts. - This is different from people who are offended by callers who sexualize the figure, which they could do whatever it's called. I don't mind gypsy meltdowns, but I find "until you just can't stand it anymore" kinda tedious; let's just walk around each other maintaining a comfortable level of eye contact until the music tells us to swing, how about that?) (And I think sexualizing things and telling dancers how they're supposed to feel, especially if it's sexual, is just getting more and more passe as different people of different (and no) sexual orientation are dancing on different sides of the set. We're all people, we're all dancing together, that's enough.) - I *like* the figure, and I really like the dance providing a safe space to look at somebody else's face and look them in the eye without it necessarily signaling anything. In the general world meeting people's eyes can carry a lot of unintended freight; I think it's great to have a place where you can just do it as part of the dance. Ideally a connection is established, but there are all kinds of connections and they're not necessarily sexual. (Which is not to say that I haven't gotten stirred up, even in meltdown-free, far-apart English dance gypsies, but that's way different from the caller telling everybody they're supposed to.) -- Alan _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list Callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net http://lists.sharedweight.net/listinfo.cgi/callers-sharedweight.net