Economic arrangements of Romanies are complexly related to their social position. The authors of this volume explore these complexities, including how economic exchanges forge key social relationships of gender and ethnicity, how economic opportunities are constructed and seized, and how economic success and failure are transformed into attributes of social persons. They explore how, despite - or perhaps because of - their unstable and ambiguous position within the market economy, shared today with a growing number of people facing precarity and informalisation, Roma and Gypsy communities continuously re-create more or less viable economic strategies. The ethnographically based chapters share accounts of socially and economically vulnerable populations that face their situation with self-determination and creativity.

Manuela Ivone Cunha is a Professor at the University of Minho and a Senior Research Fellow at CRIA-UMinho. She has authored and edited several publications on the social and penal management of social vulnerability.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Micol Brazzabeni, Manuela Ivone Cunha and Martin Fotta

Chapter 1. Usury among the Slovak Roma: Notes on Relations between Lenders and Borrowers in a Segregated Taboris
TomáS Hrustic

Chapter 2. New Redistributors in Times of Insecurity: Different Types of Informal Lending in Hungary
Judit Durst

Chapter 3. A Way of Life Flowing in the Interstices: Cigano Horse Dealers in Alentejo, Portugal
Sara Sama Acedo

Chapter 4. 'Endured Labour' and 'Fixing Up' Money: The Economic Strategies of Roma Migrants in Slovakia and the UK
Jan Grill

Chapter 5. 'I Go for Iron': Xoraxané Romá Collecting Scrap Metal in Rome
Marco Solimene

Chapter 6. 'I'm Good but also Mad': The Street Economy in a Poor Neighbourhood of Bucharest
Gergo Pulay

Chapter 7. The Mechanisms of Independence: Economic Ethics and the Domestic Mode of Production among Gabori Roma in Transylvania
Martin Olivera

Chapter 8. Deceit and Efficacy: Fortune Telling among the Calon Gypsies in São Paulo, Brazil
Florencia Ferrari

Chapter 9. Houses under Construction: Conspicuous Consumption and the Values of Youth among Romanian Cortorari Gypsies
Catalina Tesar

Chapter 10. Exchange, Shame and Strength among Calon of Bahia: A Values-Based Analysis
Martin Fotta

Chapter 11. 'Give and Don't Keep Anything!' Wealth, Hierarchy and Identity among the Gypsies of Two Small Towns in Andalusia, Spain
Nathalie Manrique

Afterword
Keith Hart

Notes on Contributors
Index