A People without a Land

This chapter discusses how property ownership in the recent historical trajectories of two Romani groups in the Middle East have been interrupted by economic scarcity and political instability. Working with a Marxist framework but also complicating it, I argue that Romani people are singularly unique in the Arab Levant region for being a people historically without having owned property. Yet, they are also a people who have at various points in recent history nearly acquired property—“nearly acquired,” that is, because various attempts by Romanies to acquire property have been thwarted by the tumultuous political climate of a region that has for several decades been characterized by war, colonialism and imperialist projects, religious militancy, and economic scarcity. I place these impediments under the rubric of “biopolitics,” in that it is the biological body that is the site into which abstract economic and political events are inscribed and, later, reproduced through kinship.