ABSTRACT
Living in a transnational diaspora, Roma from Macedonia inhabit a “community beyond locality” via music. Their music is intensely local and “traditional,” evoking the Balkans in style, genre, ritual, and dance forms while also being cosmopolitan and innovative in terms of instrumentation, text, and context. Music serves as a communicative marker in this Romani circuit where, no matter where you are located, being “Gypsy” is often a stigma, and where identity is fragile and in flux. Ritual events, which prominently feature music and dance, bind families and communities together, pose the question of what it means to be a Romani man or woman in diasporic locations, and accomplish specific identity work and display core values, especially where ethnicity is contingent and multiple.
