Abstract
This article stresses the need to perceive cultural changes in East Slovak Romany settlements in a specific context. Most previous approaches to the problems of these settlements, especially the ones based on social politics, have understood their otherness as backwardness rather than specific cultural difference.
In the name of progress and under the influence of above mentioned forces at work, these functioning social structures are gradually losing their typical features. Of the envisaged change, only the first phase takes place, meaning that the functioning social structure and the system of values linked to it is irrevocably lost.
The second phase, successful implantation of the principles of modern civic society and its values, doesnt take place at all, and what follows is a state generally known as anomy.The traditional means and techniques of livelihood of the inhabitants of Romany settlements have been lost and forgotten and there has come nothing to substitute it. Romanies have turned int