Jiří Lípa, Václav Weinrich and the National Geographic Society project "Gypsies: Wanderers of the world"
Abstract
The aim of the contribution is to offer a Czech reader a possibility to get acquainted with a chapter of the publication Gypsies: Wanderers of the world (McDowell 1970). The book is an output of the project run under the auspices of National Geographic Society and the chapter, devoted to the situation of Gypsies/Roma in Czechoslovakia in late 1960s, is based on the sojourn of the author and huis team in the country and his cooperation with Jiří Lípa, then a leading specialist on Gypsies/Roma at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Partly, the chapter consist of excerpts from the (today perhaps lost) manuscript How we lived, written by Czech Sinto Václav Weinrich, who spent his childhood in an itinerant group of his relatives. The Czech translation of these parts offers (unfortunately only fragmentary) views into the life of travelling Sinti that ceased to exist already several decades ago.