Some people may see gypsy traditions as deviant behavior. Some people look at the traveling ways and think it's deviant to just "travel" and not have a concrete place to call home.
A lot of people who are not part of this culture also think it's deviant to not send their child to school and let the children be homeschooled or even learn on their own. Travelers do know a lot about nature and they also do learn skills that are extremely helpful in survival.
Has anybody ever thought for a minute that they (or anyone who doesn't follow our norms) may think that we're extremely deviant for going to from school right to our 8-hour sport practice. To someone who is used to not even going to school and just learning survival skills from nature, spending that much time and effort with extra-curricular activities may seem extremely deviant to them! I know I would feel that way if I wasn't used to it and even participated in that myself.
What do you think? Do you think that if you followed the gypsy traditions you would be wondering why we do such things? Do you wonder why they do such things?
Deviance is so completely relative, which makes this a bigger question than one would initially think. While we might think the entirety of the gypsy lifestyle is deviant, to them it's the accepted norm. For example, I bite my nails. That might be deviant in a debutante society, but in the relaxed environment of the suburban east coast, biting your nails is no big deal whatsoever. It all goes back to ethnocentrism- yeah, I might think that some of the gypsy traditions are a bit, for lack of a better word, odd, but if I were a gypsy I would think of our habits and traditions as odd, too. It's like the "Nacirema" tribe we read- we do some weird things, out of the context of our lives.
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