NUMBER 51 / 2005

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Thomas ACTON is Professor of Romani Studies at the University of Greenwich, London. As a student he conducted the first Gypsy Council caravan summer school in England in 1967. He completed his Ph.D. thesis on British Gypsy politics in 1974.  He has published: Gypsy Politics and Social Change, London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1974; (edited) Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997; (edited with Gary Mundy) Romani Culture and Gypsy Identity Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997; (edited) Scholarship and the Gypsy Struggle: Commitment in Romani Studies, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000; and numerous other books and papers in Romani Studies.

André HOEKEMA is a lawyer and a sociologist who has entered the field of legal anthropology also. He formerly held a chair in legal sociology at the Faculty of Law of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and now holds one in legal pluralism at the same faculty. He has edited (with Willem Assies and Gemma van der Haar) The Challenge of Diversity, Amsterdam: Thela Thesis Publications (now Rozenberg Publications), 1999 (also published in Spanish as El reto de la diversidad, Zamora, Mich.: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1999). He has recently studied the various ways in which ‘indigenous’ peoples are now writing up or even codifying their fundamental laws, and published ‘A new beginning of law among indigenous peoples’, pp. 181-200 in F.J.M. Feldbrugge (ed.), The Law’s Beginnings, Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2003. He studies systems of local communal land and resource tenure and the attempts being made to incorporate these into national laws. He is a member of the editorial board of Droit et Société.

Dr. Craig PROULX is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in both rural and urban Aboriginal justice issues in Canada. He is the author of Reclaiming Aboriginal Justice, Community and Identity, Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 2003, which analyzes an Aboriginal community diversion program and its effects on the Aboriginal community of Toronto, Canada. He has also published articles on Aboriginal justice. Dr. Proulx currently teaches cultural anthropology at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

Tom G. SVENSSON is professor emeritus in Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway. Born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1934, he has studied at several universities, mainly at University of Stockholm, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1973. He moved to Oslo in 1970 assuming a junior position at the Ethnographic Museum, University of Oslo, where he has worked until his retirement in 2004. His primary interest relates to ethnicity, political and legal anthropology, and material culture, mainly aesthetic manifestations, all connected to indigenous settings. He has published extensively in all of these fields. His main publications are: Ethnicity and Mobilization in Sámi Politics, Stockholm, 1976; Asa Kitok och hennes döttrar – en studie om samisk rotslöjd, 1985; and The Sámi and Their Land, The Sámi vs .the Swedish Court: A Study of the Legal Struggle for Improved Land Rights: the Taxed Mountains Case, Oslo: Novus Forlag, 1997.