Of course, the Roma encampment is not only a linguistic transit zone (7.2). As a threshold between the forest and the city it is an exception to the closed structure (paradeisos, urbs) imposed by the sedentary culture that has served as a model for all other exceptions. As part of the Indo-Aryan family of languages, the name by which the Roma call themselves offers us a clue to the topology of their culture. In the Romani language rom (and its variants dom and lom) means “man or husband,” a word that in one of its possible etymologies may be related to the Sanskrit dam-pati (“lord of the house”) and dama (to subdue). The voices dam and dama, as can be deduced from item 0.24, are related to the proto-Indo-European dem-, “to force, constrain” and to the idea of house or settlement. However, unlike the strictly sedentary notion of settlement as a walled place, a paradeisos that determines the border (and threshold) between the domestic and the wild and the self and the other, the Roma’s notion of house—their encampment—is essentially open, permeable and mobile. It is a threshold that allows a constant transit between identity and alterity; a non-place where the transmutability of the house and the forest, of the self and the other is assumed. Hence, the identitary conflicts of the Roma in the legal sphere.

As an itinerant topography, the camp is anonymous and, as any other threshold, potentially everywhere. The paradeisos, on the other hand, as a static delimited space, is a mark on the map with a definitive geographical location, an enclosure of what used to be open and has now been confined to a specific place where the exception takes place.