Nowadays, although throughout Europe the Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Protestant denominational identities remain among Roma, the conversion rate would suggest the number of Roma Pentecostal will have numerically overtaken all the others in just a few years’ time. The uniqueness of Spanish Gypsy Pentecostalism contradicts some of the stereotypes of global Pentecostalism and resides in its organisational complexity and hierarchical structure, its rapid institutionalisation as a sole church, the thorough theological training of its leaders, and its autonomy both from the State and from the European and Latin American Pentecostal Roma Movement. This article is structured around a life history and two concerns: (a) the role of the constant circulation of the gypsy evangelical ministers as regards charisma and leadership; (b) the growing transfer of prestige from the respected gypsy elders to the young evangelical pastors and their role in wide pacification processes involving ethnic cohesion and kinship.
The Gypsy Evangelical movement started in the west of France where, in the mid twentieth century, the first conversions took place. Back home, the converted started preaching among their people, spreading the religious movement all the way to western Andalusia. Half a century later, we can hardly call this a “new” movement, but we can certainly say that Gypsy Pentecostalism has become one of the most original organizational experiences developed by Spanish gypsies. The process of constructing this new sense of ethnic and religious belonging has been marked by the double suspicion that hangs over Evangelical Gypsies: first, as part of a stigmatized ethnic minority and, second, as members of a religious “sect”. However, this has also helped to strengthen the process of ethnogenesis and cultural reinvention that is redrawing the image of gypsies from the angle of Evangelism. It has also brought about the strategic and intentional mobilization of ethnicity—the search for recognition and political activity aimed at obtaining public resources to finance extensive social development.
The state of affairs of some studies concerning Romani groups’ conversions throughout the world to the global evangelical movement, and the subtext that prevails in such studies, could reveal a persistence of ‘enlightened prejudice’ towards the nature of religions, namely, a kind of suspicion and authoritarianism that continues to tacitly fuel hostility against emerging religious phenomena, and the tendency of analysts to share, consciously or unconsciously, the language of the State, producing a negative vision of the Romani world. The creativity and autonomy exhibited by Romani Evangelism, which stays away from external financing and, generally speaking, policies of minority promotion, contribute to a vast trans-regional network of congregations, that aim towards an unprecedented global pan-Romanism with a strong social base. This is a response to a historic diaspora, and, in turn, a new form of the secular Romani diaspora.
El pueblo Rom es la minoría étnica más numerosa de Europa (10-12 millones). A partir de la década de 1950 empezaron a congregarse en iglesias pentecostales por todo el continente, extendiéndose y ganando estructura e influencia rápidamente, sobre todo en Francia y España. En este artículo se aportan nuevos datos para el análisis de un fenómeno étnico y religioso en proceso de rápido crecimiento, de origen norteamericano/afroamericano, que entre la población gitana española muestra sus propias peculiaridades: un movimiento autogestionado, en esencia ajeno a las convenciones del activismo Rom, a las políticas de identidad y a las políticas públicas de promoción de las minorías, dirigido por ministros gitanos y sustentado sobre una nueva narrativa integradora acerca del gitanismo primitivo con justificación bíblica.
In this article, we discuss personal moments of our respective ethnographic research on Guatemalan Pentecostalism and Afro-Cuban religiosity. Through our own involvement, we expose the approaches of the two religious forms, the former working by way of exorcism and the latter by way of endorcism. Guatemalan Pentecostal exorcism works by a radical expulsion of the previous non-Pentecostal past to strictly convert the person. Afro-Cuban endorcism, on the other hand, endorses the past, present, and future, as it accepts a simultaneity and multiplicity of ‘influences’. No ‘demon’ is perceived, as in the case of Pentecostalism, no ‘idolatry’ is detected and, instead of conversion, what occurs is a cumulative incorporation of multiple initiations. Our approach, we argue, as also inspired by theories of ‘radical participation’ and ‘symmetrisation’, affords a useful vantage point to engage with fine ethnographic nuances of a proliferation of comparative symmetries in the study of religiosity.
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