Paper short abstract

Through this paper I'm trying to bring a clearer picture to the way religion intervenes in the ongoing process of ethnic identification, by analyzing how the Pentecostal religion influences the ethnic identity of a group of Romanian Roma located in the city of Liège, Belgium.

Paper long abstract

This paper focuses on the complex entanglement between ethnic and religious frontiers. The analysed ethnographic case touches the notion of Pentecostalism - seen as a transnational meta-culture, the most astonishing of religious movements, with more than 500 million worshipers outside the West and with 9 million new 'converted' each year; but also the Roma ethnic group that has experienced, if we might go so far to say, a cultural revolution through massive conversions to neo-protestant religions. For these reasons, I have tried to concentrate my fieldwork and my analysis on these particular shifts by investigating the ordinary and every day experiences, by focusing on self-representations and including non-Gypsies into the study. Thus I have shown how elements like: history, tradition, origins; presence/lack of ethnic political participation; conflict; re-birth; ways of ascribing and auto-ascribing ethnicity - all enter the dialects between the ethnic and religious aspect where they are reinterpreted, re-appropriated and re-employed.