Holy Brotherhood: Romani Music in a Hungarian Pentecostal Church by Barbara Rose Lange (review)

Barbara Rose Lange’s Holy Brotherhood: Romani Music in a Hungarian Pentecostal Church is an engaging musical ethnography that deals with the community life and musical innovation within a Pentecostal religious congregation, the Isten Gyulekezet (Assembly of God). The study is primarily that of the music-making in the Isten Gyulekezet – in the Hungarian town of Pecs – whose distinctiveness from other Pentecostal congregations lies in the fact that a substantial number of its believers are members of Hungary’s largest minority, the Roma. In this context, the author integrates and connects within her work theoretical issues of Roma marginality, Roma ethnicity and musical creativity, as well as broader political aspects related to post-socialist transformations and the globalization of Pentecostalism.

The extensive immersion within the everyday life of the religious community required for this research paves the way for an elegant depiction of everyday experiences of both a religious minority and an ethnic minority group in post-socialist Hungary. The author thus analyzes significant social, cultural and political changes, making Holy Brotherhood into one of the earliest works of its kind. There are several ways to justify this argument. On the one hand, fieldwork for this research was conducted in the early post-socialist Hungarian context, providing the context to analyze broader social changes (democratization, globalization, innovation), albeit in a specific, contextualized community. On the other hand, it is one of the earliest ethnographies dealing with the Evangelical revival among Roma communities in Eastern Europe, which has now become a much explored terrain for anthropologists and religious scholars alike. Beyond all this, one of the great strengths of the book is that it offers readers insights into the fieldwork process itself, through the ethnographer’s own reflections on the experience of full immersion within this minority religious community.

The book begins with an analysis of how a Pentecostal congregation in Hungary functions autonomously and distinctly from the majority church. As the author points out in the very beginning, the main religion in Hungary is Catholicism, while Pentecostalism has held a marginal status, especially during the Socialist period. All this changed after 1989, with the impact of democratization, religious globalization and the influence of American missionaries in Southeastern Europe. Evangelizing led to significant conversions to Pentecostalism, often from individuals who felt alienated by the major churches during the socialist rule. This is primarily the case of the Roma members within the Isten Gyulekezet community. The latter is, moreover, presented as distinguishable from other Pentecostal churches in Hungary, a uniqueness especially brought about by the relative ease with which Roma members appear to have been integrated within it.

After this introduction, the main focus of the book moves on to explore the role of music in the everyday life of the Isten Gyulekezet. Although the community appears as non-discriminative and open conflicts do not arise, there are manifested differences between two of the congregation’s groups (the Roma and the Magyars) in the way they ‘receive’ and perform music. In the broader Pentecostal tradition, artistic inspiration is often seen as coming from the Holy Spirit and the performer as an instrument of this communication process. Nevertheless, as the author points out, while Roma members show an inclination towards improvisational song performances, the Magyars appear to prefer more structured ways of artistic expression, through poetry reading and poetry making as evidence of divine inspiration.

The ethnographer additionally identifies differences in apprehending the importance of musical education for church worship, especially distinct views between church leaders and church members. Thus on the one hand, the Magyar leader of the community stresses uniformity through musical training, pointing to the protestant ethic of self-improvement. On the other hand, Roma musicians emphasise the importance of improvisational music making, as forms of direct communication between performers and the community of believers. This depiction aims to show how two contrasting views on musical education can co-exist...