Ritual revitalisation after socialism. Community, personhood, and conversion among Roma in a Transylvanian village (review)

For an anthropologist of Western Europe such as myself, the setting of Fosztó's ethnography appears remarkably fragmented: here are Roma who describe themselves as 'Hungarian Roma' and who live amongst another minority, ethnic (but non-Roma) Hungarians, in a village in Romania. Unlike the majority of Romanians, Fosztó's villagers are not Orthodox but either Calvinist or, in the case of some Roma, Pentecostals. Religion works as an important symbol of difference for everybody in Fosztó's village, Gánás, but the groups and identities being constructed are multiple, overlapping and in some senses contextual. Rather than building his analysis on the usual Roma-non-Roma dichotomy that constrains most ethnographies, Fosztó elegantly juggles a variety of categories (Hungarian, Romanian, Roma, non-Roma, Calvinist, Orthodox, Pentecostal and so on). He resists the temptation to frame these terms as binary oppositions and instead shows the complexity of social relations that underpin belonging. He shows the important roles that religious affiliations, rituals and symbols play both in the creation of allegiances and identifications and in their undermining. The result is a compelling picture of Romanian village life after socialism and a thoughtful contribution to the anthropological theorising of 'being Roma'.

Methodologically and stylistically, Fosztó's take may at first appear rather old-fashioned. He approaches religion, not in terms of embodiment or inter-subjectivity as current trends would have it, but as a matter of symbols and idioms and their role in the reproduction of social boundaries. His aim, he tells us, is tracing 'the links between different levels of social organisation through an ethnography of [religion as a] communicative practice' (p. 31, my brackets). As a social anthropological analysis of the role of religion in the public sphere, his approach works very well: through detailed case studies he is successful in laying out 'the rules of symbolic exchanges and practices that maintain connectedness' (p. 3) in the complex arena of rural post-socialist Romania. To do this Fosztó rightly places Roma conversions to Pentecostalism within the complex setting of a more generalised Romanian intensification of religious activity after socialism. He analyses rituals of Pentecostal conversion alongside other statements of religious affiliation in Gánás such as oath-takings, baptisms, burials, or Calvinist confirmations.

In his conclusion Fosztó has a stab at grand theory hypothesising that high-status, resource-rich social groups gravitate towards rituals that celebrate and reinforce community and shared identity. So in Gánás ethnic Hungarians tend to prefer Calvinist rituals that mask social differences and inequalities. By contrast, lower status groups (such as the poorer Roma) are drawn to rituals focused on the individual rather than the community, like Pentecostal conversions. These revolve around the transformation of moral personhood, require limited laying out of resources and enable the mobilisation of non-local links.

Although Fosztó's model is attractive it fails to explain Roma participation in Calvinist rituals and relies on insufficiently theorised notions of community, personhood and individualism. Throughout the book I kept expecting a thorough discussion of local ideas of person and group that never came: these remain taken for granted and unproblematised and I think detract from the overall analysis. By contrast, Fosztó's contribution is at its strongest in his careful ethnographic account of the complex dynamics of everyday Gánás life. There he clearly demonstrates that 'simple explanations of the motives leading people to convert cannot do justice to the empirical realities' (p. 185).