Doctoral defence: Eva-Liisa Roht-Yilmaz "Converting identities and moralities: pentecostal christianity among the Roma in Estonia and Latvia" 

On January 17 at 14:00 Eva-Liisa Roht-Yilmaz will defend her doctoral thesis "Converting identities and moralities: pentecostal christianity among the Roma in Estonia and Latvia".

Supervisor:
Laur Vallikivi, University of Tartu

Oponents:
Inese Runce, University of Latvia
Magdalena Slavkova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Summary

This doctoral thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Roma in Estonia and in the Vidzeme region of Latvia near the Estonian border. Since the beginning of the 1990s, which was also the general period of the so-called religious boom that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, Roma Pentecostal missionaries from Finland, who paid particular attention to the Roma minority in the region, have been active in Estonia. Today, most of their missionary work takes place in Latvia, where the Roma community is significantly larger, but also continues in Estonia, as Roma live on both sides of the border and communicate with their relatives across the border. Conversion entails the need to prioritise the identity of believer and to accommodate the accompanying moral code. At the same time, Roma converts must maintain the relationships and values necessary to belonging to the wider Roma community. In the doctoral thesis, I examine how the converted Roma in Estonia and across the border in the Latvian Vidzeme region create themselves as ethical subjects, caught between two opposing moral codes. The work also shows that Roma missionaries from Finland and Roma in Estonia and Latvia’s Vidzeme region create new networks and a search for a common ethnic identity despite the internal differences among Roma groups. Ethnicity plays an important role both in missionary work and in the sensory and embodied practices of experiencing faith. It is shown that mission has a deeper impact when the missionaries of Roma origin combine Roma cultural identity with Pentecostalism and use a culture-specific approach. I show that there are a number of approaches that converted Roma individuals use to find ways of combining conflicting moral norms and systems, thus shaping their Pentecostal moral selves. For example, fortune-telling, which has been a traditional way of earning extra income for Roma women, is generally condemned after conversion and must be abandoned, may not be condemned fully by all converted Roma women, not only because of its economic importance for Roma but also because relationships with other Roma and the preservation of their cultural identity remain important to the converts. This demonstrates how the converted Roma must constantly find a balance between the different moral codes.

The defense will take place in the Senate hall (University 18–204) and can also be watched via Zoom. (Meeting ID: 993 3363 0106, Passcode: 589353)