Kaale Belongings and Evangelical Becomings: An Ethnography of Finnish Roma with Raluca Bianca Roman (Brill Schöningh, 2025)
New Books in ReligionShow Notes
Dr Raluca Bianca Roman's book is an ethnography of the Finnish Kaale, Finland's national Roma community, and of the impact of Evangelical Christianity on their social and political lives. It is based on more than a decade of fieldwork and on archival research from the early twentieth century onwards. The book follows Kaale families as they handle the consequences of settlement, urbanisation and a turn towards the nuclear household, and as many convert to Pentecostalism. It moves from family homes and prayer groups in Helsinki to small towns in Eastern Finland, and on to Roma settlements in Western Romania where Kaale believers carry out missionary work. Kaale life emerges as a set of attachments and detachments, to kin and to the Finnish nation, to custom and to faith, and to other Roma at home and abroad.
Kaale Belongings and Evangelical Becomings: An Ethnography of Finnish Roma (Brill Schöningh, 2025) brings the anthropology of Roma into conversation with the anthropology of Christianity. Its first section, on Kaale belongings, looks at life in the city, at the silence surrounding sexuality, marriage and birth that shapes Kaale morality, and at "inbetweeners" who live apart from Kaale norms. The second section, on Evangelical becomings, turns to Kaale prayer groups within mixed Pentecostal congregations, to conversion as a repeated process of entering and leaving faith, and to Roma-to-Roma missionary work in Romania. Roman shows how religious identity becomes entangled with community identity, and how Pentecostalism can both bring Kaale together with non-Kaale Finns and draw new lines between believers and non-believers.
About the author
Raluca Bianca Roman is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast, where she is a member of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict and the Centre for Creative Ethnography. Her research focuses on religion, particularly Christianity, as well as ethnicity, nationalism, migration and humanitarianism, with a focus on Roma communities in Finland and Romania. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, where she was later a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC Advanced Grant project RomaInterbellum. She was also a researcher on the Academy of Finland project Roma and Nordic Societies at the University of Helsinki. She co-edited Roma Writings in History (Brill, 2021) and a special issue of the Journal of Finnish Studies, Counter-readings on Finnish Nationhood: Minority Strategies and the Making of the Nation (2021). She is now developing research on artificial intelligence and transhumanism.
About the host
Niall Herron is a PhD researcher in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast. His ethnographic work examines queer experience during the Northern Ireland Troubles, taking the everyday as a focal point for how queerness and space were assembled across the period, and how sexuality, gender, region, ethnonational identity, and class were bound up together. His writing has appeared in the anthropology journal Ethnos and the academic queer history blog NOTCHES.
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