The present study reflects upon the process of religious conversion from the point of view of communication practices between those already converted and the person still being in the process of conversion. The analyzed ethnographic material is from a roma community near Cluj-Napoca. Among the roma there can be observed the dominance of Pentecostalism. One of the conclusions of the study is that the central element of the religious change lies in the change regarding ritual communication. The personal conversion goes along with the redrafting of the moral aspects of a person, and this needs the new approaches of both the verbal (testimony and conversionstories) and non-verbal communication (furnishing the house, dressing, public consumption practices, etc.).
The author highlights the importance of literacy during the conversion process. For the converted the congregation represents the primary publicity, but in the same time the others (not converted) are an important reference group. The converted are influenced by the engagements related to the family and relatives, and by the tension of not giving these up.
László Fosztó (Saint George, 1972) graduated from the Faculty of Humanities, Babeş–Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, specialization Hungarian Ethnology and Literature in 1996. He attended the Nationalism studies MA course at the Central European University, from 2001 he is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Humanities, Babeş–Bolyai University. Between 2003 and 2006 he was holder of the Max Planck Social Anthropology Institute scholarship. In summer 2007 he defended his PhD thesis at the Martin-Luther University (Halle-Wittenberg). His main areas of interest: community and culture of the Eastern European roma, roma political movements and moreover, the religious conversion and the anthropological research of the new religious movements. E-mail address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
