Nomad Self- Governance and Disaffected Power vs. Semiological State Apparatus of Capture. The case of Roma Pentecostalism

Published in February 2017 online first -  political philosophical research article (qualitative data),grounded theory (nomad self governance and disaffected power) in international blind peer reviewed academic journal Critical Research on Religion : see the link Critical Research on Religion 2017,Vol 5, Issue 2 ; Nomad Self Governance and Dissafected versus Semiological State Apparatus of Capture

To place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a war machine 

Deleuze and Guattari 

Cerasela Voiculescu (2017)

Abstract

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, the article discusses Roma Pentecostalism as nomad self-governance or self-ministry and political affirmation, in a dialectical conversation with stable apparatuses of power such as state and transnational polities, advancing neoliberal program of social integration as semiological apparatus of capture. The latter is upheld by expert social sciences as royal sciences, which translate alternative forms of self-governance into the conceptual apparatus of the state and transnational polities. On the other hand, Pentecostal self-ministry works as disaffected power undoing the architecture of the state subject, authorizing new hermeneutics of the self to take control over semiological acts of translation, and engendering a political  resubjectivation of the governed. The article identifies Roma  Pentecostalism as a source of political reawakening of Romani civil society, a creative line of flight with an immense power of deterritorialization of the main domains of subjection  released by the state and transnational neoliberal government.

Introduction

Religious revivalism in Eastern Europe has often been explained as a reaction to the repressive socialist measures taken against religion.[1] In Romania, during the socialist period, and generally throughout Eastern Europe, religions were repressed, but informal religious practice was accorded a degree of unofficial toleration. Pelkmans (2009) suggests that, in the Soviet bloc, socialist modernization involved transformations of religious meanings and practices and, more generally, an objectification of religion. Religious identities became attached to ethno-national categories and in this way, became manageable by the state as instruments of power (Bratosin and Ionescu, 2009). However, the religious identity of the Roma in Romania has not been uniform (Achim, 2004). Different Roma groups have been Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant; these distributions correspond to the different historical regions of Romania.[2] In the case of the Roma, socialist repression was oriented primarily towards their distinct ethnic identity, which was largely subsumed under that of Romanian and socialist proletarian identity.

After 1989, Eastern Europeans were free to choose and practice their religions. At the same time, post-socialism opened the doors to global religious movements, especially of the Neo-Protestant variety, such as Pentecostalism, which pursued a pattern of local development in Eastern European societies (Clark, 2009; Horton, 1971, 1975b; Lankauskas, 2009; Steinberg and Wanner, 2008). Many Romanian Roma adopted Pentecostalism as their faith. In an article by Ramnicelul (2011) published in The Economist, devoted to the Roma’s religious affiliations, Ilie Dinica, president of the National Agency for the Roma, stated that the Romanian Roma’s conversion to Pentecostalism is steadily growing. The statement confirmed research conducted by the Roma Education Fund, which “suggests that a fifth of the country’s Roma may now belong to smaller religious denominations, mostly Pentecostal, but also to Catholic and Islamic sects” (Ramnicelul, 2011: 1). The principal explanation, as acknowledged by scholars of Pentecostalism, is that the Pentecostal ethic offers a way of “addressing local issues in locally comprehensible terms” (Robbins, 2004: 129), promoting an egalitarian doctrine, which offers equal opportunities to believers with different levels of education and financial resources to experience God as an inspirational authority, an interlocutor in religious dialogs and a life partner (Corten, 1997; Cucchiari, 1990; McGuire, 1975). In addition, as Ries (2007) argues, in the case of the Romanian Roma, Pentecostalism integrates religious and social meanings into a community of common values, which are incorporated into a religious doctrine. These generally uphold the emergence of idiosyncratic forms of self-governance and values Roma started to adopt in their social lives. Yet, extra communitarian programs of governance directed by the state and large important transnational actors[3] approach the Roma as the most ‘vulnerable’ and ‘marginal’ population in Europe (e.g. European Commission, 2010; United Nation Development Program, 2002; World Bank, 2005), or in other words, a subaltern population lacking the necessary political and civic engagement needed for its empowerment and implicitly the capacity for self-governance. Since the 1990s, the EU, within the context of political enlargement, has started to pay attention to Roma as part of an attempt at Europeanizing a population (Van Baar, 2012) who is considered to live and act outside the mainstream European cultural and social norms. This has led to a progressive indigenization and transnationalization of governance with regard to the Roma. The social inclusion of the so called ‘poor’ and ‘marginal’ Roma was largely conceived as a program of social development, whose “objective is the elimination not of inequality, but of difference” (Procacci 1991:160) through an expanding moral economic order of capital, bringing together domains of subjectification, or categorization (e.g. neoliberal subject as entrepreneur), which translate labor power into waged labor.[4] The latter is a category projected onto a population that, in this way, becomes the object of neoliberal governance. The process is conceptually called subjectification and is constitutive of programs of social and human development such as social inclusion of the Roma.

The program of social integration has been pursued principally according to the interests of EU member states (Sobotka and Vermeersch, 2012), aiming at state welfare reduction, capital expansion, and the integration of the ‘free’ labor power into the newly ‘liberalized’ Eastern European market economies. In other words, the social inclusion of the Roma, aims to discipline and bring about the inclusion of the non-integrated poor into the neoliberal economic rationality of the market, rather than bringing about their political affirmation.[5] This has both altered and constituted Romani civil society (e.g. the NGOization of Roma civil society) as an apparatus of supervision and as a mechanism for the implementation of its social programs. It became, from a Gramscian perspective, a site for the exercise of neoliberal hegemony, not a civil society born from grassroots undertakings (Trehan and Sigona, 2009).

Contiguously, other forms of criticism concentrated on what I call the semiotics of social inclusion, with practical implications for governance. From within the discourse of social integration, the Roma are expected to achieve equality and inclusion from an already construed subaltern position (e.g. ‘the vulnerable’, ‘the poor’ and ‘the marginal’), and implicitly acquiesce in their political idiosyncrasies and submit to the semiotics of governance commanded by existent powerful transnational neoliberal actors. In this context, the neoliberal discourse of social integration of Eastern European Roma, adopted both by the EU and member states, acts as a semiological apparatus of capture (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005), a program of governance or technology of power grounded in expertize and social scientific knowledge, which aims to internalize existent forms of social and political organization (e.g. Eastern European Roma’s civic and religious organizations) and constitute them as a form of subordinate politics through acts of translation.[6] In the course of translation, through the use of bureaucratic language, idiosyncratic modes of social, cultural and political governance are redefined as state forms of governance, which need to assume the instrumentality of the state’s institutions, programs and technologies of power. This mechanism used by the state for capturing the existent forms of governance (e.g. Romani Pentecostalism) through the use of translation and the discursive language of governmental power (e.g. social inclusion) is what I call the ‘semiological state apparatus of capture.’ The term was coined by Deleuze and Guattari (2005), who analyze the way wealth is appropriated by the capitalist state through the use of language as a semiotic mechanism for the translation of labor into surplus labor. The latter, surplus labor does not exist as such. It is a semiotic category produced by capitalism and the capitalist state. 

According to Deleuze and Guattari (1986 :15), this process, the semiological state apparatus of capture, acts as an internalizing force in a “perpetual field of interaction” and dialectical communication with global externalizing forces that challenge the state as a form of governance. As part of the global political landscape, the internalizing forces (e.g. states, transnational polities and their programs of governance) aim at appropriating minor social and political movements (e.g. ethnic groups’ political, social and religious formations). On the other hand, externalizing forces (e.g. transnational economic, political and religious movements such as global Pentecostalism), or the worldwide machines that traverse the ecumenon[7] have the power of metamorphosing into global civic movements, beyond and in dialectical communication with the form of the state. The dynamic and process, involved by externalizing forces—externalization—produce an active detachment of social and political forms of organizations from established conceptual frameworks of government established by the state and transnational polities.

Internalization or appropriation through translation or semiological capture and externalization are competitive and complementary global dynamics, state and counter-state formations respectively, which belong to a global political field of interactions (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005). The state as a force of internalization realizes its aims by appropriating the Other through forms of reasoning grounded in scientific knowledge, called by Deleuze and Guattari (1986) royal sciences (e.g. state or expert social sciences). Expert social sciences uphold the apparatus of semiological capture as part of state governance, which acts complementary to the other strand of sovereignty, the state’s judicial apparatus. Thus, processes of translation made by the expert social sciences are able to inscribe and configure the social according to state forms of governance, and, in general terms, are part of state apparatuses of territorialization or semiological capture. For instance, the program of social integration grounded in expertize is able to translate Romani Pentecostalism as a form of self-government into the state and neoliberal language of governance, which territorialize pre-existent society. By territorializing society, a political force such as the state inhabits, regulates, classifies the social space or imprints its manifestations onto its conceptual frame (e.g. the sovereign modern state or reason), which assumes power to build institutional pillars of belonging (e.g. nation state building). Furthermore, each territorialization involves a precursory process of de-territorialization, de-construction or an extraction of a space from its conceptual assumptions and boundaries (e.g. new political and social movements opposed to the rationality of the nation state). Consequently, the semiological state apparatus of capture engages both processes of deterritorialization of existent forms of social and political organization and re-territorialization of these into the state’s enduring conceptual apparatus.  

By incorporating scientific reasoning into its apparatuses, the state is itself conceptualized as a process of thought extension or rational authority,[8] which universalizes its workings and constitutes its conceptual or semiological apparatus as universal, as a way of establishing the truth, “the imperium of true thinking (le penser-vrai)” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 41): “The State gives thought a form of interiority, and thought [Reason CV] gives that interiority a form of universality” (42). Nevertheless, the universality and internality of the state form are opposed by the externality and the decentralized character of the war machine, which is defined in opposition to the sovereign state that aims to maintain peace. The 17^th century treaties of Westphalia established a relationship between sovereignty and peace. Strong sovereign states were considered to be a barrier to states attacking and conquering each other and thus a means of ensuring the maintenance of a global geopolitical order. In addition, the state itself aims to maintain an internal social order and to preserve all the forms of classification associated with it. In these circumstances, the war machine serves as a reference to a struggle against the institutionalization of social and political order and power, which are established by states within their boundaries. It is an affirmative force manifested and engaged by non-state populations, but also by philosophers, local knowledge(s), creative forms of art and social mechanisms, which oppose themselves to sovereign reason.  

Following this, Romani global Pentecostalism, which emerged in mid ’60 and had as a source of inspiration Methodism,[9] can be thought, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) terms, as a war machine, a decentralized movement opposed to the state and its programs of internalization or semiological capture (e.g. social integration); it is grounded in personalized social ‘networks,’ ’profoundly localized’ and ethically idiosyncratic. The personal relation Pentecostal believers develop with the Holy Spirit emphasizes the authority of believers in relation to the external social world and implicitly forms of political power such as the state (De Bernardi, 1999; Gerlach and Hine, 1970; Ireland, 1991; Noll, 2001; Robbins, 2004; Willems, 1967; Wilson and Clow, 1981). These features indicate the movement as a relaying externalizing force, a war machine, which constitutes its enactments outside conceptually territorialized spaces of the state, particularly the neoliberal state and its programs of social integration or internalization of Romani cultural and political forms of organization.

Notwithstanding, some other authors considered new religious movements and Pentecostalism as the new ‘occult economies’ able “to conjure wealth” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001: 19) and support capital ideologically and US led global neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001; Schiller, 2005), leading to a worldwide enchantment. Nevertheless, as admitted by Comaroff and Comaroff, enchantment is not a new phenomenon, but rather a continuous reverberation of the new capitalism, a process of disenchantment that involves technologies of re-enchantment, which can include religious practices and centralized hierarchical organizations associated with leading global ideologies such as neoliberalism. Yet, Pentecostal movements cannot be disparaged by being stripped of their self-ruling capacity and the idiosyncratic manifestations revealed by the believers themselves (Ries, 2007; Vate, 2009) in order to be considered ideological missionaries of market fundamentalism. This translation itself underpins and assumes that the ideology of capital is omniscient and omnipotent, able to incorporate all new forms of self-government into its technologies of power. In addition, global Pentecostalism does not necessarily share the vision of Pentecostal churches that are centralized and evince fundamentalist features, but, as already mentioned, it is a decentralized movement with the power of self-government.

 On the other hand, the state is an internalizing force, a mechanism of demarcation between subject and law, governed and governor. It is a political entity able to capture or internalize the forms of self-government which operate as an alternative to state forms and to constitute ‘the governed’ by regulating its space of political and social expression, which implicitly becomes the territorialized space of the state. Likewise, transnational polities, such as the World Bank, European Union and United Nation Development Program, which are co-external to the state, join the same force of internalization of the social through the semiological capture of the various groups’ forms of governance, which are not yet territorialized by the global neoliberal discourse. In this case, semiological capture involves the translation of ethnic and cultural governance into the language of transnational neoliberal government, which follows a market rationality and implicitly aims at integrating those not yet subjected to its workings.

 Besides, the same transnational neoliberal governance constitutes, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (2005), ‘the right to capture’ (e.g. policies, laws, programs), which has been programmatically informed by extensive social research, building the overall legitimacy of the language or apparatus of semiological capture (e.g. governmental program for the social integration of the Roma), enacted both by states and transnational actors in development. The term ‘social integration’ itself suggests a force for internalization, in this case ordained by the state and neoliberal transnational government, opposed to externalization and political affirmation as the modus operandi of a war machine (e.g. global Romani Pentecostalism) that assumes, as Deleuze and Guattari (2005: 421) suggest, in a reversed Clausewitzian formula, “that politics is the continuation of war by other means.” It is a war that involves political affirmation or, in other words, a capacity to act independently from the state and dominant frameworks of governmental power through the use of idiosyncratic cultural and social features. The whole process is able to contribute to the constitution of a political subject or a political subjectification. The latter, as Ranciere (1999: 36) argues, performs “a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of place” assigned by the governor[10] to the governed and a direct engagement of the governed with the governing as an expression of a political will and affirmation.

Returning to the local religious initiatives found among the Romanian Roma, Romani Pentecostalism seems to be able to release forms of agency and empowerment alternatives to state programs of social integration/internalization and act at the grassroots as a form of political affirmation and globally as a war machine, in a dialectical opposition to state and transnational forms of neoliberal governance. In addition, the religious movement seems to be external and distinct from the existent Romani civil society constituted by neoliberal governmental power, and an almost unexplored area in terms of political mobilization and self-affirmation (Trehan and Sigona, 2009). Thereafter, the research undertaken in this article is an inquiry into Romani Pentecostalism as a form of self-government and counter discourse to the neoliberal program of social integration as a state and transnational semiological apparatus of capture, a conceptualization discussed by Deleuze and Guattari (1986). Generally, the article, informed by qualitative data, aims to prompt critical social research on Romani Pentecostalism and civil society, outside the existent semiotics of governance. In connection with these problematizations, some significant research questions demand attention:

Is Roma conversion to Pentecostalism a form of self-governance and political subjectification? Is Pentecostal religious practice a new language of power for the Roma, construed as an alternative to social integration as a semiological apparatus of capture?

The next section presents the methodology of this study, and the participants and group of Roma with whom I worked. The following sections offer alternative responses to the questions raised and explanations for the conversion to Pentecostalism in Eastern Europe. These issues are further explored in the data analysis sections. I then analyze the data with a view to examining royal sciences or state social sciences as part of the semiological apparatus of capture or program of social integration advanced by the state and by transnational polities (e.g. WB, UNDP, EU). 

1. Method and field site

The study is the result of seven months qualitative fieldwork carried out in 2010 with the Roma in Alexandri, a Romanian locality of 10,000 inhabitants, of which 1,000 are Roma. Religion is one of the most important spheres of interactions for one group of Roma—the Kalderash—whose members have been conducting their lives in an extraneous relation with the state. During 1960s, the socialist state forced the Kalderash’s sedentarization and heavily restricted their trading of products made from copper. In order to seize their gold, the Kalderash’s form of accumulation, the socialist security services centralized their customary leadership and the newly installed leaders became responsible for seizing their gold. After the 1990s, the customary leadership, as a key institution in their self-governance, deteriorated badly and suffered a considerable loss of authority among the Kalderash. These days, the Kalderash are still mobile, traveling seasonally within Romania engaging in informal trading. In addition, by involving themselves in informal businesses in the industrial sector (e.g. buying, selling and re-selling old technology from large plants to small companies), many of them have become affluent. However, some other families continued practicing trading copper made products throughout the country and succeeded in providing themselves with a reasonable degree of financial security. The latter are regarded by both Romanians and affluent Roma families as ‘the poorer’ Kalderash.

In this study, I engaged in participant observation inside the Kalderash’s Pentecostal church[11] for almost four months, and complemented this with ten semi-structured interviews focused on religious practices. My respondents were both females and males, in their 30s and 40s, comprising Pentecostal preachers, union administrators and Kalderash Pentecostal converts who were interested in describing their personal religious practice. I carried out informal conversations outside the church and in their homes and I conducted one interview with the union administrator inside the church. My analysis of the interviews and observations focuses on the relation between religious experience and new understandings of authority and self-governance, which are constitutive of their new subjectivities as converts. In the following account, in order to offer a framework for the analysis of this constitutive relationship, I critically compare and examine alternative explanations by social scientists of the Eastern European conversion to Pentecostalism with regard to state vs. non-state ideological mechanisms of subjectification.

2. Conversion to Pentecostalism and ideological dialectics

The post 1990s religious revival among the Roma in Romania is not necessarily a sign of a ‘traditional’ practice or strategy of survival as portrayed by the media (see Cantón-Delgado, 2010). On the contrary, it may represent the expression of a non-secular process that can bring alternative forms of empowerment (Meyer, 1996; Werth, 2000). Notwithstanding, the religious revival has sometimes been associated with poor economic performance and political instability and a diminished sense of security (Norris and Inglehart, 2004), characteristic of Eastern European societies. These types of sociological explanation, focusing on “disorganization and deprivation” (Cantón-Delgado, 2010: 256), have a political character (Thurfjell and Marsh, 2014) and can be specifically associated with derogatory explanations, which consider Roma conversion to Pentecostalism as a mechanism for the inclusion of the ‘excluded’ or ‘dis-integrated’ into mainstream society or, as Cantón-Delgado (2010: 256) asserts, as a “symbolic rebellion by marginalized and oppressed people.” Yet, many other social scientists pointed out the idiosyncrasies of Romani Pentecostalism (Hefner, 1993) without distorting its force of deterritorialization and semiotics, developed outside the semiological state apparatuses of capture upheld by expert social sciences. In this case, one of the explanations offered was that Romanian Roma populations looked for an ethnic-religious category that offered a distinct identity (Foszto, 2006). If being a Hungarian meant being Catholic or Protestant, and being a Romanian meant being Orthodox, it is conceivable that being a Roma would mean being Pentecostal. Nevertheless, the religious landscape looks more complex and is locally highly particularized. For instance, in my case study, while some groups of Roma living in extreme poverty—Romanianized Roma—were not interested in conversion to Pentecostalism, Kalderash, enjoying a degree of affluence, were very receptive to these new religious practices and built their own Pentecostal church. During the socialist period, most of the Romanianized Roma were sedentary, working as unskilled workers in state factories and farms. Their lives were primarily organized by the state, which still appears in their language as a paternal figure. Broadly, it can be argued that the Romanianized Roma were more inclined to miscognition of state domination, as well as of alternative forms of governance, which are elaborated by external forms of authority. They have been subject to a process of mystification, which is performed ideologically by the state, blurring the boundary between the reality of the state domination and the illusion of independent thinking subject. Following this, Romanianized Roma, as ideological subjects of the state, were less able to identify Pentecostalism with a form of self-governance, alternatively construed with state governance. On the other hand, the Kalderash perceived the socialist and the post-socialist state as a threat to their independent forms of social organization and economic life, associated with nomadism as lifestyle until the 1960s. In this context, the differential relation with the state indicates a different relation towards external authority and different levels of ideological subjection to state power, which is strongly challenged by the Kalderash looking for alternative forms of governance, but appropriated and incorporated by the Romanianized Roma into their everyday lives.

           Similarly, for the Chukchi and other ethnic groups of Siberia, Pentecostal conversion was interpreted “as an attempt to regain agency” (Vate, 2009: 41), previously captured by the Soviet state. For the Spanish Gitano, as Gay y Blaso (2002: 185) suggests, Pentecostal religious practice emphasizes “the uniqueness and superiority of Gitanos over non-Gypsies,” which can act as an engine for self-reformation and renaissance of a rejuvenated political community. It is indirectly implied that Romani Pentecostalism should be understood as a reversed ideological construction in a dialectical opposition to current transnational Romani activism and politics, largely seen as an abettor-subject of global neoliberalism, which fuels processes of ethnic minoritization[12] pledged by transnational governmental power. The conversion to Pentecostalism can also bring about an individual’s disconnection from imposed forms of authority and a reformulation of self-authority through religious practice and objectification of the religious self. Individuals can simultaneously adopt alternative narratives, which can be ‘hegemonic’ reproducing the existing structures of power or ‘subversive’ challenging different layers of power (Ewick and Silbey, 1995). For instance, as Marshall (2009) documented in the case of Nigeria, the Born Again movement has answered to needs of re-subjectification and remodeling of the national subject’s sovereignty previously destroyed by colonialism, but it has also cultivated an ethic of submission to Christian values, which generally requires penitence and an increased self-control. Hence, it could be claimed that conversion to Pentecostalism is neither a totally atomistic experience, nor a discourse entirely colonizing the individuals’ consciousness (Pelkmans, 2009). It involves both the adoption and domestication of meanings conveyed by articulations between religious authority and self-expression. Thereafter, the study of conversion to Pentecostalism can cast new meanings upon “cultural categories such as agency and power, familiar and foreign, space and time” (Wanner, 167) as well as new forms of grassroots self-governance and political subjectification. In the following section, I explore Roma believers’ religious domestications and the way in which conversion to Pentecostalism brings changes in their discursive practices and their relation with forms of authority, leadership and pastorate.

 3. Roma Pentecostal pastors and domains of subjection

According to Dionis, one of the Union’s administrators, in 2008 there were only forty-five Kalderash converts in Alexandri. By 2010, their number had reached 135. This expansion evinces an increased level of conversion among the Kalderash, who emphasize a change in lifestyle—‘Godly ways’—which marks a significant distinction between themselves and everybody else. Moreover, the Pentecostal conversion brought changes in the way the Kalderash approached local authorities and their customary leaders (bulibasi). However, not all Kalderash converted to Pentecostalism. Some of the believers considered that only ‘the poorer’ Kalderash, who hoped for more equality and community cohesion, joined the union. It was also an opportunity for several rich Kalderash, who had been unsuccessful in their economic activities and unsuccessfully aspired to customary leadership, to become administrators of the union and, in this way, regain some prestige and authority in the eyes of poorer converts.

Before delving into the analysis of religious practices and forms of self-governance, I explore several considerations about Roma leadership. In Romania, until the state enforced sedentarization in the 1960s, the Kalderash Roma had a nomadic lifestyle and an idiosyncratic form of self-governance based on reticulated movements and the small family group administration of resources and distribution of economic activities. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (1986: 13), nomadic Kalderash were organized around customary leaders of “groups of the rhizome type,” opposed to centralized forms of power such as the state, based on hierarchies and rational authority. In general terms, rhizome type groups, operating as part of decentralized networks, are based on kinship relations and do not follow a pre-established order, but rather share a collective support for common social and economic practices. Small group customary leadership and its forms of control over members are limited and mainly based on the continuous negotiation of collective avowal, involving “no instituted power other than prestige, no other means of persuasion, no other rule than his [leader’s CV] sense of the group’s desire” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 11).

Among the Kalderash, the customary leader was usually a respected elder negotiating access to local state services and commercial activities, embodying an almost non-hierarchical “complex mechanism that does not act to promote the strongest, but rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a web of immanent relations” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 12). It follows that customary leaders did not dominate, but were part of mobile small units of governance connected to each other as part of a larger decentralized network impeding the reticulated political organization of nomadic family groups from being captured by the state apparatuses of power. In other words, mobile groups of Roma were not subordinated to a main leader able to collaborate with state institutions and were more focused on mobile governance organized by a leader with limited attributions. The small groups were able to both connect to each other and maintain their independence within a network opposed to the centralized and hierarchical character of the state. I call this form of social and political organization, based on kin relationships, reticulated mobile self-ministry, or in other terms, nomad self-governance. Deleuze and Guattari (2005) identify the nomadic feature as an expression of a political affirmation in dialectical opposition to stable and settled state centralized apparatuses of power. The term does not necessarily emphasize dichotomies between the state and external forms of governance, but rather indicates independent forms of governance (e.g. community governance) in a dialectical communication with state governance, which both configure the architecture of their political subjectivities.

          Yet, the nomad forms of self-governance and leadership underwent substantial changes in conjunction with the transformation of the state from socialism to post-socialism. During the state enforced sedentarization of the 1960s, the customary leaders of small nomadic groups became subordinated to a principal customary leader, who would then serve as a collaborator with Securitate, the state security service, and serve as a broker in a shared control-dyadic relation with the socialist state. This constituted a mechanism of incorporation of the Romani leadership and indirectly of their nomadic self-governance into the state apparatus of control and repression. Overall, the relations between the customary leader, the socialist state and the Kalderash progressively delegitimized the institution of bulibasa among the Roma. Once the post-socialist period began, with no support from institutions and with a delegitimized institution of leadership that the Kalderash associated with state violence, the principal leaders lost a significant degree of their authority. On the other hand, the informal economy that emerged created opportunities for the Kalderash to improve their material position and for members of some wealthy families to claim the position of bulibasa, which decentralized and multiplied the Kalderash’s claims to leadership. In order to gain some authority (e.g. the power to institute and maintain local community governance) several of them became preachers, enacting the re-building of community, re-approached through religious dialogs with God and the idiosyncratic practice of communion.

         The Pentecostal church in Alexandri followed the model of a small congregation that incorporates or negotiates local cultural norms and the believers’ experiences and expectations. In general, the atmosphere during the church services is quite different from that in Romanian non-Romani Pentecostal churches, where believers follow the pastor’s directions and listen in silence to his prayers, sing in the choir and pray in a moderate voice. In the Kalderash’s church, believers pray loudly and speak in tongues. In addition, as believers indicated, Pentecostal religious performances are different from those permitted in Orthodox churches, which are mainly directed by the priest, who performs ministerial power over a community of values, which are taught and not presumably reflected upon. Divine authority is not delegated, but is personified in the image of the priest who governs the believer’s religious self in a continuous rhetoric of submission to a transcendent Holy Spirit, and is disconnected with the endeavors for self-government. However, during Pentecostal sermons, Roma believers are expected to actively and creatively participate in the new architecture of their subjectivities, practice the art of self-dialog through testimonies and prayers, deterritorialize existing domains of subjection to extraneous forms of power and incorporate the self into a communion with the immanent Divine, which is appropriated as a life partner. Notwithstanding, and similar to Pentecostal Gypsy Travelers (Voiculescu, 2012), pastors are not recognized as community leaders exercising power over believers and are not followed as advisers on self-conduct. They are rather expected to enhance the believers’ participation in the religious community (e.g. sermons), to extend and strengthen social bonds and financial support among community members, without interfering in their private lives and sphere of decision-making. Likewise, there is a practice of ethical communion which promotes egalitarianism and condemns affluence as a source of alienation from an authentic self, engaged in a dialogical personal relationship with God—an immanent authority defiant of alternative forms of subjection. Dionis, a charismatic leader, who is a preacher of the Pentecostal Union, often calls for the dissolution of the differences between rich and poor Kalderash. Some other believers themselves do not accept a clear-cut division between rich and poor, which from their viewpoints would generate conflicts between members of the community. During one sermon, a young woman performed a song, a call for the rich Kalderash to give money to the poorer ones. In exchange for their good deeds, the rich would receive rewards from God. Similarly, but on a different day, a Kalderash woman on her way to the church contemplated the rich Kalderash’s ‘palaces’ and remarked that their wealth means nothing in God's eyes. The content of this kind of utterance and performance suggests an opposition to the religious community of values and sharing in which all are brothers and sisters. In other words, Roma believers, who share a kin related solidarity and a socially unbound rhetoric of a dialogical self in relation with God, go beyond a collective ideological communion, and guided by the pastor help each other financially when needed (e.g. the illness or death of family members). Additionally, all the concerns related to interactions with the local authorities and the problems of life (e.g. poverty, sickness) are portrayed in songs or testimonies and discussed collectively inside the church. These symbolic enactments of local community governance are usually harmonized by a pastor who performs the duties of gathering believers, connecting those in need to those who can be supportive and dealing with administrative issues that can affect the unity of the religious community. As many Romanian Roma believers in Alexandri stated, the pastor’s authority is limited to power to administratively build and organize a religious community, and does not include the control over believers’ everyday lives. This kind of community governance is commonly practiced in Romanian Roma Pentecostal unions all over Europe, including those established in the UK (Voiculescu, 2012; WSREC, 2015). Notwithstanding, these do not indicate an integration into a social and cultural space of the majority, as Slovak ethnologists Podolinska and Hrustic (2014) claim for the case of Slovak Roma. On the contrary, as Cantón-Delgado (2010) and Gay y Blasco (2002) argue, in the case of Spanish Gitano, believers are already integrated in social networks and identify themselves with Roma local communities, but they distinguish themselves from the non-Gitano/Roma. In general, Roma Pentecostals are primarily looking to emphasize the idiosyncrasies of a moral self, fed by a religious dialogical practice, in a seamless dialectical conversation with non-Roma culturally enchanted modern forms of subjection such as state institutions. 

 Preaching about the role of faith and religion vary in relation to the preachers’ identities. Irrespective of their cultural or ethnic background, pastors from other Pentecostal Unions are often invited to preach at the Kalderash’s church. On one of these occasions, a Romanian non-Roma pastor, Teodosie, from a neighboring area, was invited. His speech was different from Dionis’ and followed the logic of controlled governance imposed from above. In his speech, he mentioned that believers should avoid engaging in informal commerce. He gave as an example an illiterate woman who used to cheat customers at the market and, after she became a Pentecostal believer, without being able to read the Bible, she received the Holy Spirit and gave up cheating. However, Teodosie’s speech was not very well received. His preaching was rather didactic, with questions from the Bible to which no one knew the answers. Many of the Kalderash believers either started laughing or left the church. At the end of the service, non-Roma pastor Teodosie explained his views on Pentecostal religious practice, which he saw as a form of education, encouraging literacy and promoting the reduction of criminality among the Roma. He indirectly confirmed that his preaching was aimed at producing a contiguous effect. It was a different way of approaching Pentecostal religious practice, as a form of teaching from above, adopted and ideologically performed by the state, with the aim of demarcating the border between governors and governed. Notwithstanding, Kalderash preachers and administrators of the union follow the local, contextualized character of Pentecostalism, and promote a softer version of change, which does not exclude the so-called Romani ‘traditions’ (e.g. early marriages, informal economic practices). In general terms, Pentecostal religious practice brings about a domestication of religious practice and a reformulation of the subject as a ruler of the self, in a dialog with God as an internalized authority. It establishes a new sphere of self-ministry and of the hermeneutics of the self, which I discuss in the next section. 

3.1 From Bulibasa to God: self-ministry and the hermeneutics of the self

 In many informal conversations about leadership, Kalderash believers claimed that they no longer ‘listen’ to their customary leaders —bulibasi— and that the roles of bulibasi are, when needed, limited to mediation between the community and the police. The presence of God became more important and even replaced the role of customary leaders in their everyday lives. In addition, many believers started to claim that their ultimate bulibasa is God. In a conversation I had with one of the union administrators, Daniel, this transfer of authority between bulibasa and God was clearly stated.

    C: Do they [Kalderash] still listen to bulibasa?

D: Who listens to bulibasa today? He does not matter anymore. We listen to

God. Why should I listen to bulibasa? Does he give us anything?

C: Who gives you support? Bulibasa or God?

D: In the past, bulibasa helped us. Now it is finished with bulibasa.

C: What does he do now?

D: He handles police claims or intervenes when there are fights among us, and

that is all.

C: Do you have other bosses?

D: No. We just listen to God.

C: Why are they bulibasi then?

D: It is just that they consider themselves bulibasi.

C: What role do they have in relation to you?

D: They have no role (...). Instead of helping the poor, they tell everything to the

police. (Interview with Daniel, Pentecostal union’s administrator)

As with many other Kalderash believers I talked to, Daniel explained that the bulibasi are self–appointed and are part of the self-interested rich community and lack authority among the poorer Kalderash. Mediation with the police is again mentioned as the single role customary leaders still play. On the other hand, Pentecostalism, as practice and belief, seems to have blurred the division between rich and poor and to have generated a transfer of government from bulibasa to God and, finally, to the Kalderash themselves. It gives a sense of empowerment to individuals, who are no longer in a relation of dependence upon an extraneous source of authority. For instance, Dumitru, a Kalderash believer from a moderately wealthy family claims that Jesus is the new bulibasa and the only leader in his life.

C: But, who is bulibasa now?

D: Everyone is her/his own master. Bulibasa deals with police issues only. It is

just a word: bulibasa. They are bulibasi, but not our masters. We have Jesus.

C: Do you fear him [bulibasa]?

D: We feel fear because he is our bulibasa, but we have no issues with him. If

they [bulibasi] help you, they ask for money. It is better to manage yourself. If

you are weak and don’t know what to do, you still go to him [bulibasa]. He

sometimes says: come to me, if you do not come, I’ll beat you. We have our

bulibasa, that is, Jesus.

C: Can you still have a bulibasa, or is Jesus the new bulibasa?

D: Bulibasa is a name, but we are masters of ourselves. If someone comes to me

to harm me, I go directly to the police and complain. I'll go to courts and ask for

his arrest. (Interview with Dumitru, Pentecostal believer)

          Similarly, to many other Kalderash, when referring to the roles and importance of bulibasa for the Kalderash community, Dumitru’s statements are contradictory: “we feel fear because he is our bulibasa” which contradicts the assertion “they are bulibasi, but not our masters.” The distinction indicates that bulibasa is no longer an authority, but only a source of fear and control for the ‘weak,’ who ask for mediation services provided by the local authorities. Believers’ strength in their relation with external forms of control comes through their private relationship with God. In this context, Dumitru’s statements become relevant: “everyone is his/her own master” and “we are masters of ourselves.” Both suggest that Roma believers tend not to distinguish between divine authority (e.g. God or Jesus) and a dialogical religious self—self-God—and claim to be both masters of themselves and have God as the master of their private lives (Voiculescu, 2012). For believers, God appears as an egalitarian internal life partner, and is therefore relational. God is an immanent authority, in Deleuzian terms, indistinguishable in relation to the self, and not a transcendental sovereign force commanding obedient submission, as it is the case in the Orthodox and Catholic faiths. This religious partnership with God internalizes the center of decision-making and control over acts of translation, authorizing a new hermeneutics of the self to evolve into a form of self-ministry, which is no longer subject to external semiological capture, in so far as the seamless self-God dialog remains the constant locus of authority and constitution of believer’s subjectivity. Furthermore, through conversion and penitence (e.g. renouncing bad habits) believers break their relation to their past identities to become subjects of their own self-mastery. This process creates affective and reflective relations to oneself—a form of knowledge of the self, complementary to a care for the self (Foucault, 2005) as part of a new form of self-government, exclusively mediated by Divine-self authority (Voiculescu, 2012).

          Like other Roma believers, Dumitru considers that they do not need mediators or representatives (e.g. bulibasi or pastors). The self–governance gained through the new religious Pentecostal experience and partnership with God replaced leaders’ mediation of their everyday problems. It led believers into a much closer relation and interaction with the local authorities (e.g. police and local council). Many of them claim they can approach state institutions directly and solve their problems with no help from their customary leaders. Hence, on the one hand, Roma believers endorse a domesticated Pentecostal ethic and on the other hand, expand their private space of decision-making to encompass their interactions and relations with heteronomous sources of authority (e.g. the state or leaders), which ultimately are mediated by the religious self.

          Compared to the program of social integration of the ‘marginal’/’vulnerable’ as a semiological state apparatus of capture of vernacular forms of governance, aiming at constituting Roma as subaltern subjects of the neoliberal state structures and labor markets, the Pentecostal ethic constitutes Roma believers as political subjectivities in the making, capable of self-governance. Partnership with God as self-mastery offers a new hermeneutics of the self, exclusively mediated by the God-self relationship, which becomes the autonomous center of decision-making in the interactions believers have with external authorities or the state. This process translates into a form of self-governance independently and alternatively construed to state governance and customary leadership, and generates a form of empowerment from within the self and community. In the next section, I critically discuss the way Romani Pentecostalism as a form of self-government is translated by expertise and social sciences into the program of social integration of the ‘marginal,’ run by states and transnational polities, as an apparatus of internalization or semiological capture.

 

Discussion: Romani Pentecostalism as Nomad Self- Governance vs. Semiological State Apparatus of Capture

Inspired by this case study and previous research I carried out (Voiculescu, 2012), I suggest that Romani Pentecostalism is able to engender an individualization of the space of decision-making, which is not in any sense a space of responsibilization associated with ‘reflexive modernization’ (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994) that can easily be translated into the liberal understanding of ‘free will,’ which stands at the core of projects of human development and social integration for the Roma. Responsibility becomes blurred by the private relationship believers establish with God, who provides the source of both right and wrong. Claiming the supreme authority of God in relation to themselves and others, Roma believers feel more able to manage their relation with extraneous forms of authority and manipulate discourses on right and wrong, good and bad, which are usually structured by state power and transnational government through institutions, norms and laws. On the other hand, localized Pentecostal practice leaves space for the domestication of religious doctrine, which does not beget the submission expected by the state, but is instead translated into self-government, which strengthens and internalizes the center of individual decision-making and underpins the expropriation of other forms of authority (e.g. state institutions, bulibasi) from their everyday lives. Hence, the locus of authority and empowerment is disaffected into the private space of relations with God and the religious self. In this case, Pentecostal religious semiotics acts as disaffected power, deconstructing or undoing the subject of the state. Furthermore, centered on a dialogical religious self—God-self—Romani Pentecostalism deterritorializes/deconstructs existing domains of subjection to external forms of power, including subjection to state power. The religious self is re-territorialized as political affirmation into a form of self-governance that is construed alternatively to the state and its program of social integration, and these reveal the main characteristics of self-ministry or nomad self-governance, discussed in the first sections. Following Foucault (1997), the latter matches juridical-political patterns of subjectification through which strong relations to oneself are cultivated, imposing a rupture with the previous forms of subjection (e.g. subjection to the state) and establishing the relation with God-self as a new locus of mastery and sovereignty. In other words, the conversion to Pentecostalism does not “target the establishing of an identity but, instead, serves to mark the refusal of the self, the breaking away from self” (Foucault 1997: 96), a nomad self-government or a form of political subjectification that involves a detachment by Roma believers from a mechanism of identification and constitution of the governed subaltern, imposed by the state and transnational neoliberal governance.

In addition, based on two other pieces of research carried out in the UK with regard to Romanian Roma migration and Roma migrants in other European countries (Voiculescu, 2012), Romanian Roma Pentecostal unions appear to be organized around extended families, having a reticulated and volatile nature within the EU (WSREC, 2015). Romanian Roma who constantly travel, live and work in various EU countries institute unions they can easily divide or dissolve if necessary (e.g. conflicts between families, migration to a different country), to be recreated in a different city or country, in a smaller or larger format (WSREC, 2015). This conforms to the image of a rhyzomatic—irregular, dispersed, decentralized—and highly unstable movement of cells of self-government disembodied from central routes of governance, which gives an idiosyncratic character to the Romanian Romani Pentecostal movement. It helps Gypsy Travellers from all over Europe such as the Spanish Gitano (Gay y Blaso, 2002; Cantón-Delgado, 2010) to build transnational networks through Pentecostal unions and organize annual global conventions. All these suggest that Romani Pentecostalism can act as a form of reticulated self-ministry in dialectical opposition to centralized, stable apparatuses of power such as the state or transnational actors in development.

Besides, the decentralized and non-hierarchical nature of the global Romani Pentecostalism, which connects independent Pentecostal unions to each other, without altering the autonomy, wards off the state capture of the Pentecostal network and its associated ideology, or, in other words, its absorption into the state structures of domination. Although some unions might surrender to state projects of internalization/semiological capture, other ones would be able to continue to act independently as units of nomad self-governance. Some pastors can become brokers of the state, but they would be unable to exercise control over the believers’ ideological choices, as believers are endowed with self-mastery. In both cases, fragments of the captured units,[13] rejecting domination by the state or other powerful organizations, are able to split into multiple units, which can, in their turn, claim autonomy. On the other hand, such independent Pentecostal unions are able to communicate with each other, retaining power to diffuse ideology and engagement with local self-government and possible civic movements. Thereafter, the global Pentecostal network seems to act as a war machine, with the capacity to resist state projects of internalization or capture of its idiosyncratic forms of self-government, which, in the long run, may lead to the constitution of an independent civic and political Romani society, and implicitly to a decolonization of the subaltern governed subject of the state and transnational neoliberal governance.        

Notwithstanding, the semiotics of Romani Pentecostalism are not always reflectively problematized by many Romani studies researchers. The Roma pastor is portrayed as the governor, holding power over believers and leading the formation of the local opinion, “achieved by silent control over the members of the community” (Slavkova, 2003: 10). According to this interpretation, Roma pastors are “desired partners of local governments in solving the accumulated Roma problems” (Todorovic, 2004: 1017) or, state brokers able to discipline the community as promoters of state social integration (e.g. Podolinska and Hrustic, 2014). Nevertheless, Pentecostal Roma pastors have no instituted power over the transfer of community government to the centralized and hierarchical state power apparatus, but only power to organize religious community locally. As my fieldwork data and previous research show (Voiculescu, 2012), pastoral power over is displaced to believers through self-mastery and internal dialogs with God. Yet, experts on Romani issues seem to translate the Pentecostal discipline into a form of ‘normalization’ and ‘education’—a successful program of ‘social taming,’ a substitute for state programs of integration, which helps to produce submissive Roma.

If we focus on the changes in behavior within these communities, and the forms of coexistence with others, then we can say that the church, especially the Neo-protestant church, has succeeded in integrating them [Roma CV] into society (...) We cannot compare what the state does with what the church has succeeded in doing for them. (Horvath, 2009: 1)

The strong emphasis on bible studies, sermons and devotional literature creates a high literacy rate among the Pentecostal converts that in turn lead to a valorization of education as a way of social achievement (Gog, 2009: 106) (...) the internalization of moral codes and the puritan ideals allows the converted Roma to articulate distinct practices that are totally contrary to the general perception or Roma as vagabonds that steal, cheat and are dirty. (p.108)

           These statements and the meanings assigned to the Roma Pentecostal conversion raise challenges to the legitimacy of the program of social integration, which could be regarded as an unsuccessful project of ‘social taming,’ pursuing a purely instrumental rationality. It also suggests how a genuine form of self-government can be semiologically incorporated into the state language of normalization and how particular forms of cultural translation made by social scientists unmask a thought territorialized by the state, which makes “the distinction between the legislator and the subject under the formal conditions permitting thought, for its part, to conceptualize their identity” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986:43). These forms of semiotic translation made by social sciences can be considered as symbolic procedures for wielding the semiology of the state apparatus of capture.

 Following Deleuze and Guattari (2005: 444), the translation of Romani Pentecostalism reflects two operations constitutive of the semiological apparatus of capture: “direct comparison and monopolistic appropriation,” which presuppose each other. In the act of comparison with the state’s social integration, Romani Pentecostalism is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms ‘overcoded,’ reconstituted in the act of translation and incorporated into state language and its programs of governance. In other words, Roma nomad self-governance is translated into sovereign’s colonizing discourse, which ingests creative acts of redefinition of the self and community. The latter are conceptualized by social expertise into the theorematic apparatus of the state, which assumes social integration as a scientific solution and an internalized model of governance.

Henceforth, Romani Pentecostalism that can act globally as a war machine and locally as nomad self-governance, productive of political subjectivities—the ruled who become rulers of themselves—can often be ‘overcoded’ by state scientific language as the state governance of the subaltern. The semiotics of social integration used by scholars and experts in their analyses of Romani Pentecostalism enclose the symbolic power of classification and identification,[14] and can be seen, in Dean’s (2012) terms, as the signature of state power with subtle and secret mechanisms of re-enchantment, which go beyond the language itself. Notwithstanding, any research inquiry (e.g. social sciences) implies an idiomatic mechanism for the cultural translation of the social, which sometimes acts as a foundation for the semiological state apparatuses of capture. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (1986), the latter are underpinned by royal sciences or expert state knowledge(s), which can deteritorialize/deconstruct the internal idiosyncrasies of a community and its forms of self-governance and reterritorialize/insert these into the conceptual apparatus of the state. Thereafter, the functioning of social sciences as royal or state sciences can contribute to the annihilation of nomad forms of self-governance and implicitly of their political affirmation, fostered outside a “striated mental space” of the state which “aspires to universality” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 379). Romani Pentecostalism, globally acting as a war machine and locally as a nomad form of self-governance, in dialectical relation with depoliticized models of state governance, continues to remain subject to semiological translation made by royal sciences or state expert social sciences.

To summarize, this article brings to light an important problematic of governance and empowerment from within the self and community, which needs to be carefully articulated in the context of the current neoliberal transnational program of social integration of the Roma. The latter reveals itself as a force of internalization that reterritorializes vernacular models of government and political affirmation into the semiological apparatus of the state and transnational polities. In addition, the article reveals that Romani Pentecostalism can act as a form of nomad self-governance and disaffected power, which can uphold mechanisms of de-subjectification of the governed subaltern of the state and neoliberal governance. It also acts to promote the re-subjectification of the Roma as political subjects, which involves “a break with the axiom of domination, that is, any sort of correlation between a capacity for ruling and a capacity for being ruled” (Ranciere, 2010: 32). Hence, Romani Pentecostalism can be seen as a sign of a grassroots undertaking, “a creative line of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 422), able to contribute to the reconfiguration of Romani civil society and its emancipation from acts of subjection to both the state and transnational neoliberal government and as Deleuze and Guattari (2005: 384) metaphorically affirm: “when religion sets itself up to a war machine, it mobilizes and liberates a formidable charge of nomadism or absolute deterritorialization and turns its dream of an absolute State back against the State- form.”

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[1]     See Pelkmans, Vate, Falge (2005), Pine and Pina-Cabral (2008), Vallikivi (2003), Vate (2009), Werth (2000).

[2]     Whereas in Walachia and Moldavia the Orthodox religion is the predominant one, in Transylvania there is a religious mix of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant religions and Neo-Protestant cults.

[3]     I refer here to polities such as the European Union, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

[4]    For further details, see Karl Marx (1902), who makes a distinction between labor power and labor. While the first refers to the existent natural capacity to work, the latter is part of capitalist production.

[5]     The program of social integration of the Roma, as a force for the internalization and depoliticization of the subject, engaged by states and transnational polities, can be seen in opposition to the political affirmation of the Black People and their social and political movements in the US, which constituted them as political subjects.

[6]     This is a reference to re-definitions made by state and transnational actors in development, which through expertize and social research translate the existent cultural, political and social manifestations of various groups in society into the language of governance. In this context, Romani civil society became an extension of the neoliberal governmental apparatus engaged in the program/language of social integration.

[7]  Ecumenon, the Greek word, suggests here a global inhabited space, a decentralized network of local congregations or communions with particular values and vernacular features.

[8]    In the way Weber (1978) defines it, rational authority refers here to modern bureaucracy, but also science, which stands at the core of bureaucratic work within the capitalist state.

[9]     Methodism was both a British and American religious movement founded in 18^th century.

[10]   This refers to the Roma’s position of vulnerability and marginality, assigned by the transnational neoliberal government.

[11]   Whereas Pentecostal church is a reference to a site for prayer and sermons, Pentecostal union indicates a mode of association and organization specific to small Romanian Romani Pentecostal communities, mainly based on kinship ties.

[12]   Ethnic minoritization refers to the process of constructing a minority in relation to a majority, its cultural and political values, which are considered to exist by default as ideological constructs (e.g. European identity). Additionally, its construed minoritary subject is expected to subordinate its idiosyncrasies to a Master signifier (e.g. European neoliberal model of citizen as entrepreneur), which incorporates its enactments and reveals the majority’s vision.

[13]   In Edinburgh and Glasgow, UK many of the Roma Pentecostal unions have split into two or more unions and some of them have disappeared. For example, one of the Pentecostal unions in Edinburgh has split into two distinct unions because one branch of the union started to collaborate with an American foundation, whereas the other branch decided to remain independent ideologically and form a different Pentecostal union.

[14]   As discussed in the introduction, Romani Pentecostalism was culturally translated as the social integration of the Roma for the good of the market economy and welfare state reduction.

CRR is a Sage international peer reviewed journal edited by Warren S. Goldstein, Center for Critical Research on Religion, USA and Jonathan Boyarin, Cornell University, USA

"Critical Research on Religion is a peer-reviewed, international journal focusing on the development of a critical framework/theory and its application of research on religion. It provides a common venue for those engaging in critical analysis in theology and religious studies, as well as for those who critically study religion in the other social sciences and humanities such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literature."

Final Anonymous Academic Reviews 03/05/2016

Reviewer 1 

"I consider that the article is extremely interesting and necessary to check and review the complicity of Social Sciences with the thought of the State. The functioning of social sciences as royal sciences within the state apparatus, can contribute, in the author's view, to the annihilation of the most genuine forms of self-governance, specially regarding the ethnic minorities and the religious innovation. The main proposal of the text is to inquire into Roma religious discursive practices as counter discourses to the "State semiological acts of capturing forms of self-governance", which is a largely unexplored perspective.”

Reviewer 2 

"The manuscript presents a well researched, theoretically sophisticated, and somewhat convincing argument on the possibility of reading Roma Pentecostalism through the Deleuzean lens. By employing the Deleuzean notion of "State semiological apparatus of capture," the author reads the idiosyncratic religious identity of Romanian Roma Pentecostals as a form of creative appropriation and self-empowerment of the Roma community that resists the state apparatus which seeks to govern/control them with its politics of assimilation and inclusion. The qualitative data gathered by the author him/herself indicates how the reinvented religious identity of the members of the Roma Pentecostal community functions as a powerful frame of self-empowerment and agency which displaces the sovereignty of state control by reconfiguring the role of both political and religious leader in a way that their (Bulibasi and the pastor) power and influence over the community and its members becomes either obsolete or limited while at the same time the agency of the subject is invigorated, thus

presenting a form of self-governance over against the state apparatus of capture. Such form of nomadic self-governance (a la Deleuze), according to the author, allows the de-subjectification of the “governed” and re-subjectification of them as political subjects. 

In what follows, I am presenting a few questions that might require further clarification and in some cases—a careful rethinking of the claims the author is making.

1.The first question concerns the difficulty of reconciling the notion of God (who is, the driving force of the Roma Pentecostals) with the Deleuzean notions of subversive politics such as war machine, nomadic movement, rhizome, and line of flight. Such notions Deleuze suggests are based in the ontology of immanence, a philosophical vision that rejects any claim or resort to a transcendent and pivotal notion of (the organization and articulation of) power. The author needs to articulate how the Roma Pentecostals displace such notion of God, and if they do not, he/she will have to give a serious consideration to the gap lying between the Deleuzean platform of radical immanence which leaves no room for the notion of God and the Roma Pentecostals’ understanding of God.   

2. The second question is connected to the first one. In a way, the author does providing an answer to my previous question by suggesting the idea of the dialogical religious self, that is, the self-God. The author argues that the lack of distinction between divine authority and the self-God is the sign of non-hierarchical structure of power which transfers power back to the self. What exactly is this dialogical religious self (God-self)? The author should elaborate with more detail what he/she means by this. I’m not sure how this God-self is different from a conventional self who is inspired and guided by the external source of authority (God). Is this a God-self because God is immanent and mediated by the self to the point that it becomes indistinguishable from the self? If this is the case, how does the process happen? Is the idea of God as a sign of transcendent power completely displaced? Is there a line of distinction between the self’s own independent decision, the decision guided from the self-God, and the decision informed by the external power (God)?

3. The last question regards the cause that produces the idiosyncratic religious identity of Roma Pentecostals. While the manuscript provides an ample description of the process and possible implication of such phenomenon, it does not provide any explanation on what causes it and what aspects of Pentecostalism enables this  process/phenomenon." 

Reviewer 3

"This piece should definitely be published. It shows a good combination of theoretical sophistication and suggestive fieldwork to shed new light on a topic that, at least in global Pentecostal studies, has not received sustained scholarly attention: the socio-political implications of the growth of Pentecostalism among the Roma. The author makes very fruitful use of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thought to examine the emerging notions of governmentality as a result of conversion to Pentecostalism among the Roma. The essay asks the right questions: “Can Pentecostal religious practice be seen as a new semiology of power for the Roma, alternatively construed to semiological apparatuses of capture? Can Roma conversion to  Pentecostalism be seen as a form of self-governance and political re-subjectification?” (p. 6). 
     More importantly, it offers a very provocative and quite plausible answer, namely, that Pentecostalism represents a “reticulated mobile self-ministry” that challenges or, at the very minimum, cannot be reduced to the semiotics of capture deployed by the Romanian state and transnational polities and organizations like the EU and the NGOs that have sought to normalize and categorize the Roma. From a religious studies perspective, this answer has very important implications, offering a powerful critique of the automatic modernist assumption that religion is necessarily a vehicle for submission (vis-à-vis the emancipatory thrust of secular liberal notions selfhood, autonomy, and citizenship, the last on connect to the discourse of integration). In that sense, the piece stands in the tradition of works like Saba Mahmood’s on the alternative notions of agency that animate piety among Muslim women.

       While there is no question that the piece should be published, I think that it can be strengthened theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, I believe that the author should engage the larger literature on Pentecostalism, geopolitics, and the hermeneutics of the self. Now, there is a vast literature on this, going back to the origins of the movement itself, since it has traditionally grown among marginalized sectors of society (Robert Mapes Anderson called Pentecostalism “the vision of the disinherited”). Thus, it is not fair to expect the author to master all of this lit. However, s/he should at least see the work of Kevin O’Neill in Guatemala (on soul security and neo-liberalism), Nina Glick-Schiller’s “Transnational Social Fields and Imperialism. Bringing a Theory of Power to Transnational Studies” (on Evangelical churches among African immigrants in the U.S. and Germany), Jean and John Comaroff’s essay on the “economies of the occult” in Africa (see their Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism), and Ruth Marshall’s Political Spiritualities (which uses Foucault and Agamben, two theorists who would complement the insights of Deleuze and Guattari).

      Most of these works highlight that Pentecostalism’s politics of the self are deeply ambivalent, with Glick Schiller, O’Neill, and the Comaroffs arguing that it carries forms of subjectification and governmentality that have a strong elective affinity with neoliberal capitalism and new forms of state panopticism. Manuel Vásquez’s recent essay in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (Winter 2014) seems to agree a bit more with the author of the piece under review, using Derrida’s notion of radical hospitality to argue that religion may be offering alternative forms of visibility and presencing for undocumented immigrants in the face of a new transnational biopolitics (built on the dichotomy of illegality-legality). In any case, while the author recognizes the “overcoding” of Pentecostalism among the Roma, that is, its potential interpenetration with and translation to state and capitalist technologies of governmental power, it would strengthen his/her claims to confront the larger debates about Pentecostalism’s geopolitics and hermeneutics of the self.

        I wonder if the claims the author makes about Pentecostalism as a subaltern war machine do not have something to do with the kind of Pentecostalism present among the Roma, that is, the specific trajectories, scales, morphologies, and theologies involved. It is not the same to speak of small, decentralized, and rhizomatic congregations led by indigenous leaders creatively appropriating local notions of authority like the bulibasa than to deal with huge, strongly centralized, hierarchically arborescent transnational networks like the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God or the Nigerian Redeemed Christian Church of God, both of which advocate a gospel of health and wealth that does have strong resonances with the neoliberal capitalism’s individualist overconsumption and hyper-reality. In other words, the author’s argument that Pentecostalism is functioning as “a creative line of flight,” a source of political rejuvenation of Romani civil society, might be on target for his/her particular case study, pace countervailing dynamics in other forms of Pentecostalism. This just shows the diversity and glocal adaptability of the religion, that cannot be dismissed as merely as a reactionary religious ideology vis-à-vis late modernity.

       Beyond the theoretical debates about Pentecostalism and politics, I think the piece could also be more explicit about the alternative forms of self-government emerging among Pentecostal Roma. The author provides a couple of long citations of his/her informants, which are very helpful in bringing the argument down to earth, illustrating it and supporting it. However, I would encourage him/her to draw from more from the testimonies, speeches, sermons, and performances s/he has collected to characterize more fully what the new nomad forms of self-governance entail. This fuller characterization would strengthen the argument, showing the ruptures and continuities between there forms and the interpellations of the state and global capital."