Abstrakt
My paper explores the intersections of kinship and conversions of Roma to Charismatic/Pentecostal Christianity. First I move to the review how different scholars of Romani conversion treated kinship and religion.
Belonging to the same kin group has been used as an explanatory factor for both successful and unsuccessful conversions. In my view it is a blackbox and I ask how come Roma are able to convert despite the fact their relatives already converted? In the second part I introduce the concept of relatedness which replaced the notions of kinship in the recent anthropological debate.
I turn my attention to the cases where relatedness is reconfigured through the conversion and how the relatedness is used for opening new arenas, rather than seeing it only as binding set of rules. I mention the case of Tchirklo presented by Patrick Williams and the case of Feriko from my fieldwork.
Following the case of Feriko I focus on how the ontology of biological relatedness was negotiated in the congregation, and how, through the discussions of kinship the realms of natural x cultural and divine x mundane were locally constructed.