UCLA

My dissertation asks whether, when, and how the adoption of Evangelical Christianity by multiply stigmatized Roma (or Gypsies) in post-socialist Bulgaria has affected the status and engagement of Roma women in their families, communities, and the larger society. Scholars have shown that Evangelical Christianity has facilitated women's advancement in some patriarchal societies in the developing world. This raises the question of whether it might have a similar impact among Roma in Eastern Europe. In 2009-2010, I conducted a year-long immersive ethnographic fieldwork in the town of Sliven, which is distinctive for its large and heterogeneous Roma population. Against the background of economic dislocation, complex hierarchical interethnic relations, an indifferent state, and a changing religious marketplace, I examined the dynamic interplay between outside religious actors (foreign and Bulgarian), on the one hand, and members of local Roma communities that vary in the extent of their marginalization and in the degree of their adherence to traditional patriarchal attitudes and behaviors, on the other hand. I focused especially on the most marginalized Roma in the walled-in Nadezhda ghetto and the more integrated Roma in the Nikola Kochev neighborhood. I argue that participation in Evangelical churches has a minimal impact in the most marginalized communities, while it enhances women's status in more integrated Roma communities. The confluence of local and external religious actors in Nadezhda has created incentives for enterprising men to found and manage churches as a way of procuring external material resources in this extremely resource-poor environment. Manipulating the multiplicity of scales that characterize the Evangelical networks in which they are embedded, the Nadezhdan pastors have carved out a niche characterized by fluidity, ruthless competitiveness, corruption, and lack of bureaucratization and institutionalization. This has had significant consequences for the social dynamics in Nadezhdan churches and for their effects on gender relations. By underscoring the role patriarchal structures and practices play in the cycle of exclusion, and by illuminating the variable effects of religious participation, this research seeks to enhance the understanding of the persistent problem of the marginalization of Roma in Central and Eastern Europe.