Turncoats: Dervish Magic, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Unstable Religious Compounds in a Roma Neighborhood, North Macedonia
Turncoats: Dervish Magic, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Unstable Religious Compounds in a Roma Neighborhood, North Macedonia

Author(s): Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic
Subject(s): Ethnic Minorities Studies, Sociology of Religion
Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Keywords: Roma; Ethno-religious identities; Syncretism; Conversion
Summary/Abstract: This paper briefly explores how Roma citizens of Skopje oscillate between different religiosities that have been increasingly siloed into distinct ethno-religious ‘identities’ in the Balkan nation-state of North Macedonia. Not limited to examples of religious pluralism or syncretism, the oscillation involves the use of religious services regardless of one’s denomination and harnessing the indiscriminatory potency of magical healing and amulets. Alternatively, the oscillation is manifested in serial and back-and-forth conversion from Orthodox Christianity to various Islamic movements, to evangelical congregations such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, and back to Islam. Instead of mere multiplicity of Roma religious affiliations, this is a case of religious promiscuity which contributes to maintaining ethno-religious group boundaries by performatively crossing them and, simultaneously, offers an insight into a ‘turncoat’ model for thinking about religious (and civic) participation. A really difficult question is what do turncoat, promiscuous religiosities tell us about prevalent toxic reliance on politico-racialised and ethno-national metaphor of humankind as naturalised taxonomies of species, be it ethnic or religious.

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