Kaale Belongings and Evangelical Becomings: An Ethnography of Finnish Roma with Raluca Bianca Roman (Brill Schöningh, 2025)

October 17, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Finnish Kale number roughly 13,000 people, a recognized traditional minority living in Finland and Sweden. Over recent decades, urbanization, settlement, and the shift toward the nuclear family have reshaped how Kale social life is lived. At the same time, many Kale have converted to Pentecostalism, creating new relationships between believers and non-believers and between Kale and non-Kale Finns. Dr. Raluca Bianca Roman’s Kale Belongings and Evangelical Becomings (Brill Schöningh, 2025) draws on more than a decade of fieldwork to trace how these two processes—belonging to a community and becoming a believer—are never finished, always in motion, and constantly in conversation with each other.

Belonging and Becoming as Processes, Not Categories

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Listen to Audio Summary Open in App

Never miss an episode of New Books in Christian Studies

Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

What you'll learn

1 (02:40) **Introduction and Guest Background** - Host Niall Heron introduces Dr. Raluca Bianca Roman and her book on Finnish Roma (Kale) and evangelical Pentecostalism.
2 (03:47) **How the Research Began** - Roman explains her academic journey from studying religion and Roma communities to focusing on Finnish Kale.
3 (07:03) **Core Concepts: Belonging and Becoming** - Roman explains why she structures the book around “belonging” and “becoming” rather than fixed categories like identity.
4 (11:08) **Bridging Ethnography and History** - Roman describes how archival work on the Finnish Gypsy Mission (later Romano Missio) enriched her anthropological writing.
5 (14:22) **Gender, Belonging, and Space** - Roman discusses how her gender shaped fieldwork access and the book’s focus on Kale womanhood.
6 (20:20) **Navigating Purity Norms Without Reifying Them** - Roman reflects on writing about categorical norms (e.g., Mary Douglas’s purity/pollution) without essentializing them.
7 (24:00) **Silence and Invisibility as Structural Themes** - Roman explains how she wrote about voices and self-perceptions when silence and invisibility are salient.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Dr Raluca Bianca Roman's book is an ethnography of the Finnish Kaale, Finland's national Roma community, and of the impact of Evangelical Christianity on their social and political lives. It is based on more than a decade of fieldwork and on archival research from the early twentieth century onwards. The book follows Kaale families as they handle the consequences of settlement, urbanisation and a turn towards the nuclear household, and as many convert to Pentecostalism. It moves from family homes and prayer groups in Helsinki to small towns in Eastern Finland, and on to Roma settlements in Western Romania where Kaale believers carry out missionary work. Kaale life emerges as a set of attachments and detachments, to kin and to the Finnish nation, to custom and to faith, and to other Roma at home and abroad.

Kaale Belongings and Evangelical Becomings: An Ethnography of Finnish Roma (Brill Schöningh, 2025) brings the anthropology of Roma into conversation with the anthropology of Christianity. Its first section, on Kaale belongings, looks at life in the city, at the silence surrounding sexuality, marriage and birth that shapes Kaale morality, and at "inbetweeners" who live apart from Kaale norms. The second section, on Evangelical becomings, turns to Kaale prayer groups within mixed Pentecostal congregations, to conversion as a repeated process of entering and leaving faith, and to Roma-to-Roma missionary work in Romania. Roman shows how religious identity becomes entangled with community identity, and how Pentecostalism can both bring Kaale together with non-Kaale Finns and draw new lines between believers and non-believers.

About the author

Raluca Bianca Roman is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast, where she is a member of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict and the Centre for Creative Ethnography. Her research focuses on religion, particularly Christianity, as well as ethnicity, nationalism, migration and humanitarianism, with a focus on Roma communities in Finland and Romania. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, where she was later a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC Advanced Grant project RomaInterbellum. She was also a researcher on the Academy of Finland project Roma and Nordic Societies at the University of Helsinki. She co-edited Roma Writings in History (Brill, 2021) and a special issue of the Journal of Finnish Studies, Counter-readings on Finnish Nationhood: Minority Strategies and the Making of the Nation (2021). She is now developing research on artificial intelligence and transhumanism.

About the host

Niall Herron is a PhD researcher in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast. His ethnographic work examines queer experience during the Northern Ireland Troubles, taking the everyday as a focal