How to write about faith when you write about the margin: a new book at SANU
The book Roma on the Waves of Neo-Protestantism by sociologist Dragan Todorovic was presented in the SANU Ceremonial Hall as the first institutional recognition of fieldwork that had remained without continuity in the Serbian academic community.
In the Ceremonial Hall of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, where editions resulting from five- or ten-year work by academicians are usually presented, last week saw the launch of a book by an author who is not a member of the Academy, a field sociologist with more than twenty years of experience in south-eastern Serbia, and one who has pursued his subject of research from a moment when the Belgrade academic community recognised the topic as peripheral. Roma on the Waves of Neo-Protestantism: the Protestantisation of Roma in South-Eastern Serbia by Dragan Todorovic was presented before an audience that included professors, religious researchers, representatives of church communities and pastors of Roma Protestant churches from several Serbian cities.
The book is the result of long-standing work by an author who defended his doctorate in 2008 at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nis on the religious identity of the Roma, and who has since published more than forty academic papers in domestic and international journals. Roma on the Waves of Neo-Protestantism is a SANU edition in cooperation with the Belgrade Open School and the Centre for Empirical Studies of Religion, printed in a run of five hundred copies, a typical academic edition of this rank.
The research subject, the Protestantisation of the Roma population in the municipalities of Leskovac, Vranje, Bujanovac and Pirot, represents statistically one of the most dynamic religious shifts in Serbia of the past two decades. According to figures Todorovic cites, the number of Roma who declared themselves members of various Protestant denominations in these municipalities rose between 2002 and 2022 by 400 per cent, while traditional Roma Orthodoxy in the same period saw a 30 per cent decline. These figures, however debatable on census methodology, mark the trace of a social shift that has remained outside continuous attention in the mainstream media.
What this book means for Serbian sociology of religion
The SANU launch opens two parallel questions: one about the book itself, the other about what a launch in that hall means. Read in full, the book is an example of empirical work rarely conducted in the Serbian academic environment with such consistency: over fifteen years, Todorovic has visited more than forty Roma Protestant gatherings, interviewed thirty-seven pastors and over two hundred members of these communities, and organised that material through a combination of ethnographic and statistical approaches. It is a piece of work that in the United Kingdom or the Netherlands would have been published as a standard monograph by one of the major academic publishers, but in the Serbian context the author had to wait fifteen years from the beginning of his fieldwork to institutional recognition.
The launch in the Academy’s Ceremonial Hall is not accidental. SANU in its publishing programme has gradually broadened its focus over the past two decades from the traditional disciplines of national historiography and linguistics towards sociology, demography and ethnography, a process that has not been free of tension within the Academy. Academician Tibor Varadi, in his introductory remarks at the launch, advanced the thesis that “the academic community has long neglected that Roma, as part of the Serbian population, deserve the same level of academic attention as other ethnic and religious groups”, a careful formulation, as it opens the question of what previous practice was and what moral obligation now dictates by way of revision.
The book is particularly interesting in the passages where Todorovic tries to understand the motives of conversion. Contrary to the frequent reductionist interpretation that Roma convert to Protestantism for economic reasons, on the assumption that these communities offer social assistance as part of their missionary work, the author shows that in most cases the motivation is predominantly religious, with elements of individual spiritual seeking and a sense of belonging to a community that is less racially segregated than mainstream churches. The pastors he spoke with, several of them from Leskovac active in the public sphere, point out that their communities have over the past five years initiated educational and health programmes that are not purely religious.
What remains an open question after the launch is distribution. The five hundred copies SANU is printing will be available primarily to university libraries and institutes, with only rare appearances in general retail. Todorovic in his closing remarks asked the publisher to consider a commercial edition with a lower retail price that would make the book accessible to students of sociology, religious studies and Romani studies outside the largest academic centres. The director of SANU publishing, Dr Borislav Pekic, said the question is under consideration but no concrete decision has been made.
The next launch of Roma on the Waves of Neo-Protestantism, according to the announcement at the Belgrade event, will be at the Centre for Scientific Research of the University of Nis, with a date set for the first week of October when the new academic year begins.
