Los más gitanos del mundo. Transnacionalismo etno-religioso, liderazgo y política en la iglesia filadelfia

Laburpena

In this doctoral thesis I analyze the political processes promoted by a Gypsy Pentecostal evangelical denomination, the Iglesia Evangélica Filadelfia (Evangelical Church of Philadelphia), around the dynamics of ethno-religious ascription and leadership. The Evangelical Church Philadelphia spreads within great part of the population of Gypsies Calós in Spain and Argentina (Buenos Aires). For this reason I have focused this research as a multilocal ethnography, exploring ethnicity and the exercise of power within the Pentecostal churches in Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz, Spain), Linares (Jaén, Spain) and Buenos Aires (Argentina ). The three scenarios I propose respond to different ways of understanding Gypsyness, so I am interested, firstly, in approaching the ways in which understandings of ethnic identity are articulated at different scales and what are the foundations of this understanding. However, to the extent that significant proportions of Gypsies from different regions have converted to evangelism, they have in parallel incorporated a particular aesthetic, that is, a sensible understanding of reality. In the work of constitution of a regime of reality, religious leaders, through their role in ritual performance, have been fundamental. However, for the political project to be consistent, religious leadership is submitted to limitations. The processes of ethnic-religious ascription and the dynamics of leadership correspond, in turn, to the organizational forms that the denomination takes at different levels. But the Philadelphia Church deploys its activities in many different contexts. For this reason, I approach the relations that the Gypsy denomination maintains with the Spanish State through Gypsy activism and the political sector of evangelism. In this sense, I am interested in the actions that the local congregations or the denomination as a whole carry out, as the case may be, to remain autonomous or to be incorporated into different structures, as well as the consequences that these movements have for the denomination, the local congregations and some particular subjects.