MACMILLAN Marian Devotion Among the Roma in Slovakia: A Post-Modern Religious Response to Marginality

In this book Tatiana Zachar Podolinská explores how post-modern Marian devotion represents both the continuation and restoration of tradition in the modern world. Podolinská illuminates how Mary as a Great Enchantress has colonised the modern world and survived mandatory atheism in communist countries. The resilience of Marian devotion in the face of the secularising forces of modernity is due to how fluidly it mixes pre-modern and ultra-modern elements of beliefs and practices with the grassroot current of post-modern Christianity. At the same time, Podolinská elucidates how Mary has become the voice of peripheral ethnic groups and nations. This book specifically explains the devotion of the post-modern Mary among the Roma in Slovakia and explores how this community copes with marginalisation, creating islands of marginal centrality. By approaching the ethnicised and enculturated forms of the Virgin Mary (i.e. Chocolate Marys), the book illuminates her potential for helping the Slovak Roma on their own path from the periphery to the center. Review “This book offers extremely interesting insight into the religiosity of the marginalized part of Slovak society―Roma. Beside the fact that there are only few analyses of (Eastern European) Roma religion, the very contextualization makes the work interesting. I am convinced that each aspect, the little-studied topic and the broader social context, offers an original contribution to religious and area-related studies.”(Zdeněk R. Nešpor, Professor, Department of European Cultural and Intellectual History, Charles University, Czec Republic)   “Tatiana Zachar Podolinská honestly drafts two possible scenarios for (potential) Romani emancipation in Slovakia:  a Catholic one, under the flag of an ethnicized and enculturated Chocolate Mary, and a Pentecostal one, peripheralizing both Mary as well as the Roma vernaculous tradition and culture. On every page of the book, the reader is provided both with the broader context as well as the deeply engaged ethnographic insight. The book represents a unique contribution to both Romani Studies and Studies on Marian devotion.“ (Elena Marushiakova, Professor of History, University of St Andrews, Scotland) From the Back Cover In this book Tatiana Zachar Podolinská explores how post-modern Marian devotion represents both the continuation and restoration of tradition in the modern world. Podolinská illuminates how Mary as a Great Enchantress has colonised the modern world and survived mandatory atheism in communist countries. The resilience of Marian devotion in the face of the secularising forces of modernity is due to how fluidly it mixes pre-modern and ultra-modern elements of beliefs and practices with the grassroot current of post-modern Christianity. At the same time, Podolinská elucidates how Mary has become the voice of peripheral ethnic groups and nations. This book specifically explains the devotion of the post-modern Mary among the Roma in Slovakia and explores how this community copes with marginalisation, creating islands of marginal centrality. By approaching the ethnicised and enculturated forms of the Virgin Mary (i.e. Chocolate Marys), the book illuminates her potential for helping the Slovak Roma on their own path from the periphery to the center. About the Author Tatiana Zachar Podolinská directs the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and is Visiting Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies of Religions at Comenius University, Slovakia. .