@book{
author = "Đurić-Milovanović, Aleksandra and Sikimić, Biljana and Maran, Mirča",
year = "2011",
abstract = "ROMANIAN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES IN BANAT
A contribution to the study on multiconfessionality of Vojvodina
Abstract
The Romanian ethnic minority in the Serbian Banat traditionally belongs to the Orthodox religion, but during the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century new religions appeared – first the Greek Catholicism, as well as several Neo-Protestant confessions, such as the Church of the Nazarene, the Adventist and the Pentecostal Church. The number of the Neo-Protestant believers within the Romanian community increased during the first half of the 20th century, but after that came to a standstill and even decreased due to the general decline of the Romanian population in the Serbian Banat. Affiliation with Neo-Protestantism does not hinder the preservation of the national identity of the Romanians in Banat, as these believers are constituent parts of the confessional reality of the Romanians of Vojvodina and Serbia. After a detailed insight into the identity of the Romanians in Banat, the first chapter of the monograph offers an overview of their confessional life, followed by the history of the development of the Greek Catholic Church, Nazarene, Adventist and Pentecostal communities, with a brief outline of the Jehovah Witnesses. The confessional life of the Romanians in Banat is shaped by the fact that most of them belong to the Romanian Orthodox Church, but also, in smaller numbers, to Neo-Protestant and the Greek Orthodox Church. The Neo-Protestant confessions, which appeared with the Romanians in Banat in the last decades of the 20th century (the Adventists, Baptists and Pentecostals), led to the enrichment of the confessional life in the region, but also to the decrease in the number of Orthodox believers. The presence of these communities in the multiethnic and multiconfessional nowadays world has become a reality which does not obstruct the preservation of the ethnic identity of the Romanian minority in Banat, but, on the contrary, may stand for the expression of free choice of each and every citizen.The second chapter is focused on the Nazarene community, the first Neo-Protestant community that had a great number of believers in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century among the Serbs and Romanians in Banat. In spite of the fact that, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Nazarenes used to be a very large community, due to unfavorable socio-historical conditions, their number has constantly decreased. This chapter puts emphasis on the position of minority religious communities, and debates the problem of the so-called double minorities, as well as hidden minorities. Through a brief outline of the creation of the Nazarene movement and its spread to the region of nowaday Vojvodina, certain basic Nazarene ideas are presented and the specific features of Nazarenes as first Neo-Protestants in the region are stated here. The second part of the chapter offers a short historical overview of the oldest confession of the Romanians living in Banat, i.e. the Romanian Orthodox Church, with a focus on the appearance of the evangelistically oriented movement of the Army of the Lord. According to the results of the field research conducted by the author, which are presented in the book as transcripts of conversation, elements of cultural identity of the Romanian Nazarenes are also analyzed. The basic assumption is that, due to double minority position the Romanian Nazarenes, they have remained more closed and conservative and therefore more numerous in comparison to Serbian Nazarenes. The problem of the “closed field” is also tackled here, as well as various forms of risks when working in the field with micro- communities. The third chapter situates itself, from a methodological standpoint, at the crossroad of linguistic anthropology and pragmalinguistics. Such a methodological pluralism has imposed itself after a long field research practice of integrative recordings of maximally broad interview contexts. The researcher starts from the idea that the interviewed persons take part voluntarily in the research, since they want to be heard by others, but she agrees that this is only partially true and does not refer to all the subjects. Having in mind that it is grounded on the results of field work, this chapter incorporates integral transcripts of the appropriate parts of conversation, without any subsequent interventions of the author. Eight passages of conversations with the representatives of the Romanian language and culture in Vojvodina have been selected as the starting point and basis of the analysis. These are conversations with the Romanians in Banat, held between 2004 and 2008, and one interview in the Serbian language, made in 2011 with a Roman Catholic Bayash from Sonta, Bačka region. Аn attempt has been made for transcripts to preserve the specific features of the idiolect of the interviewed subjects as much as possible. Only epistemological elements of the applied field work methodology have been chosen, which reflect the concept of serendipity. As for the content of the interviews, the author opted for the analysis of the ideological Neo- Protestant elements, as well as of the local oral history regarding the age of interconfessional cohabitation in the village of Markovac.",
publisher = "Vršac : Visoka škola strukovnih strudija za obrazovanje vaspitača "Mihailo Pavlov"",
title = "Rumunske verske zajednice u Banatu: prilog proučavanju multikonfesionalnosti Vojvodine",
url = "https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_dais_8159"
}
