This is the way from ‘periphery to the centre’. This is the way from private/ individual apparition to public/collective acknowledgement. For every apparition, the crucial point is to achieve collective consensus and to attract masses. As far as visions are ‘cultural products’ (Christian 1998) produced in the process of communication (Knoblauch 2009 Knoblauch and Schnettler 2018), they are not only embedded in a particular cultural context but also in the language and aesthetic taste. from marginal private/individual apparition to the central public/mass recognition). The story of her apparition thus contains the well-known part of the path of other ‘successful visionaries’ – ‘from periphery to centre’ (i.e. Her visions are private ones, and since they started to appear, she started her struggle for collective and public recognition. The seer perfectly fits into the ‘periphery’ concept: she is an illiterate woman from a socially deprived settlement and is a member of the ethnically stigmatised community of Cigáni. This chapter offers an in-depth qualitative analysis of a narrative on private Marian apparitions of one Romani woman living in a segregated Roma settlement in Šariš region, Eastern Slovakia. ‘Chocolate Mary’ that physically, mentally and spiritually fits bet- ter and corresponds to the hopes and needs of particular ‘peripheral’ ethnic community.Īs Viktor Turner (1974) pointed out that what is interesting about apparitions is that they occur on the periphery not only from the geographical point of view (peripheries of cities, rural areas) but also at peripheral levels of society: the seers are mostly children or (illiterate) women from a socially deprived background. In particular, she pointed out the phenomenon of inculturation in which the ‘White’ Virgin Mary is culturally and ethnically ‘transcripted’ and ‘translated’ into the
In the framework of the previous outputs from this research, the author attempted to create, with some generalisation, a typology of the elements of traditional rural Romani Christianity in Slovakia, elucidating the phenomena of the cultural and ethnic reinterpretation of mainstream Christianity into a Roma cultural context (Podolinská 2009). The overall research dataset used for the purposes of this chapter is part of ongoing research of the author on Roma folk beliefs (2006–2007), as well as on the activities of both traditional and non-traditional religious movements among the Roma in Slovakia (2003–2004, 2010–2011).
0 kommentar(er)
