Addicted to Christ. Helena Hansen
of progressive and conservative politics reflected in African American televangelism (Walton 2009). Pentecostalism in particular historically has housed an array of gender and racial politics, ranging from Aimee Semple McPherson, single mother and preacher who founded Four Square Gospel, one of the largest Pentecostal ministries of the early twentieth century; and William Seymour, African American self-ordained pastor whose interracial 1906 Azusa Street revival was the progenitor of contemporary Pentecostalism; to televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, leaders of the anti-feminist and anti-integrationist U.S. Religious Right in the latter twentieth century.
Pentecostalism serves as an adaptable framework for social organization and cultural innovation, rather than being a stable set of practices, beliefs, or politics. To see its many valences, I provide foreground on the interpretations that converts make of themselves. I try to be cautious in applying theoretical frameworks that would give me narrative control, and am mindful of the words of social theorist bell hooks:
No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still [the] colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk (Hooks 1990, 241).
Narrative control can lead to colonization akin to that which contemporary anthropologists critique; it also can lead anthropologists to miss innovations occurring at social margins.
In medical anthropology, much of the contemporary ethnography of social margins builds on concepts of social suffering, in which an individual’s suffering is “taken as a manifestation of social structural oppression/or collective experience of cultural trauma” (Wilkinson 2005, Wilkinson and Kleinman 2016), as well as structural violence: the everyday violence of exclusion, deprivation, and vulnerability caused by institutional structures and policies that create inequalities (c.f. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, Farmer 2005). These studies illuminate how power inequalities exact tolls on the bodies and minds of people on the margins. Global capitalist extremes of accumulation, deprivation, and war rob marginal people of their humanity. In post-industrial society, taken-for-granted bodily routines and popular discourses in themselves serve as technologies of control, theorized by Michel Foucault (1976) as biopower, in which people unwittingly reinforce their own domination as they manage and discipline themselves.
These bodies of work illustrate that individuals do not engineer their own marginality, but they leave open the question of how marginalized people can deliberately influence their own lives. Staying experience near to those at the bottom of social hierarchies, moral economy uses ethnography and popular history to theorize actions that appear self-destructive instead as acts of survival and resistance. Marxist historian E. P. Thompson (1971), who first elaborated the term “moral economy” in his study of the peasant bread riots of eighteenth-century Britain, and anarchist political scientist James Scott (1977), who popularized moral economy in his studies of Malaysian rice farmers, were both interested in peasant resistance to the encroachment of free market capitalism on the older systems of patronage and reciprocity that had ensured peasants’ subsistence. In the United States, urban ethnographers also contrasted the moral systems of the industrial poor with the dominant structures that threaten their survival. In the 1970s, anthropologist Carol Stack’s 1974 study of reciprocity among extended kin networks of African American women as a survival strategy challenged U.S. Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report depicting black single mothers as the pathological producers of a culture of poverty.
In the decades that followed, urban ethnographers adopted moral economy as a framework to understand how some inner-city blacks and Latinos came to see the drug trade as honorable, and to analyze drug-use practices as based on reciprocity and solidarity (Reinarman 1979, Murphy 1987, Bourgois 1995). These studies highlighted their logics of survival, but concluded that these logics locked them into short-term strategies that ultimately maintained their oppression rather than changing the institutions that constrained them. This analytical approach has been enriched by post-structural ethnographers such as Cheryl Mattingly, who describes hope among the families of poor, severely ill African American children as an active practice rather than an emotion or attitude. For her, hope is “the practice of creating, or trying to create, lives worth living even in the midst of suffering . . . to forge new communities of care” (Mattingly 2010, 6). She considers “larger macrostructures as powerful cultural resources . . . that inform life on the ground, not as containers that enclose it” (Mattingly 2010, 47).
The view that marginalized people have developed specific practices of hope, or—in the case of the street ministries described here—technologies of transformation, challenges the idea that social suffering is passive. It raises the question of how marginalized people imagine other ways of living; how they enter the state of openness to new relations and directions described by philosopher Gilles Deleuze as “becoming” (Biehl and Locke 2010), and how they work “to construct a livable world on the other side of their experiences of contact and colonialism” (Robbins 2013, 459). Imagining other ways of living requires vision and action; it calls for moral entrepreneurs who can name, interpret, and dramatize the areas where social hierarchies are contested (Becker 1963), and for moral pioneers who can creatively draw on “prior social relations and cultural understandings [to] condition the uses . . . [of new] technologies” (Rapp 2011, 12).
The details of how people imagine and interpret their alternatives matter. In the United States (including Puerto Rico), the figure of the inner city black or Latino addict sits in the center of debates about whether poverty is culturally or structurally determined, and about the merits of “bootstrapping” and mutual aid as opposed to a systemic political-economic overhaul. Some call on the addicted poor to discipline themselves, to earn societal inclusion and respect. Others call for a reordering of the State to address unemployment and basic needs as fundamental causes of addiction. Few ask if and how addicted poor people already are positioning themselves for change. Within a U.S. political discourse that casts evangelical politics as a product of the conservative white middle and lower classes, the complex practices and motives of evangelists from non-dominant ethnic and racial groups rarely are examined.
Puerto Rican street ministries address the social and political marginalization of ex-addicted converts with a narrative of collective redemption and ascendance. Pentecostal ex-addicts cast themselves as the nidus for worldwide re-enchantment, as reflected in their written and oral histories of themselves. In these histories, addicts are the unlikely instruments through which the Holy Spirit redeems an apocalyptic reality, placing addicts at the center, rather than the margins, of world events. Ironically, Puerto Rico itself is both marginal and central to global political economies. It sits at the geographical and political margin between the United States and Latin America, its burgeoning narcotraffic is the product of the Puerto Rico’s rapid social transformation to meet the needs of U.S. national corporations, originally for low-cost labor and more recently as a primary corporate tax shelter. Puerto Ricans have U.S. citizenship and aspire to the living standards of the U.S. mainland, but do not control local capital. This creates the conditions for consumption of imports and for profound debt, and creates the political conditions to blame drug trade as the cause—rather than the result—of island-wide disinvestment. In this milieu, by 2000, the island’s transition to managed healthcare emerged as the flagship of Puerto Rico’s modernity and compatibility with U.S. mainland economy. Yet the governor—a physician—declared addiction a “spiritual-social” problem better addressed by faith- and community-based organizations than by biomedicine.
Street ministries raise questions about whether techniques of spiritual transformation are ultimately liberatory, whether they are complicit with domination, and whether liberation and domination are mutually exclusive. Here I track these questions through the attempts of a group of addicted, economically displaced Puerto Ricans to build spiritual power; to reinvent gender, family, and work in the alternate social order of self-fashioned ministries.
TRADING ON MORALITY
Ramón sat under the canvas awning that, with eight rows of rusted folding chairs and a makeshift altar of unfinished wood, marked the worship space at Victory Academy. As I studied the green tattoos that wound around his arms, his voice went up in pitch, he