Faith in Flux. Devaka Premawardhana
those in Togo where he worked, as untouched by global processes of interaction and exchange. One decade later, in Nostalgia for the Future, Piot (2010) claims to stand by those earlier insights, but with the premise that something has changed, something epoch defining in fact: the end of the Cold War. Dictators and chiefs lost power and prestige as global superpowers ceased propping them up. The resulting, radically new sovereignties have generated radically new temporalities and subjectivities, in Togo and elsewhere.
Piot acknowledges the arguments against seeing history in terms of momentous breaks.1 Yet “despite the continued presence of … hybridities—of the cultural mixing that is emblematic of the postcolonial moment and celebrated by postcolonial theory—this is nevertheless a world that has turned a new page” (2010: 14). Quotidian concerns have been reoriented from untoward pasts to indeterminate futures. Figuring most prominently in this is the extraordinary spread of Pentecostalism. This is the branch of Christianity—distinct from Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant branches—that traces its institutional origins to the early twentieth century and manifests in such visceral displays as speaking in tongues and miracle healings. It is also the Christian tradition most belligerent toward non-Christian (sometimes simply non-Pentecostal) ways of being.2
Precisely through its disparaging and demonizing of “tradition,” Pentecostalism exemplifies just how new is the page that has been turned (Piot 2010: 53–76). From elsewhere in West Africa, political scientist Ruth Marshall frames her own work on Pentecostal renewal movements against what she calls anthropology’s “domestication of modernity” paradigm. This approach “depends on tracing, not the ruptures that ‘conversion to modernity’ brings about, but rather the lines of cultural and historical continuity” (2009: 6). Yet Marshall’s critique of anthropology may be overdrawn, since, as seen, more than a few anthropologists have come to emphasize rupture over hybridity.
Indeed, it is within—though also against—the anthropological discipline that the anthropology of Christianity has arisen; and it is within this subfield that the trope of rupture most thrives. Most of its studies of conversion reference Birgit Meyer’s (1998) essay, “‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’: Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse.”3 In the case Meyer describes, to break with one’s past means to sever ties with kin and to desist from ancestral rituals. The global reach of this injunction has helped generate much interest in and theorizing of contemporary Pentecostalism.4
Leading anthropologist of Christianity Joel Robbins not only documents evidence of Pentecostal discontinuity; he makes of it a critique of his discipline. Anthropology is biased toward continuity, he argues, wedded to a view that “culture comes from yesterday, is reproduced today, and shapes tomorrow” (2007: 10). Robbins contends that Pentecostalism’s discourse of disjuncture and ritualization of rupture compel a retheorizing of how people relate the new to the old. Pentecostalism refuses capture by standard models of hybridization and localization. It does, in fact, demand discontinuity.5
There is much to commend in the shift from hybridity to rupture, from continuity to discontinuity. Regarding Pentecostal practitioners, first of all, it takes them at their word. Many Pentecostals do claim to be making a “break with the past.” The prayers offered at the cinema’s inauguration are a clear example, evidence that Mutúali’s entrepreneurial project is inseparable from an ethical project of remaking the self in particular ways. Moreover, it is significant that the cinema appeared in the compound of members of Kaveya’s Pentecostal church. In the prayer to banish evil spirits from the space of the cinema, the rupturing dynamics associated with mass media’s proliferation converged with the rupturing dynamics associated with Pentecostalism’s proliferation. Finally, anthropological models that reduce people to one or another cultural matrix do indeed perpetuate a pernicious notion that certain people, usually labeled “traditional,” are prone only to reproducing their past, such that even as they change, they essentially stay the same. As argued in an important review essay on the anthropology of Christianity, scholars who hold such views tread perilously close to “suggest[ing] that people are incapable of ever learning anything new” (Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins 2008: 1145).
Efforts to avoid such perils must be applauded. It would be the height of ethnocentrism to deny non-Westerners existential possibilities that most Westerners assume for themselves—possibilities of transcending one’s formative context, of breaking with the past, of taking on the new. But what is implied by associating these capacities with Pentecostalism and other aspects of modernity now said to be at large? Renewal certainly may be occasioned by them, but does it require them?
In line with existential anthropology’s insistence on the irreducibility of the self, this book affirms the recent theorizing of rupture but also seeks to radicalize it. The men and women among whom I lived showed me that experiences of migration, models of change, and rituals of transformation are not mere by-products of contemporary global forces. Rather, these preexist and prefigure engagements with those forces.6 Change, even rupturing change, is endogenous, intrinsic to “tradition.”
Theorists of rupture never explicitly state that some people could never, absent “modern” catalysts, engage discontinuity. Just this, however, is implied by the exceptional status granted to such novelties as long-distance migration and Pentecostal conversion. This book can be read as an attempt to render rupture less exceptional, to see Pentecostal conversion at least potentially—and certainly in what I witnessed—as a mundane extension of an already convertible way of being. Conversion, so understood, is less a matter of continuity or change than of the continuity of change (Bergson 1998: 23).
Beyond Pentecostal Explosion
Helping underwrite the theoretical turn toward rupture is Pentecostal Christianity’s global rise. Few studies of the tradition begin without asserting, or at least assuming, its “explosive” growth.7 Robert Hefner summarizes the consensus in the opening line of just one recent state-of-the-field overview: “It is by now a commonplace in sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies to observe that Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the contemporary world” (2013a: 1). Were such a claim not sufficiently superlative, consider the words of two renowned religion scholars—Peter Berger, who has written, “In all likelihood, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing movement in history” (2012: 46), and Harvey Cox, who has described “the tsunami of Pentecostalism that is sweeping across the non-Western world” (2009: 197).
With little more to go on than accounts such as these, I arrived in Mozambique’s northern province of Niassa in 2011. I knew what I would be finding; the only task was to make some original analysis of it.
I did not find it.
Not in Niassa Province anyway. To be sure, charismatic ministries have spread throughout Mozambique, including in the historically less Christian, more Islamic north.8 Moreover, Niassa’s capital city of Lichinga is not without a Pentecostal presence. The most visible and well-known among Lichinga’s churches is the Brazil-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, or IURD). Fifteen branches had opened in the ten years prior to my arrival—evidence, indeed, of Pentecostal explosion.
Yet in that same time span, as many as three of those branches had folded, while others had moved into smaller buildings.9 The most graphic illustration of Pentecostalism’s tepid reception was written on the cracked, whitewashed façade of a two-story building near Lichinga’s municipal prison. During the time of my fieldwork, the building served as a storage and operations facility for Humana People to People. A banner displaying this NGO’s Portuguese acronym occupied the top right corner of the exterior wall. However, in faded yellow letters that the banner only partially concealed appeared the faintly legible words Jesus Cristo é o Senhor (Jesus Christ is the Lord), the slogan affixed to IURD buildings throughout the world. The narrative of Pentecostalism’s dramatic rise is commonly expressed in terms of former cinemas, factories, and storehouses turned into churches. Here I encountered the reverse.
Figure 2. A church building