Faith in Flux. Devaka Premawardhana
seek treatment in hospitals, or sell surplus crops. Better than “reverse migration,” the notion of “circular migration” (Potts 2010) captures such patterns, marked as they are by both transience and repetition. They entail not so much the permanence of outward movements as the multiplicity of lateral movements.
Modernization narratives, by contrast, presume a trajectory. Teleological assumptions about civilizational progress are explicitly denied by those who have recently theorized rupture (e.g., Appadurai 1996: 9). Nevertheless, the trajectory remains. Pentecostalism, it is argued, differs from hybrid forms of religion (e.g., popular Catholicism and African Initiated Churches) in the same way that urban and transnational migration differs from nomadic forms of habitation. Against such thinking, there may be value in applying the same critique made of “permanent urbanization” to the comparable issue of “permanent Christianization.” If migrations are circular, so too may be conversions.15
Phenomenology and Critique
How might anthropology better account for such deviations from the standard narrative of unidirectional breaks and irreversible shifts? It turns out that Piot, despite purveying this narrative in his more recent work, provides therein an answer. Extending his thesis that both Pentecostalism and emigration independently bespeak discontinuity, Piot notes that the two reinforce one another: “Not surprisingly, perhaps, prayer is routinely called on to enhance peoples’ [sic] chances in the [visa] lottery. Entire Lomé congregations have even been known to engage in prayer … so that members will get visas.” Yet, Piot adds, “the lottery fuels not only church attendance but also visits to spirit shrines. One selectee I know hedged his bets and did both, stepping up church attendance while also returning to the village to consult a diviner” (2010: 91; emphasis mine). An important shift has taken place from one passage to the next: from “entire Lome congregations” to “one selectee,” from the general to the particular, from ethnography to ethnographic biography.16 Although his book centers on wide-scale, post–Cold War aspirations to break with villages and spirit shrines, Piot in this brief but telling anecdote reveals what his theoretical model conceals: the often circular and situational character of both migration and conversion.
Inherent in much academic writing is a tendency to eclipse such variations in lived experience with grand theories and metanarratives. Inherent specifically in much social science is a tendency to reduce human thought and behavior to social structures, cultural meanings, and other antecedent conditions amenable to conceptual grasp. Arguing for the disciplinary integrity of the anthropology of Christianity, Robbins (2007) contrasts this subfield with Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff’s (1991, 1997) influential work on Christianity and colonial capitalism. According to Robbins, the Comaroffs fail to do what an anthropology of Christianity must: take up Christian culture “as a system of meanings with a logic of its own” (Robbins 2007: 7). Logocentric concerns with meaning and logic—often centered on what people say, what they claim to believe, and what “language ideology” they ascribe to—have driven much of the anthropology of Christianity.17 Yet while there is no disputing the need to take informants at their word, there are obvious limits to discourse and representation. As Meyer makes plain in the subtitle of her seminal essay, the Pentecostal claim of rupture—conveyed in the phrase “make a complete break with the past”—is a discursive claim. In practice, most notable is “believers’ inability to make a complete break with what they conceptualize as ‘the past’” (1998: 318; emphasis mine).
Phenomenological approaches go further than most in stressing the limits of language. Anthropologists working in this vein attend to the frequent disjuncture between ideology and experience, between worldviews and lifeworlds.18 A phenomenological perspective on the anthropology of religion would take as its starting point not the reified terms whereby institutional religions are conventionally classified—Buddhism, Islam, Christianity—but the idiosyncrasies and indeterminacies of everyday life (Schielke and Debevec 2012).19 Crucial to this book, as a work of specifically existential-phenomenological anthropology (Jackson 2005; Jackson and Piette 2015), are its detailed portraits of the individual in situation. It employs storytelling techniques that eschew the consolations of category thinking, privileging instead the messiness of mundane events and interactions.20 Narrative ethnography has the added virtue of resonating with the pluralistic approach to life that characterizes societies relatively less encumbered by the West’s outsized Greek metaphysical inheritance. That Africa, as theorized by Négritude philosophers, offers tools for deconstructing Western rationalism and reductionism perhaps explains why phenomenological approaches have been so generative in Africanist anthropology.21 Out of their respective fieldwork engagements in West Africa, phenomenological anthropologists Paul Stoller and Michael Jackson have helped pioneer a more humanistic mode of anthropological research and writing.22 I follow their lead in accentuating the textured, multiplex lives of my interlocutors. Those lives are worthy of attention in their own right, but also as a critique of the disembodied epistemologies that are as alien to African villages as they are paramount to Western academies.
Without discounting the impact of global forces and discursive formations, phenomenological anthropology recognizes that macro-scale phenomena, “explosive” though they may be, never exhaust the intricacies of life as lived. These intricacies often present themselves at such easily overlooked registers as corporeal dispositions, mundane metaphors, and quotidian practices. Robbins’s starting point for the anthropology of Christianity is much different—more discursive than experiential, more intellectual than embodied, more structural than existential. Concerned to identify that which uniquely characterizes Pentecostal culture, Robbins ultimately settles on a negative definition—“a culture ‘against culture’” (2010: 159–62). He insists nonetheless that it is meaningfully spoken of as a whole. In his rejoinder to Robbins’s initial critique, John Comaroff argues that by “treat[ing] the faith primarily as culture,” Robbins commits the once common flaw of analyzing cultural or religious traditions separately from their historical and material entailments (Comaroff 2010: 529).23 I could not agree more with Comaroff on this point, though I do not endorse the Comaroffs’ alternative that reifies impersonal powers and processes of another type—for example, neoliberalism, commodification, and modernity.24
Against all forms of abstraction, phenomenological anthropology intervenes by reinserting the individual and refusing to infer lived experience from identities and epochs. Comaroff is as dismissive of this approach as he is of the anthropology of Christianity. He faults it for fetishizing the local and failing to deal with theory. Yet a turn to critical situations and lived events need not imply disregard for global dynamics (Abu-Lughod 1993: 8). It is simply a refusal to see what Comaroff calls the “macro-cosmic forces and determinations in the world” (2010: 528) as so forceful or so determinative that they leave people with little to do but acquiesce.
Existential Mobility
Along with identifying and characterizing “Christian culture,” a parallel research priority for anthropologists of Christianity has been that of specifying what it means to be a “Christian self.” Social theorists have long noted the role of Christianity, particularly Protestantism, in individualizing and interiorizing subjectivity. Among those for whom the self is defined relationally, conversion to Christianity involves conversion not just to a religion but to a modern conception of autonomous personhood.25
Yet just as surely as unidirectional models of conversion and migration oversimplify, so too do trajectories of individualization and the typology they assume. Against claims anthropologists once made about the mystical interrelations of “primitive” people, Godfrey Lienhardt highlights the eccentricities, slips of tongue, and clever calculations at the heart of traditional African folktales. Without foreclosing relationality, these reveal an “African concern, also, on occasion, with individuals as individuals” (1985: 143). Conversely, against claims that Christian converts become self-governing free agents, numerous recent studies show that, after conversion, forms of sociality get newly formed while others persist from the past.26 To honor this variability, Simon Coleman proposes replacing the language of trajectory with that of negotiation, since “the spiritual, moral, and ethical movements involved in such negotiation are