In much of the literature on African Pentecostalism, conversion has been associated with a striving for modernist individualist identities and a strategy for legitimising social, generational rupture. This article contributes to the existing scholarly field by shedding light on the ways in which urban Tanzanian born-again Christians address generational antagonisms and position themselves in relation to elder generations. Drawing on anthropological discussions of the concept of agency and focusing particular attention on the ways in which a specific kind of agency is cultivated through participation in ritual, I argue against a narrow association of born-again Christianity with modernist individualism. While an assertion of individual autonomy is implied in conversion, Tanzanian born-again Christians do not cease to be social beings, deeply embedded in family relationships. I demonstrate how born-again religious practice enables urban Tanzanians to actively rephrase and sometimes even improve their relationships with unconverted family elders.
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Pentecostalism used to be the stigmatized religion of the marginal sectors of Chilean society and has often been interpreted by scholars in terms of symbolic protest. However, a new generation of Pentecostals is now attempting to redefine their religion as more legitimate and respectable. This process involves attempts at gaining more public recognition and it implies revisiting Pentecostal stylistic and religious practices. Many younger Pentecostals tend to distance themselves, both from certain kinds of emotional expressions and from what they perceive as the rigid formalism of classical Pentecostalism. This is prevalent, both in Pentecostal worship which carefully balances effusiveness and liveliness with control, and in testimonies of younger Pentecostals who tend to downplay the sensationalist aspects of conversion (as caused by an instant revelation) and rather portray it as a gradual process of maturation. My paper explores how mainstreaming processes unfold at different levels and occasionally cause tensions among Chilean Pentecostals.If the growth and spread of Pentecostalism represents the primary source of religious pluralism in Chile and Latin America, a serious contender for the second place could be an increasing diversification of Pentecostalism itself. This diversification has occurred, in part, because of schisms and endless proliferations of Pentecostal denominations and a growing religious competition between them, but also because Pentecostals have adapted to popular culture, transformations in generational identities, a general boom in higher education and new class dynamics (see Lindhardt 2016a). For the better part of its history, Chilean Pentecostalism was unmistakably the religious movement of the lower socio-economic sectors of society. For this reason, and due to the emotional and noisy ways in which Pentecostal religiosity is practiced, Pentecostalism has suffered from a second-rank status as a less legitimate and respectable religion than Catholicism which, despite the official separation of the Catholic Church from the Chilean state in 1925, has maintained a privileged position in Chile´s political field. Not only has the Church maintained close relations to political authorities and shaped both policies and the cultural climate of Chile, but Catholicism has also continued to be the de facto official religion, insofar as all national religious holidays were Catholic until 2008, and before 1999 only the Catholic Church had chaplains in military units, prisons and public hospitals (Robinson 2005). Furthermore, Catholicism is linked to notions of respectable middle-and upper-class citizenship, a link that is undoubtedly reinforced both by close ties between influential Catholic Church movements such as Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ, and the upper class and the entrepreneurial elite (Alcaino and Mackenna 2017) and by the fact that the Church runs several private schools and universities.To some extent, Chilean Pentecostals have themselves embraced the stigma attributed to their ...
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