This paper focuses on the conversion narrative of a man in the Johane Masowe weChishanu Church, an apostolic church in Zimbabwe. Taking up recent discussions within anthropology on Pentecostal and charismatic churches, the author shows how apostolics talk about conversion as a distinct break with 'African custom'. It is argued that anthropologists of religion need to take such narratives of discontinuity seriously because they allow us to understand better the dynamics of religious change.
Pentecostal studies has been one of the most vibrant areas of research in Africa for over twenty years, but is it time we started to look past Pentecostalism? Using some of the most important work in this tradition as a point of departure, this article offers both a critique of and supplement to the Pentecostal literature. It focuses in particular on how we should understand the relationship between Pentecostalism and African Independency by pushing the debates on how to frame their oft-shared desire to ‘break with the past’. Every rupture is also a realignment and how each is conceptualized and understood is a matter not only of discourse but decisions and dilemmas faced in everyday life.
In this review essay, I consider three recent collections, one edited by anthropologists, one by an art historian, and one by a philosopher, that reflect on what might be called "the media turn" in religious studies. I situate these collections in relation to broader trends and interests within anthropology, religious studies, and media studies, focusing in particular on the idea of religion as mediation, which involves, in part, a turn away from conceptions of belief and toward materiality and practice. [religion, media, materiality, belief, the public sphere]
In this article, I introduce the idea of “ambient faith” in an effort to clarify the stakes in long‐standing debates about public and private religion. I take as my starting point the increasingly common recognition that conceptual distinctions between publicity and privacy are difficult to maintain in the first place and that they are, in any case, always relative. The idea of “ambient faith,” which I connect to work on the turn to a materialist semiotics, can serve as both a critique of and supplement to the ideas of “public” and “private” religion. Introducing ambience—the sense of ambience—allows one to raise important questions about the processes through which faith comes to the foreground or stays in the background—the extent to which faith, in other words, goes public or stays private. I use my research on a Christian organization in England, the Bible Society of England and Wales, to illuminate these points, discussing the society's campaign in 2006 to bring angels to Swindon and its promotion of Bible reading in coffee shops. I also consider Brian Eno's music and recent advertising trends for additional insights into the notion of “ambience.”[Christianity, secularism, semiotics, public religion, England]
By and large, anthropology's reflections on the concept of evidence have been couched within other discussions – on truth, knowledge, and related concerns. This essay, which introduces the special issue, makes the case that evidence deserves more considered attention in its own right. Drawing on the small but growing body of literature in social and cultural anthropology that does address questions of evidence, I situate the articles here in relation to several anthropological conversations, suggesting in the process how an exploration of evidence can shed light on three key issues: anthropology's standards of judgement, the potentials within interdisciplinary collaboration, and the benefits of a public anthropology. Résumé De manière générale, les réflexions de l'anthropologie sur le concept de preuve ont été imbriquées dans d'autres discussions concernant la vérité, la connaissance et d'autres questions connexes. En ouverture de ce numéro spécial, le présent essai avance que la preuve mériterait une attention plus spécifique pour elle‐même. À partir d'un corpus restreint mais grandissant d'études en anthropologie culturelle et sociale consacrées à la question de la preuve, l'auteur situe les articles réunis ici par rapport à plusieurs conversations anthropologiques, en suggérant comment une exploration de la preuve peut faire la lumière sur trois grandes questions : les critères de jugement de l'anthropologie, les possibilités offertes par une collaboration interdisciplinaire et les avantages d'une anthropologie publique.
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