Past Pentecostalism: Notes on Rupture, Realignment, and Everyday Life in Pentecostal and African Independent Churches

Abstract

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.

The social life of prayers – introduction

“…And it entails a social process of learning to become a new and changed subject, of breaking with one's past (cf. Robbins 2007; see also Meyer 1998;Engelke 2010). Here in various ways the process of learning to pray is formative for life as a Christian.…”

After dispossession

“…Other, similar examples of such metaphysical interpretations of capitalism transcending the subject-object dichotomy and generating new-oft en magically or religiously infl ected-forms of subjectivity include the work by Peter Geschiere on the modernity of African witchcraft (1997) and the seminal work by Jean and John Comaroff on "occult economies" and "millennial capitalism" (2001). In contemporary Western society, Richard Sennett (1998) analyzed the personal and psychological eff ects of contemporary capitalism, while Simon Coleman (2000), Matthew Engelke (2010), and Daromir Rudnyckyj (2010) discuss the material aspects of contemporary "prosperity religions" and the ways that they form new subjectivities.…”

Vivir en (dis)continuidad: reconfiguración de subjetividades religiosas en una comunidad ikojts de Oaxaca.

“…Varios antropólogos han explorado las estrategias por medio de las cuales los sujetos gestionan la ruptura con su propio pasado y entorno social con mediaciones que pueden ser de realineamiento (Engelke, 2010), no completamiento (Meyer, 1998) y preservación de ontologías espirituales indígenas mediante la demonización (Robbins, 2004).…”