The “new masculinity”: Addiction treatment as a reconstruction of gender in Puerto Rican evangelist street ministries (original) (raw)
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Negotiating Respect: Pentecostalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Spiritual Authority in the Dominican Republic, 2016
Negotiating Respect: Pentecostalism, Masculinity, and the Politics of Spiritual Authority in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida 2016), is an ethnographic investigation of Pentecostal Christianity—the Caribbean’s fastest growing religious movement—in the context of urban poverty in the Dominican Republic. Based on extensive fieldwork in a barrio of Villa Altagracia, Negotiating Respect examines the everyday practices of Pentecostal community members and the complex ways in which they negotiate legitimacy, recognition, and spiritual authority within the context of religious pluralism and Catholic cultural supremacy. Probing the interconnections of gender, faith, and identity from an anthropological perspective, I consider in detail the lives of young male churchgoers and their struggles with conversion and life in the streets. I show that conversion offers both spiritual and practical social value because it provides a strategic avenue for prestige and an acceptable way to transcend personal history. An exploration of the church and its relationship to barrio institutions like youth gangs and Dominican vodú, further draws out the meaningful nuances of lived religion and provides new insights into the social organization of spiritual authority locally and the cultural significance of Pentecostal growth and popularity globally. By focusing on the cultural politics of belief and the role religious identity plays in poor urban communities, Negotiating Respect illuminates the social dynamics of Pentecostal culture in practice and offers a fresh perspective on religious pluralism and contemporary religious and cultural change. This introductory chapter contextualizes this theme within the study of religion in the Caribbean and situates the book’s theoretical and analytical concerns within the growing field of the anthropology of Christianity. A summary of each chapter is also provided.
American Ethnologist, 2019
When David Edwards was 10, he received a postcard from his grandmother, who traveled in Afghanistan in the 1960s. That postcard-where she described the caravans arriving at the bazaar beneath her hotel window-was the catalyst for Edwards's desire to become an anthropologist and to engage as closely as he could with the people in that country. As with so many of us, anthropology's attractions were tinged with a certain romance. But the Afghanistan that Edwards first visited in 1978 was, within a few short years, riven with extremes of unimaginable violence instigated by foreign powers using the land and its people as proxies in global conflicts. This powerful book, Edwards tells us, is not the one "I imagined myself writing, or would have wanted to write, when I set off on my journey. But it is the book that I needed to write because it tells a story that has to be told" (xii). Instead of the postcard caravan, it is the caravan of martyrs in the war-littered landscape of 21st-century Afghanistan that Edwards takes as his theme. Central to this spread of martyrdom has been the act of suicide bombing: the basis of an explicit strategy first championed by Osama bin Laden in a February 2003 video encouraging "martyrdom operations against the enemy" (15). Picked up by the Taliban, which started its own attacks, the numbers have risen ever since: from 2 in 2003 and 20 in 2005 to 140 in 2007 and averaging 100 per year now. How has it developed, Edwards asks, that "men (and sometimes even women and children) would come to consider it a good thing to strap bombs onto their bodies, walk into crowded places, and trigger the bombs, knowing not only that they will lose their own lives but also that they will take with them a large number of strangers?" (15). To provide context for the upsurge in suicide bombing after the end of the Soviet invasion, Edwards traces its evolution against the backdrop of political movements and events that include the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion; the rise of Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban; the US invasion of Afghanistan following 9/11;
Victims of Illicit Desire: Pentecostal Men of God and the Specter of Sexual Temptation
ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY, 2018
For men in the context of urban poverty in the Dominican Republic, Pentecostal conversion may lead to conditions of gender distress: frustration stemming from the challenges of reconciling the con icting gender ideals of the church with those of the street. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with members of a Pentecostal community in the town of Villa Altagracia, I discuss how many young men come to experience the initial trials of conversion as tormenting spiritual assaults on their manhood in the form of alluring succubi. At the same time, male converts adopt newly inspired antagonisms with women familiars whom they blame for their illicit desires. Elsewhere I have discussed the strategies Pentecostal men deploy in order to mediate the con ict between barrio masculinity and evangelical Christianity; here I am concerned with illustrating how this conflict is given personal and cultural expression and how the attending experience of gender distress and its symbolic elaboration shapes masculine identity and male subjectivity in the church and local faith communities. By focusing on male converts and their struggles to remain manly, this article contributes to a richer understanding of gender dynamics in Pentecostal churches and offers useful insight into how gender is variously troubled, performed, and remade through conversion and religious practice more broadly. [Keywords: Spirit possession, gender distress, conversion, masculinity, succubi, demonization, anthropology of Christianity]
The Anthropology of Religious Charisma: Ecstasies and Institutions, 2013
Chapter 5 of The Anthropology of Religious Charisma: Ecstasies and Institutions, edited by Charles Lindholm, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013 This essay considers men, masculinity, and charismatic authority among Pentecostal Christians in the Dominican Republic. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an urban barrio of Villa Altagracia, I argue that male converts reconcile the apparent antinomy between Pentecostal Christianity and barrio masculinity by exploiting their former identities in the streets as admirable and exemplary machos. Through detailed narratives of sin and redemption grounded in the particulars of their pre-conversion lives as so-called tígueres (or macho men), converts articulate and assert their maleness at the same time they satisfy the esteemed conversion ideal of transformation from sinner to saint. Those converts who demonstrate the greatest reversals of fate, those who best exemplify a personal transformation from severe depravity to unquestioned righteousness, are often attributed the most prestige and recognized as charismatic ideals and spiritual leaders in the faith community.
Neo-Pentecostal Masculinities and Religion in the Public Sphere in Latin America [2015]
Special Issue on the 2014 FTL Costa Rica Conference
This article dwels around the construction of masculinities among neopentecostal churches and how the men who belong to these faith communities interact between societies and public spaces in Latin America. It addresses the challenges that these spiritualities involve as living faith expressions and as public social identities, as well as the dynamics that arise from its practice as religious subjects.
Anthropological Quarterly, 2018
This piece explores the support group movement's role in restructuring Latin American religion and contributing to the trans-denominational and trans-secular spread of the "reformation of machismo"-Elizabeth Brusco's (2010) name for Latin American evangelicalism's focus on transforming men and masculinity. Using ethnographic data from two years of fieldwork in an urbanizing area of northern Costa Rica and life history interviews with men from three churches and three men's groups there, this article argues that a region-wide popular discourse about a "crisis of masculinity/ma-chismo" and a "crisis of the family" has broadened the appeal of efforts to transform men and masculinity-not only among most churches, but especially among a proliferating number of trans-denominational and non-religious men's groups that are modeled implicitly on all-male Alcoholics Anonymous groups, which are extraordinarily popular throughout Latin America. This essay's argument borrows from Wuthnow's analysis of "the
Anthropological Quarterly, 2018
This piece explores the support group movement's role in restructuring Latin American religion and contributing to the trans-denominational and trans-secular spread of the "reformation of machismo"-Elizabeth Brusco's (2010) name for Latin American evangelicalism's focus on transforming men and masculinity. Using ethnographic data from two years of fieldwork in an urbanizing area of northern Costa Rica and life history interviews with men from three churches and three men's groups there, this article argues that a region-wide popular discourse about a "crisis of masculinity/machismo" and a "crisis of the family" has broadened the appeal of efforts to transform men and masculinity-not only among most churches, but especially among a proliferating number of trans-denominational and nonreligious men's groups that are modeled implicitly on all-male Alcoholics Anonymous groups, which are extraordinarily popular throughout Latin America. This essay's argument borrows from Wuthnow's analysis of "the
Global Public Health, 2011
This analysis focuses on the evangelical Protestant responses to drug use and HIV prevention, treatment and care in the urban periphery of Rio de Janeiro. We question how religious institutions, and the positions of pastors, create or reduce various elements of societal illness and vulnerability. We aim to show that the views of pastors may symbolise a form of social regulation that may have a meaningful social impact on drug use and HIV and AIDS. The interviews of 23 evangelical religious leaders were collected. Two case studies of evangelical drug rehabilitation centres (DRC) are derived from five qualitative interviews. Evangelical DRC generally reflects pastors’ discourses of reintegration into social networks including marriage, family and employment. We found important differences in the discourses and practices in private versus state-funded rehabilitation centres that may reveal ways social and programmatic vulnerabilities may affect the efficacy of public health interventions.