Dialogues and Trajectories (original) (raw)
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for the Study of Religion Afterword
2016
This special issue makes a welcome addition to the burgeoning anthropologically inspired work on Christianity. It takes as its central theme the thorny issue of religious experience, and in this case particularly the kind of experience that lies at the centre of Protestant Christianity-direct, unmediated experience of God's presence. Refreshingly, it is framed not merely in terms of changes in intellectual fashion-the turns towards the body, the senses, ontology, aesthetics-but also in terms of substantial and substantive changes within Protestant Christianity itself. These changes may be linked to what we could call a Pentecostal revolution within Protestant Christianity, which has placed the experience of God at its centre-so much so that much Pentecostal effort goes in to inculcating such experience (Brahinsky 2012). Being experientially connected with God becomes an outcome, rather than a precondition , of religious activity. The term 'Pentecostal revolution' stems from Ruth Marshall's work in Nigeria (Marshall 2009), where she identifies a simultaneous reconfiguring of the political and religious landscape as Pentecostalism took hold and expanded across the country. The concept could equally be applied to other contexts. Although it is not clear the extent to which the rise of Pentecostalism has restructured entire polities in other contexts, as it appears to have done in Nigeria (though it may well also have done), it is certainly true that people's spiritual, material, and political lives have been radically transformed through Pentecostalism. It is also true that the experiential focus of Pentecostalism has leached into a much broader range of Christian constituencies-from the Alpha movement (see Stout and Dein 2013) to Catholic Charismatic Renewal (see Csordas 1997)-such that it is a central pillar of much Christian activity in the contemporary world. This empirical topicality, as well as its intellectual topicality, makes this a valuable special issue. Its articles cover a range of geographical and temporal contexts. Combining historical, literary, and Bible studies approaches with more contemporary anthropological ones, it tacks backwards and
FORUM 34–35: RELIGION, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND THE 'ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION'
A b s t r a c t: This discussion concerns certain important issues in the anthropology of religion. In recent decades, there have been claims in the social sciences that 'religion' has outlived its usefulness as a concept, with criticism coming from a range of disciplines. Thus it is reasonable to ask how signifi cant and intellectually credible the term 'religion' may be, and how useful to our research and writing. Other questions that may be encountered when studying religion(s) are related to the confessional or non-confessional identities of researchers. In the anthropology of religion, there is particularly extensive attention paid to the personal standpoint of individual scholars and specifi cally to the extent of their involvement with a given religious tradition. On the other hand, among the specifi cities of religious fi eldwork is the high degree of 'agency' of our informants, as expressed especially in the efforts made in a particular religious group to convert the observer to their own beliefs. The participants of the discussion accept the challenges of these diffi cult problems, and strive to analyze the processes of anthropological and sociological description and interpretation of religion(s).
Pentecostudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on The Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, 2017
Following the diagnosis made by the editors of The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism, the anthropology of Christianity has been flourishing as a subdiscipline of anthropology for several decades, becoming now recognized analytical field. Consequently, the current corpus of anthropological literature on Pentecostal and evangelical churches is abundant and multilayered, and the editors raise an important question concerning the present location and future development of this research area. As Joel Robbins claims in the afterword of the volume, the anthropology of Christianity has already come to its mature age and therefore it needs to be seen as an established science stepping beyond its "revolutionary" period, if we want to capture its evolution in Kuhn's terms. The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism is thus intended both as a neat résumé of the evolution of the discipline (Introduction), with some important insights for scholars and students entering the field, and a presentation of the current state of the art. For the latter purpose, Simone Coleman and Rosalind I. J. Hackett have gathered twelve, relatively short contributions. Considering that the volume aims to constitute summary of the discipline, it unites scholars that have been working in the field for several decades together with a new generation of already renowned researchers. A strong side of this collection therefore is its high-quality, multi-layered ethnography based in geographically diverse settings, as dispersed as Brazil,
Mediating the local and the global in Nigerian Pentecostalism
Journal of Religion in Africa, 1998
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