Pentecostalism and the Production of Community In the Haitian Diaspora (original) (raw)
This essay addresses the production of community (Appadurai 1996) among Haitian migrants in Guadeloupe, French West Indies, an "overseas department" of France located in the eastern Caribbean 1. About 24,000 Haitian migrants currently live in Guadeloupe, and as elsewhere in the Haitian diaspora, they are marginalized by the dominant society in both material and symbolic ways. Living in substandard housing and typically working in poorly paid and insecure jobs, Haitians must also contend with the stigma they bear in Guadeloupean society as uncivilized, chaotic and even a threat to the public order. The origins of these images of denigration, the way they are materialized in everyday life, and the counter-images that Haitians put forward are the overarching framework for this essay. This complicated process of displacement, resettlement, and insertion into an occasionally hostile society forms the backdrop for the local appeal of Pentecostal conversion in this migrant group. There are two religious groupings among Haitian residents of Guadeloupe. One partially reproduces the nominally Catholic orientation found in Haiti. However, the rest of the migrant population (between 40% and 60%, according to most people) has joined several all-Haitian Pentecostal churches scattered throughout the island. Their pastors are Haitian, the services are mostly in Haitian Creole, although all of these churches were founded in the past 25 years by visiting North American missionaries. We must therefore locate Pentecostalism in this setting at the
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