Matthew Engelke

Women of fire and spirit : history, faith, and gender in Roho religion in western Kenya

This is the first extensive study of the African Christian Roho religion, or Holy Spirit movement, in Western Kenya. Hoehler-Fatton uses extensive oral histories and life narratives to provide a counterweight to existing historical literature, and also brings to the fore the role of women in the evolution and expansion of the Church.

‘We Wondered what Human Rights He Was Talking About’: Human rights, homosexuality and the Zimbabwe International Book Fair

This article addresses the recent debates on homosexuality and human rights in Zimbabwe, particularly as they relate to the controversy surrounding the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) participating in the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. These debates highlight the problems inherent in talking about universal human rights when appeals to ‘cultural difference’ are made. In Zimbabwe, for example, critics of GALZ and homosexuality have tried to argue that ‘homosex is not in African culture’. Drawing from recent scholarship on human rights in anthropology and elsewhere, as well as the work of the philosopher Richard Rorty, the author argues that appeals to human rights on behalf of GALZ in Zimbabwe must consider the moral sentiments involved in arguments over human rights more carefully if claims to those rights are to be realized.

Reading and Time: Two Approaches to the Materiality of Scripture

In this article I examine Christian approaches to conceptions of time as expressed in approaches to reading the Bible. The first main focus in this effort is upon the work of Saint Augustine, whose arguments about the connections between reading and time have been, as I try to show, very influential. The second main focus is more ethnographic in nature, and comes from my work in Zimbabwe on a small group of apostolic Christians whose views differ significantly from Augustine. These two cases are framed by some more general remarks on Christian temporalities, as well as a call for the newly-emerging interest in the anthropology of Christianity to take note of more general work on literacy and the ethnography of reading.

An interview with Edith Turner

Introduction: The following interview is taken from a much longer life history conducted over the course of several months in 1997 as a project sponsored in part by the Historical Archives Program of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The original motivation for that project was to explore the life and writing of Edith Turner, her marriage to Victor Turner, and how the dynamics of gender and marriage affect the production of anthropological work. This interview has been framed to touch briefly on the issues raised in the longer work. In a few instances it has been necessary to write transitional paragraphs in order to give this interview a more coherent form, but an effort has been made to keep the tone, ideas,

The Book, the Church and the 'Incomprehensible Paradox': Christianity in African History*

A review essay of G. West and M. Dube (eds), The Bible in Africa: Transactions, Trajectories, and Trends (Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2000), xviii�828 pp.,

Christianity and the Anthropology of Secular Humanism

59.95. B. Sundkler and C. Steed, A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2000), xix�1232 pp., £85 hardback.

Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church by Joel Cabrita (review)

Secular humanists in the United Kingdom regularly think about, talk about, and act in relation to religion, especially Christianity. In this article, I address the relationships between secular humanism and Christianity by drawing on fieldwork with a local humanist group affiliated with the British Humanist Association. In line with many moderns, as indeed with many kinds of Christians, these secular humanists often want to sever ties with the past—in this case, with what they understand to be Christianity’s religious elements. At the same time, they want to preserve those aspects of Christianity they understand to be human, not religious. These engagements with and articulations of Christianity can be helpful not only for understanding contemporary secular-humanist formations but also some of the debates that have framed the anthropology of Christianity over the past decade.

Economies and Ecologies of the Sacred in Zimbabwe

Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church ‘This terrifi c book ought to help us rethink the whole enterprise of Christian theology. For the members of the Nazaretha church, the Christian canon was not closed. They documented their prophet’s spectacular deeds, chronicled their own exemplary triumphs, and created an archive. These records in turn became material for sermons, fodder for rituals, and templates for liturgy. By taking us into the procedures by which miraculous events were recorded, edited, rehearsed, and relived, Joel Cabrita’s book shows theology to be a popular endeavor, an imaginative work in which commoners, not only prophets and academics, participate.’ – Derek R. Peterson, University of Michigan

A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church

I am happy to talk about the specifics of the ethnographic study that I conducted in Zimbabwe in the 1990s, as well as the ways in which both the political and the economic crisis have unfolded since 2000 and 2001, which I document. But what I wanted to do more broadly is just to talk about some of the general issues and problems that I think are related, and that tie in very much with several of the themes that we have looked at before. I shall address conflict—which is one thing that in fact we have not really addressed thus far in much detail. And I think that is partly—if I can be provocative—because we are switching now from normative models to some actually existing histories, and of course models of how the world should be, or how humans should act, do not always get borne out in practice.