Naomi Haynes

Egalitarianism and hierarchy in Copperbelt religious practice: on the social work of Pentecostal ritual

Abstract This article offers an analysis of Pentecostal ritual life focused on a core tension in this religion, namely that between the egalitarianism associated with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all believers and the hierarchy that follows from the charismatic authority of church leaders. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Zambian Copperbelt, the author traces out the egalitarian and hierarchical aspects of Pentecostal ritual in order to demonstrate the importance of both of these elements to the social relationships that Pentecostal adherence produces. While the tension between egalitarianism and hierarchy is evident in all Pentecostal groups, on the Copperbelt their interaction produces social results which build on extant cultural models, and which have particular significance in the light of Zambias recent economic history. These local resonances in turn allow us to address discontinuity, a central topic in analyses of Pentecostalism, as well as the role of creativity in ritual practice.

Learning to pray the Pentecostal way: language and personhood on the Zambian Copperbelt

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of prayer in the production of the Pentecostal person on the Zambian Copperbelt. While Pentecostal prayer is partly focused on private concerns, and therefore reinforces a classic Protestant notion of bounded, individualised personhood, success in this practice depends on a believer’s ability to incorporate the language of the Pentecostal community. Prayer is also therefore dependent on a model of personhood in which permeability has an important part to play. One of the implications of this latter element of Pentecostal prayer is that it turns individual believers into iconic representations of their communities.

Affordances and Audiences

The wide-ranging contributions to this special issue point to the extraordinary variety of Christian adherence around the world. In the light of this multiplicity, it has become increasingly important to develop frameworks that will allow us to conceptualize Christianity as a multifaceted, labile, but nevertheless identifiable object. Drawing together the concept of affordances, as used by Webb Keane in his contribution to this issue, as well as what I call “audiences,” this afterword outlines a comparative framework for the study of Christianity. This framework is focused on Christian adherence as a form of value creation, worked out in contested social space. I begin by applying this model to some of my own material from the Zambian Copperbelt, showing how Pentecostalism and the prosperity gospel afford claims on audiences that include God, the state, and the wider social world. I then turn my attention to the affordances and audiences that emerge in the articles collected in this special issue. I conclude by suggesting that the framework of affordances and audiences I have developed here helps to address one of the most vexing problems in the anthropology of Christianity, namely, how the subfield defines its object of study.

Change and Chisungu in Zambia's Time of AIDS

ABSTRACT Through an examination of amafunde – a Bemba word meaning ‘instruction’, which refers to the training given to a young woman before her marriage – this article explores the social changes that have followed widespread HIV infection on the Zambian Copperbelt. Amafunde today are marked by openness between senior women and those they train for marriage, an openness that they encourage their charges to adopt in married life. This emphasis on direct or ‘straight’ speech stands in stark contrast to earlier accounts of female initiation in Zambia, which highlight ‘obscure’ modes of communication. An analysis of this change reveals the increased importance of both secrecy and disclosure in Zambias time of AIDS, as well as the influence of Pentecostal Christianity. Most importantly, it indexes changes in the social forms that the interplay of secrecy and disclosure has traditionally produced.

Theology on the Ground

Any exploration of theologically engaged anthropology ought to begin with a clear definition of what is meant by theology. Most simply, we could say that theology is a system or set of ideas about the divine; theology is what people think about God and how they ought to relate to him. This definition is quite broad, and one might want to qualify it with a connection, if not to the academic discipline of theology, then at least to the work of religious specialists. In order for theology to be different from something more general such as cosmology, it seems to require a certain kind of expertise or access to a particular intellectual tradition. While I see the reasoning behind such claims, I want to argue against such a narrowing impulse by providing a broad view of Christian theology “on the ground.” This democratizing approach enables me to treat theology as an ethnographic object and, by extension, as the basis for anthropological analysis. This, in turn, allows me to address one of the most vexing problems in the anthropology of Christianity, namely how to write about divine action in a way that preserves the integrity of both our informants’ experiences and that of anthropological frameworks.1 In the discussion that follows, I approach theology as a particular kind of reflexive action aimed at understanding who God is, how he works in the world, how people ought to relate to God, and what they can expect from him. This reflexive work is, as I have already suggested, as ably done by church leaders and scholars as it is by ordinary laypeople, although in this chapter I focus more on the efforts of pastors than I do on the members of their congregations. In the Protestant tradition, theology so defined has historically meant engagement with the biblical text, and in the Pentecostal case that I examine here, we will see that this type of textual engagement takes on a very

Conversion beyond “Rice Christians”

Comment on Roberts, Nathaniel. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in a Chennai Slum. Oakland: University of California Press