Ruy Llera Blanes

The atheist anthropologist: believers and non-believers in anthropological fieldwork

Following a reflection triggered by a fieldwork episode, this paper discusses issues of faith, belief, and personal conviction within anthropological fieldwork and specifically within research carried out in contexts of belief and religious practice. Incorporating fieldwork and biographical accounts taken from research within the (Gypsy) Filadelfia Evangelical Church, I discuss the involvement of personal beliefs and attitudes in anthropological theory and practice, its consequences on the production and circulation of anthropological and interpersonal knowledge, and its importance for the construction of personal relationships within fieldwork contexts. I outline the dynamic and somewhat paradoxical character of this process by comparing two different but sequential field contexts – Lisbon and Madrid.

Unstable Biographies. The Ethnography of Memory and Historicity in an Angolan Prophetic Movement

In this article I discuss issues of memory and historicity in a contemporary African prophetic movement, the Tokoist church. I do so by focusing on the multiple processes of “biographization” of the prophet’s (Simão Toko) life from the different allegiances within the movement. I suggest that, despite recent critiques on the biographical method, the ethnography of those (unstable and heterogeneous) processes can be very helpful to understand the place of memory and historical consciousness in contemporary Christianity.

Time for Self-Sacrifice: Temporal Narratives, Politics and Ideals in African Prophetism

In this article I propose an approach to sacrifice through notions of time, memory and expectation, moving away from classical formalist definitions that highlight the ‘nature and function’ of sacrifice, and into ideas of meaning and experience and their insertion in particular ideologies of time. I will argue that sacrifice entails particular temporalities, participating in political and experiential realms of memory and expectation. For this, I will invoke a particular regime of sacrifice: the notion of self-sacrifice, as it circulates among a prophetic and messianic Christian movement of Angolan origin, the Tokoist Church.

Extraordinary Times. Charismatic Repertoires in Contemporary African Prophetism

Charismatic qualities, spiritual gifts, and agencies are embodied in memory, hope, and certainty. This temporality is implicit in Max Weber’s classic formulation of charisma as a “removal from the sphere of the ordinary” during which certain individuals were “treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities” (1947:358–359). Through that exceptionality and extraordinary attribution, the charismatic relationship between leader and followers invokes a certain sense of (utopian) “expectation” under the guise of hope and/or dread (Feuchtwang and Mingming 2001:13). Charisma implies a disruption of traditional political authority; it inaugurates new ways of thought and experience that are mediated simultaneously by contrary emotions of uncertainty and trust concerning the future. As I will argue here, charismatic leadership also produces a sense of “extraordinary time,” that is, an alternative future akin to what Walter Benjamin called “Messianic moments” (1968).

Sites and Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe

Moving beyond the current media verves, this book debates, from a critical perspective, case studies on the sites and politics of religious diversity in Southern Europe.

What kind of God

Comment on Luhrmann, Tanya. 2012. When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf.

Introduction: Secularities, Religiosities, and Subjectivities

What has become of secularism following the so-called postsecular turn? As a consequence of the demise of modern twentieth-century secularization theory (as per Peter Berger’s ‘sacred canopy’), we live in an interesting intellectual moment in which the so-called postsecular (understood descriptively rather than theoretically, see, e.g., Habermas 2008; Mavelli and Petito 2012; Wilson 2012; Rosati 2015) coexists with the secular, which in turn has become pluralized and historicized (see, e.g., Taylor 2007; Agrama 2012; Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013). On the other hand, if, as Habermas argues, the secularist paradigm has learned to cohabitate with the religious, we also witness the conflictual anti-religious stance of ‘new atheist’ movements, which claim a ‘scientific’ argument for the removal of the religious from the public sphere (see Oustinova-Stjepanovic and Blanes 2015). This cohabitation of the secular and the postsecular is revealed, as the new atheism example above shows, mainly through political dialectical processes (see also Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Sullivan et al. 2015). This in turn makes us, editors of this volume, feel that (1) those political statements overshadow the subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of secularity, making it difficult to pinpoint concrete sites, agents, and objects of expression; and (2) for that same reason, they tend to obscure rather than illuminate the pragmatics and empirical dimensions of secularism. We argue that one such move toward the concrete and the subjective will allow us to know more about the plural, heterogeneous, and processual character of the secular/religious conundrum, and thus move beyond the monolithic, immobilized configurations that often flourish in the public sphere.

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia

ion: Notes from the South African Postcolony’. American Ethnologist

Introduction to Pentecostal Witchcraft and Spiritual Politics in Africa and Melanesia

In this introduction we give a comparative overview of the situation of Pentecostalism, witchcraft and spiritual politics in Africa and Melanesia. Our comparison between Africa and Melanesia starts off from the cultural specificity of witchcraft and sorcery, but simultaneously highlights how Christian evangelism “pentecostalizes” witchcraft and sorcery by making them universal concerns of life and death, good and evil.

The Angolan Apocalypse

In this article I explore some convergences between religious and political apocalyptic thinking, taking as case study the inauguration of the cathedral of the ‘Tokoist Church’ in Luanda, Angola, in August 2012. Describing the marginal contestation to the otherwise triumphant current church leadership, I argue that it is part of a movement of social fracture and political contestation that is also part of contemporary, post-war Angolan society, and also suggest that apocalyptic thinking can be understood as an expression of political dissent and of a ‘transformative politics’ that postulates alternative temporalities.