The Immanence of Transcendence: God and the Devil on the Aberdeenshire Coast

In Gamrie (a Scottish fishing village of 700 people and 6 Protestant churches), local experiences of ‘divine providence’ and ‘demonic attack’ abound. Bodily fluids, scraps of paper, video cassettes and prawn trawlers were immanent carriers of divine and demonic activity. Viewed through the lens of Weberian social theory, the experiences of Scottish fisher families show how the life of the Christian resembles an enchanted struggle between God and the Devil with the Christian placed awkwardly in-between. Because, locally, ‘there is no such thing as coincidence’, these Christians expected to experience both the transcendent ordering of life by divine providence through God's immanence and the transcendent disordering of life by demonic attack through the Devil's immanence. Where this ordering and disordering frequently occurred through everyday objects, seemingly mundane events – being given a washing machine or feeling sleepy in church – were experienced as material indexes of spiritual reality. Drawing on the work of Cannell (on transcendence), Keane (on indexicality) and Wagner (on symbolic obviation), this paper argues that attending to the materiality of Scottish Protestantism better equips the anthropology of religion to understand Christian experience by positing immanence as a kind of transcendence and transcendence as a kind of immanence.     

American individualism and the social incorporation of unaccompanied Guatemalan Maya young adults in Los Angeles

This study prompts a re-examination of segmented assimilation by investigating the social incorporation of unauthorized Guatemalan Maya young adults who arrive to the USA as unaccompanied minors to work while their families remain abroad. Unaccompanied Guatemalan Maya young adult participants of a Los Angeles support group show that Americanization and the adoption of American individualism equips youth growing up without parents or supportive social institutions with the rhetoric and behaviours of self-responsibility necessary for emotional, psychological and financial stability. As youth become expressive individuals, their social commitments move from the transnational family to the local community, which bolsters social incorporation and shapes aspirations for socio-economic mobility.     

Sick Again,Well Again: Sorcery,Christianity and Kinship in Northern Aboriginal Australia

This article concerns the ways in which Yolngu people of the Galiwin'ku settlement in northern Australia employ contemporary constructions of sorcery doctrines and Christian practices to rearticulate their kinship relations. In particular, I discuss the adaptation of sorcery ideas and accusations to present-day circumstances and the Christian healing processes that have emerged alongside traditional healing behaviours and biomedicine. Sorcery and Christianity at Galiwin'ku, I argue, are intertwined ethical models that enable the person and community to heal over and over again in accordance with the vicissitudes of postcolonial life. They continue the moral imperative of ‘looking after’ kin even as the net of ‘looking after’ has expanded to encompass new experiences, behaviours, and persons.     

United and Divided: Christianity,Tradition and Identity in Two South Coast Papua New Guinea Villages

The Motu and the Hula, two south coast Papua New Guinea societies, are linguistically related, have similar social organisation and were economically linked before European colonisation. They were both introduced to Christianity by the London Missionary Society in the late 19th century, and each appeared to incorporate the new religion into their social life and thought quickly and unproblematically. More than a century later, however, generalities about the similar adoption of Christianity by the Motu and the Hula are no longer possible. Nor are generalities about the engagement with Christianity within one or the other group, as individual Motu and Hula villages have unique histories. In this regard, while Christianity has now arguably become part of putative tradition among the Motu, some Hula are experiencing conflict between Christianity and their sense of tradition. In particular, while in the Motu village of Pari Christian virtues are appealed to as part of Pari's conception of itself as a ‘traditional’ Motu village, the situation in the Hula village of Irupara is more or less the contrary. Many people in Irupara are now lamenting ‘tradition’ as something lost, a forgotten essence destroyed or replaced by Christianity. Based on fieldwork in both villages, this paper discusses some differences in their engagement with Christianity and compares contemporary perceptions of religion, tradition and identity in both societies, informing a commentary on notions of tradition and anthropological representations of the Melanesian experience of Christianity.     

Respectable conviviality: Orthodox Christianity as a solution to value conflicts in southern Ethiopia

This article explains the recent emergence of Orthodox Christianity in a majoritarian Evangelical Protestant community in southern Ethiopia. Examining conversion motives and forms of religious engagement, I show that Orthodoxy is attractive to erstwhile followers of traditional practice because it affords them the solution to a value conflict. Joining an institutionalized ‘religion’ associated with national elites, converts attain the respectability formerly denied them by Evangelicals. And since Orthodoxy is less puritan than local Evangelicalism, conversion does not come at the expense of conviviality. An ethnographic discussion of this process of value harmonization provides the basis for a conceptual contribution to anthropological value theory, while also offering new insights for the debate about different modalities of Christian change.     

How to make fire: Resonant rupture within Melanesian charismatic revivalism

Recent theoretical developments within the anthropology of Christianity have shifted away from conceptualising the uptake of Pentecostal‐charismatic Christianity in polarised terms of rupture versus continuity towards more inclusive, dynamic interpretations that appreciate both underlying cultural synergies alongside deeply felt projects of personal and collective moral and spiritual transformation. Drawing upon Marshall's concept of ‘resonant rupture’, I explore how a series of interconnected revivals that occurred in many places throughout Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea resonated with pre‐existing elements of indigenous religion and cosmology. At the same time, however, I show that, although a broad conjuncture between tradition and Pentecostal‐charismatic Christianity existed, the events that constituted these movements were understood by revival participants as unequivocally Christian, innovative and radically new, thus revealing the simultaneous processes of resonance and rupture at work. In support of my argument I focus upon reports of religious intensification during this formative period from three different ethnographic settings, namely, Malaita, Solomon Islands, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea and the Min culture area, Papua New Guinea, respectively. All of the examples vividly exemplify Melanesian Christians absorbing existing religiosity into their new worship while at the same time imposing a radical change on the level of asserted meaning.     

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.     

Converts,Christians and anthropologists: A critique of Mark Mosko’s partible penitent thesis

First advanced in a major essay published in 2010, Mark Mosko's ‘partible penitent’ thesis asserts that Melanesian and Christian cultures are based upon analogous conceptions of dividual personhood. Consequently, conversion in the region has been characterised by continuity rather than rupture, as argued most prominently by Joel Robbins. This essay offers an assessment of Mosko's thesis in terms of his critique of the theoretical and ethnographic literature and his recent application of the model to religious change in the Trobriand Islands. Robbins’ work proves more convincing and provocative on both theoretical and methodological grounds. Yet both approaches, which frame their analysis of Christianity in terms of conversion, appear increasingly out of sync with the experience of the vast majority of Melanesians who are more accurately considered active participants in a diverse global religious tradition rather than recipients of it.     

Beyond rupture: Christian culture in the Pacific

In its many forms, Christianity tends to focus adherents’ attention upon earlier religious traditions, compelling them to renew their faith, repent and seek redemption. This special issue takes up questions about Christianity’s temporal ‘secondarity’. Contributors move beyond increasingly futile theoretical debates about rupture and continuity by considering how Christians in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands conceptualise and enact their fraught relationships with prior religious traditions. By examining the place of culture within Christianity, contributors avoid the analytical pitfalls of assuming that Pacific culture is not already thoroughly Christian. Rather than taking up questions about initial Christian conversion, these articles focus on revival. The relentless campaigns of Christian renewal that have transformed religious landscapes more than a generation aim not only to overcome pre‐Christian powers, but also to supersede earlier versions of Christianity. In examining not only highly localised ethnotheologies, but also regional movements, this issue opens questions that should be of interest beyond the anthropology of Christianity.     

Moral failure: a jeremiad of the war on drugs in Guatemala

The current consensus among social scientists and political pundits is that the war on drugs failed, with a raft of failed programmes, failed interventions, failed policies, and even failed states. But these critics have tended to overlook a more existential form of failure that plays a key role in the ongoing effects of the war on drugs. This failure, which anthropologists of Christianity are well positioned to understand, is the perceived failure of Pentecostal Christians to make right with the Lord. Based on extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, a country profoundly transformed by the illicit movement of cocaine from the Andes to the United States, this article assesses how and to what effect a sense of moral failure among the country's Christian communities sustains a now expansive network of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres. Reading one such centre's archive of intake forms as a jeremiad – a Christian lament that bemoans the failures of society to keep its covenant with God – this article concludes that a sense of moral failure sustains the fading edges of today's war on drugs.     

All around Australia and overseas: Christianity and indigenous identities in Central Australia 1988

This paper discusses the themes and practices of Christian performance at the Western Desert Aboriginal community of Warlungurru in 1988, 1 six years after the Pintupi return to their homelands (see Myers 1986 ; McMillan 1988 ; Nathan & Japanangka Leichleitner 1983 ) and the enthusiastic Christian revival—nightly Gospel singing, a ban on gambling—experienced in the first years of their return. My concern is with how a distinctively Lutheran focus in Pintupi Christianity (in opposition to competing Pentecostal orientations in Central Australia at that time) was grasped by some Pintupi as a structure organising relations between Indigenous people and others in the world, and how specialised knowledge constituted positions of prestige and authority. Thus, I explore certain convergences between prior Indigenous formulations of personhood and relatedness and the way in which Lutheran Christianity was articulated during this period.     

Syncretism or Sychronicity? Remapping the Yolngu Feel of Place

For Christian Yolngu in Arnhem Land visions shape the imagined, embodied and affective experiences of places of danger, illness, healing and general wellbeing. In this paper, I argue that Yolngu have consistently constructed their Christian faith through visions stemming from an ancestral aesthetic embodied in the environment. As a result, religious ideology and social action have sometimes been seen as syncretic, raising questions about how Yolngu understand and experience Christian conversion, encounter and revelation. I argue that Yolngu spiritual experiences emerge from the sentiments associated with ancestral places that act as emotive sites for remapping an ancestral aesthetic as Christian experience. The resultant emotional and spiritual synchronicity underlies a Yolngu Christianity that is corporeal and abstracted, negotiated and strategic, practical and experiential.     

Pentecostal peacefulness: virtue ethics and the reception of theology in Nepal

The anthropology of Christianity has struggled to theorize the place of theology in Christian social life. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's account of virtue ethics, in particular his concepts of practice, narrative, and moral tradition, I explore the reception of Pentecostal theology in the Nepali city of Bhaktapur. I show how local Christians have drawn on Pentecostal eschatology to develop a pacifistic ethics, allowing them to negotiate local social and religious conflicts. The belief that Christ has decisively defeated evil spirits allows local Christians to detach themselves from cycles of aggression connected with witchcraft accusations, providing a space of security in which to cultivate distinctive practices of care. Connecting this local theology with a wider tradition in Pentecostal moral thought, I argue that MacIntyre's virtue ethics provides a powerful tool for interpreting the relationship between local circumstance and extra‐local theology, and for studying cross‐cultural patterns of theological reception.     

Homegrown foreigners: how Christian nationalism and nativist attitudes impact Muslim civil liberties

Building from the literature on racialization of Muslims, we argue that there are two unique dimensions to anti-Muslim attitudes: Christian nationalism and nativism. Christian nationalism subscribes to the idea of Christianity as being central to American identity, and nativism provides insight into the monopolies regulating citizenship. We then test this framework’s hypotheses on data drawn from the General Social Survey in 2014 to see if these two dimensions predict support for civil rights infringements of Muslim-Americans compared to other outgroups, including atheists, communists, and racists. The results indicate both Christian nationalism and nativism have significant and negative effects on Muslim civil liberties. We also find some differences between the effects of Christian nationalism and nativism on Muslim civil liberties compared to the other outgroups. We interpret these results as an indication that nativism works as an ordering principle to reconstitute who counts as American and who does not.     

‘Destiny is written by God’: Islamic predestination,responsibility, and transcendence in Central Morocco

Tracing the story of Atiqa, a young Moroccan woman in her late twenties, and the revivalist imagination that informs it, I reflect in this article on how responsibility is imagined and reckoned with when human choice and action encounter the transcendental forces of destiny. Far from leading to an abeyance of responsibility in the face of worldly and transcendental powers, I show that it is precisely the idea of a divine predestination based on God's omnipotence and omniscience that triggers an ethical reflection on questions of choice, action, and consequence. Atiqa's story provides insights with regard to the notion of human responsibility under God's will. Revealing the relational dynamics of the encounter (and disjuncture) between human and divine intentionalities, it compels us not only to move beyond the emphasis on the embodiment of divine will present in the paradigm of self-cultivation, but also to reconsider transcendence in current anthropological debates on ethics.     

Let the earth forever remain! Landscape legacies and the materiality of history in the northern Basin of Mexico

This article examines the landscape as an enduring protagonist in the northern Basin of Mexico over the past 1,000 years in communities north of Mexico City. Viewing materiality as the mutual constitution between social and physical worlds, I discuss the production and inheritance of landscape legacies. The manner in which legacies are inherited is tied to changing political, economic, and social conditions. This project integrates multiple sources of information (archaeological, ethnographic, historical, and ecological) to understand transforming connections between people and the landscape in this region, from the ancient state of Xaltocan to the Aztec and Spanish empires, continuing into the struggle for a modern nation. It reveals relationships that are apparent only via a perspective in dialogue with the landscape's materiality over time. In so doing, this article asserts archaeologists' unique contribution to the study of not only long‐term change but also historical processes inherited by and relevant to the contemporary world.     

Life-in-Death: Raising Dead Sons in New Orleans

The social and religious work of African-American women in New Orleans who mourn and memorialise the dead attends primarily to sons and grandsons, the young black men who are most frequently the victims of homicide. Based on ethnographic and historical research in two Christian congregations, this article examines the forms of relatedness that women have developed to support and advocate for each other, the displaced, and the deceased. Tracing more broadly the development of vulnerability and violence at the urban margins, I argue that this work unfolds in a continued context of social death, predicated on dominant and still racist determinations of human value. I thus examine the transformative potential of African-American religious women’s relational practices, highlighting in particular their assertion of black social and spiritual value, in the kingdom of God if not yet in the inclusive, just, and sustainable city and world they envision.     

Mental Ill Health,Recovery and the Family Assemblage

The recovery approach is now among the most influential paradigms shaping mental health policy and practice across the English-speaking world. While recovery is normally presented as a deeply personal process, critics have challenged the individualism underpinning this view. A growing literature on “family recovery” explores the ways in which people, especially parents with mental ill health, can find it impossible to separate their own recovery experiences from the processes of family life. While sympathetic to this literature, we argue that it remains limited by its anthropocentricity, and therefore struggles to account for the varied human and nonhuman entities and forces involved in the creation and maintenance of family life. The current analysis is based on an ethnographic study conducted in Australia, which focused on families in which the father experiences mental ill health. We employ the emerging concept of the “family assemblage” to explore how the material, social, discursive and affective components of family life enabled and impeded these fathers’ recovery trajectories. Viewing families as heterogeneous assemblages allows for novel insights into some of the most basic aspects of recovery, challenging existing conceptions of the roles and significance of emotion, identity and agency in the family recovery process.