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Introduction

I clapped twice to announce my presence, then ducked into the mud-plaster longhouse that Mutúali built soon after the rains had ceased. It was dark inside, except for the day’s last sunrays passing through the rear. It was empty except for Mutúali and Leonardo standing toward the front. On a bamboo platform before them sat what was, as late as 2012, only the second television set to appear in Kaveya village. An empty box to the side revealed it to be a fourteen-inch Sharp Multisystem. To repay the loan needed for its purchase, Mutúali would be operating his longhouse essentially as a village cinema, charging visitors an entrance fee of three meticais (at the time, around five U.S. cents) per night. Of course, not always would he be able to show videos and take in revenue. “Depends on the gasoline,” he said. The fee would also go toward this: the cost of diesel for his electric generator, and the labor of biking, jerry cans in tow, to the service station forty kilometers away.

For this inaugural occasion Mutúali invited his fellow worshippers at Kaveya’s Pentecostal church to join him early. I arrived with Jemusse, a church member with whose family my wife and I were living that year. We greeted Mutúali and Leonardo, then sat down in the front row—a broad log on the dirt floor. Silently and admiringly we watched our friends maneuver through a tangle of wires and devices.

Other church members trickled in. After Deacon Nório arrived, technical preparations ceased. Or, rather, they took a new form: we got to our feet and prayed. Jemusse started by recalling Mutúali’s previous failed projects—a dilapidated sewing machine, a malfunctioning motorbike—yet affirming that God was behind those opportunities just as God is now behind this one. “Bless us, Lord, so that all the machines work well,” he said. We each then took to shouting our own prayers. Our eyes were shut and our voices loud. A few arms were raised, others punched the air. After some minutes, Deacon Nório raised his voice above the rest: “We thank you, God, for the miracles you are doing in this home. Here on earth no one can do these miracles. Thank you, Lord! But whoever wants to spoil this place, stay away. Evil spirits, you cannot come near! Let Jesus Christ reign. I hand over all to you, my God.” We all yelled in unison, “Amen!”

I reclaimed my seat, and Mutúali and Leonardo resumed their setup. Out of some foam casing they removed a DVD player. They connected it to an extension cord that snaked out the side entrance. There the generator sat, whirring hesitantly, then more persistently. It was soon emitting the pungent odor of burning fuel.

Meanwhile the rows behind me were filling silently, everyone seemingly awed by the novelty before them. One man finally broke the silence with a joke, telling us to look and see the television already on. He was referring to what the screen reflected beyond the rear passageway: the open sky and a mango tree, under which children could be seen playing.

Those children rushed in when, finally, a test bulb flickered overhead. The screen lit up and the word SHARP appeared as if to signal the substitution under way: bold blue pixels displacing the faint blue reflection of the evening sky. Afro-pop beats soon resounded from the speakers. Everyone cheered and fixed their eyes on Mr. Ong’eng’o, the Kenyan megastar on screen. Though the Gusii words he sang were meaningless to us, the images and sounds were electric.

The bass lines thumped so intensely they would nearly drown out the beats that sounded a short time later from elsewhere in Kaveya. Summoning villagers to an all-night mirusi ceremony, these rhythms were amplified not by sleek new speakers but by the goat hide of hand drums, their source of power not diesel but deities. These deities were the ancestral spirits integral to all healing ceremonies, the same spirits Deacon Nório had just called evil and banished from Kaveya’s new longhouse cinema.

The distant throb of drums presented me with a dilemma. I was tempted to go; it was one of my first opportunities to witness a traditional healing ceremony. But I worried about how I could be present for both it and this signal event in the life of my friends. I hung around a bit longer, then rose to leave, apologizing for having to break away. No one saw the need for apologies; everyone respected my desire to go. Leonardo, tireless in his offers of research assistance, even promised to join me later, once his services at the cinema were no longer needed.

I thanked him and began the ten-minute walk down the laterite road. In the darkness I made out the profiles of children and teenagers sharing the path with me. We exchanged greetings as we crossed: Munetta phama? (Are you walking well?)

I knew I had arrived when five or six fire pits came into view, all at a single compound where usually just one burns through the night. Around each fire sat clusters of people on the ground or on stumps, their hands alternately extending toward the flame and tearing balls of porridge paste from a common tin plate. I was invited to sit and share in the meal.

After eating, a number of young people got up and left. They headed in the direction from which I had come, and I realized that those whose paths I earlier crossed were not just heading to Mutúali’s cinema. They were leaving the mirusi grounds to do so. It was tempting to see this as a harbinger of things to come. Were we at a tipping point where people increasingly opt for transnational pop over ancestral ceremonies? The short journey from the ritual grounds to the cinema seemed suddenly a passage of great import. The only one swimming upstream was the anthropologist.

The mirusi ceremony eventually got under way. All the women—and only the women—made their way into the healing hut. But they scarcely remained there. At various points through the night, they exited in single file, shaking gourd rattles and chanting rhythmically: “Let’s go to the mountain and seek out wood for the pot.” “Let’s seek the naruru, the medicine from the bush.” “I’m returning from where I came, to take the nihiro bath.” Each verse named an element of ritual significance. Firewood was used to heat the medicine consumed by the afflicted. The naruru (water strider) was brought into contact with the patient, then released to return her vertigo to the bush. The nihiro was a river bath, taken just before sunrise, wherein, I was told, “the sick person moves from the old environment to a new life.” Transformation, in all these cases, presupposed motion: from inside to outside, from land to river, from village to bush. Yet there was always, also, a return.

In so many ways the mirusi ceremony differed from what was simultaneously occurring just up the road. One event was retrospective, done because “this is how our ancestors did it”; the other was prospective, evoking electronic futures from which ancestral spirits were explicitly expelled.

There were also, though, similarities. As central as motion was to the healing ceremony, the same could be said of the motion pictures, mostly of dancers, broadcast at the cinema; and both events summoned forces from other worlds—whether ancestral spirits or the Holy Spirit, whether bush animals or pop stars. Two seemingly disparate events were connected by movement. The past and the future conjoined in a mobile present.

That mobility manifested most clearly in the youths whose paths I had crossed earlier that night. It turned out I would see them again, when they returned to rejoin their mothers. Back on the healing grounds, they tended their own fire pits, varyingly following the ritual and entertaining themselves with riddles. It struck me as I observed their seamless inhabitation of parallel worlds that although radical changes were afoot, such changes were not one-way. There was, it seemed, a return route on the path to modernity.

I saw it not just in the ease of young people’s movements but in the fact that many women at the mirusi ceremony had been, and would perhaps again be, involved with the village Pentecostal church. I saw it in the good cheer with which my friends wished me off to what, for them, is a forbidden ceremony. I saw it in the enthusiasm with which Leonardo, though Pentecostal, arrived around midnight to aid my introduction to it.

All this made me rethink what had so troubled me earlier that day: “How would I be able to attend both the cinema’s inauguration and the healing ceremony? How terrible that both had to fall on the same night!” I now wondered whether the sense of this as a dilemma was uniquely mine.

Continuities of Change

This is a book about change, about how it is conceived and experienced, received and initiated. Dominant discourses, following Michel Foucault’s (1972) view of history as a series of epistemic ruptures, have come to present historical change in terms of discontinuous epochs. Attending this is usually a strong sense of the exceptional nature of the present, its radical alterity from the period just past. Hence, the present world, the one we are all said to inhabit, is that of the “post”: postmodern, postcolonial, postsecular. Germane to this book’s opening narrative is the “postelectronic world” now upon us, one in which media technologies connect even remote corners to far-off places (Appadurai 1996: 5).

Of course, there are exceptions. As late as the year of my fieldwork (2011–12) no cell phone signals reached Kaveya or other rural parts of northern Mozambique; electricity was confined to the core of the district capital. Yet plans for constructing cell phone towers were in the works. And, as seen at the longhouse cinema, living off the grid could not keep resourceful villagers from accessing hitherto unknown styles and stylings. Mr. Ong’eng’o was just a hint of things to come. On future visits I saw villagers enjoying videos from as far away as Nigeria and Hollywood. Especially popular among the latter was the film Undisputed II: Last Man Standing, promoted on the DVD cover as “Intensive! Explosive! Mind Blowing!” Major changes under way, indeed.

There is indisputable value in seeing often-overlooked locales as developing in these ways. Worried by globalization trends, anthropologists once made it their mission to document and thereby salvage “tribal” folkways before modernity could render them extinct (Gruber 1970). Well-intentioned though they were, the anxieties driving these efforts also betrayed a measure of ignorance about how cultures have always been dynamic, adopting and adapting to foreign and unfamiliar forces. An anthropological alternative to the caricature of vulnerable natives powerless before homogenizing pressures arose in the late twentieth century along with similar developments in postcolonial theory (Bhabha 1994). The argument here was that however universalizing its rhetoric and however expansive its ambitions, no cultural, religious, or political formation succeeds in taking similar form in dissimilar settings. People do not passively accept the new. They hybridize and syncretize it, they localize and indigenize it, all in accord with underlying, context-specific logics.

With his 1996 book Modernity at Large, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai marked yet another shift, not by denying processes of hybridization but by intensifying possibilities of change. Due not only to electronic media but also to greater means of long-distance travel, a far wider set of possible lives has become imaginable, if not achievable, for more people than ever before. It is not just that people appropriate the new in terms of the old. Today most have it in their power to transcend their places of origin. Consequently, “the world in which we now live … involve[s] a general break with all sorts of pasts” (Appadurai 1996: 3).

Nothing better illustrates this turn from hybridity to rupture than the oeuvre of anthropologist Charles Piot. In Remotely Global, Piot (1999) argues compellingly against the tendency to see remote African villages, such as those in Togo where he worked, as untouched by global processes of interaction and exchange. One decade later, in Nostalgia for the Future, Piot (2010) claims to stand by those earlier insights, but with the premise that something has changed, something epoch defining in fact: the end of the Cold War. Dictators and chiefs lost power and prestige as global superpowers ceased propping them up. The resulting, radically new sovereignties have generated radically new temporalities and subjectivities, in Togo and elsewhere.

Piot acknowledges the arguments against seeing history in terms of momentous breaks.¹ Yet “despite the continued presence of … hybridities—of the cultural mixing that is emblematic of the postcolonial moment and celebrated by postcolonial theory—this is nevertheless a world that has turned a new page” (2010: 14). Quotidian concerns have been reoriented from untoward pasts to indeterminate futures. Figuring most prominently in this is the extraordinary spread of Pentecostalism. This is the branch of Christianity—distinct from Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant branches—that traces its institutional origins to the early twentieth century and manifests in such visceral displays as speaking in tongues and miracle healings. It is also the Christian tradition most belligerent toward non-Christian (sometimes simply non-Pentecostal) ways of being.²

Precisely through its disparaging and demonizing of “tradition,” Pentecostalism exemplifies just how new is the page that has been turned (Piot 2010: 53–76). From elsewhere in West Africa, political scientist Ruth Marshall frames her own work on Pentecostal renewal movements against what she calls anthropology’s “domestication of modernity” paradigm. This approach “depends on tracing, not the ruptures that ‘conversion to modernity’ brings about, but rather the lines of cultural and historical continuity” (2009: 6). Yet Marshall’s critique of anthropology may be overdrawn, since, as seen, more than a few anthropologists have come to emphasize rupture over hybridity.

Indeed, it is within—though also against—the anthropological discipline that the anthropology of Christianity has arisen; and it is within this subfield that the trope of rupture most thrives. Most of its studies of conversion reference Birgit Meyer’s (1998) essay, “‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’: Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse.”³ In the case Meyer describes, to break with one’s past means to sever ties with kin and to desist from ancestral rituals. The global reach of this injunction has helped generate much interest in and theorizing of contemporary Pentecostalism.⁴

Leading anthropologist of Christianity Joel Robbins not only documents evidence of Pentecostal discontinuity; he makes of it a critique of his discipline. Anthropology is biased toward continuity, he argues, wedded to a view that “culture comes from yesterday, is reproduced today, and shapes tomorrow” (2007: 10). Robbins contends that Pentecostalism’s discourse of disjuncture and ritualization of rupture compel a retheorizing of how people relate the new to the old. Pentecostalism refuses capture by standard models of hybridization and localization. It does, in fact, demand discontinuity.⁵

There is much to commend in the shift from hybridity to rupture, from continuity to discontinuity. Regarding Pentecostal practitioners, first of all, it takes them at their word. Many Pentecostals do claim to be making a “break with the past.” The prayers offered at the cinema’s inauguration are a clear example, evidence that Mutúali’s entrepreneurial project is inseparable from an ethical project of remaking the self in particular ways. Moreover, it is significant that the cinema appeared in the compound of members of Kaveya’s Pentecostal church. In the prayer to banish evil spirits from the space of the cinema, the rupturing dynamics associated with mass media’s proliferation converged with the rupturing dynamics associated with Pentecostalism’s proliferation. Finally, anthropological models that reduce people to one or another cultural matrix do indeed perpetuate a pernicious notion that certain people, usually labeled “traditional,” are prone only to reproducing their past, such that even as they change, they essentially stay the same. As argued in an important review essay on the anthropology of Christianity, scholars who hold such views tread perilously close to “suggest[ing] that people are incapable of ever learning anything new” (Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins 2008: 1145).

Efforts to avoid such perils must be applauded. It would be the height of ethnocentrism to deny non-Westerners existential possibilities that most Westerners assume for themselves—possibilities of transcending one’s formative context, of breaking with the past, of taking on the new. But what is implied by associating these capacities with Pentecostalism and other aspects of modernity now said to be at large? Renewal certainly may be occasioned by them, but does it require them?

In line with existential anthropology’s insistence on the irreducibility of the self, this book affirms the recent theorizing of rupture but also seeks to radicalize it. The men and women among whom I lived showed me that experiences of migration, models of change, and rituals of transformation are not mere by-products of contemporary global forces. Rather, these preexist and prefigure engagements with those forces.⁶ Change, even rupturing change, is endogenous, intrinsic to “tradition.”

Theorists of rupture never explicitly state that some people could never, absent “modern” catalysts, engage discontinuity. Just this, however, is implied by the exceptional status granted to such novelties as long-distance migration and Pentecostal conversion. This book can be read as an attempt to render rupture less exceptional, to see Pentecostal conversion at least potentially—and certainly in what I witnessed—as a mundane extension of an already convertible way of being. Conversion, so understood, is less a matter of continuity or change than of the continuity of change (Bergson 1998: 23).

Beyond Pentecostal Explosion

Helping underwrite the theoretical turn toward rupture is Pentecostal Christianity’s global rise. Few studies of the tradition begin without asserting, or at least assuming, its “explosive” growth.⁷ Robert Hefner summarizes the consensus in the opening line of just one recent state-of-the-field overview: “It is by now a commonplace in sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies to observe that Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the contemporary world” (2013a: 1). Were such a claim not sufficiently superlative, consider the words of two renowned religion scholars—Peter Berger, who has written, “In all likelihood, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing movement in history” (2012: 46), and Harvey Cox, who has described “the tsunami of Pentecostalism that is sweeping across the non-Western world” (2009: 197).

With little more to go on than accounts such as these, I arrived in Mozambique’s northern province of Niassa in 2011. I knew what I would be finding; the only task was to make some original analysis of it.

I did not find it.

Not in Niassa Province anyway. To be sure, charismatic ministries have spread throughout Mozambique, including in the historically less Christian, more Islamic north.⁸ Moreover, Niassa’s capital city of Lichinga is not without a Pentecostal presence. The most visible and well-known among Lichinga’s churches is the Brazil-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, or IURD). Fifteen branches had opened in the ten years prior to my arrival—evidence, indeed, of Pentecostal explosion.

Yet in that same time span, as many as three of those branches had folded, while others had moved into smaller buildings.⁹ The most graphic illustration of Pentecostalism’s tepid reception was written on the cracked, whitewashed façade of a two-story building near Lichinga’s municipal prison. During the time of my fieldwork, the building served as a storage and operations facility for Humana People to People. A banner displaying this NGO’s Portuguese acronym occupied the top right corner of the exterior wall. However, in faded yellow letters that the banner only partially concealed appeared the faintly legible words Jesus Cristo é o Senhor (Jesus Christ is the Lord), the slogan affixed to IURD buildings throughout the world. The narrative of Pentecostalism’s dramatic rise is commonly expressed in terms of former cinemas, factories, and storehouses turned into churches. Here I encountered the reverse.

Figure 2. A church building turned storehouse, Lichinga.

It is not that IURD churches in Lichinga were uniformly empty. Many services were reasonably well attended. However, I soon learned, the attendees were primarily vientes (newcomers). This Portuguese term refers not to Yao-, Makhuwa-, and Nyanja-speaking peasants arriving in the city from Niassa’s countryside. Rather, vientes are formally educated business and government elites who relocate from the more prosperous cities of Mozambique’s southern and coastal regions, usually with employment contracts in hand. One worship service I attended in Lichinga included a praise song recited in Changana, an indigenous language of Maputo Province, located nowhere near Niassa. The pastor, himself a viente, preached against the demonic influence of “traditional healers, false prophets, and mazione.” The latter word referred to the prophets of Zion churches that are ubiquitous in southern and central Mozambique but scarce in the north (Seibert 2005: 126). The preacher was clearly contextualizing his demonology—in response, though, not to the reality around his church but to the vientes within it.

When I asked one pastor how many of his congregants hailed from Lichinga or elsewhere in Niassa, he estimated around 3 percent. He added that in Lichinga’s peripheries, where migrant laborers live, “it’s sometimes hard to get fifteen people in the church, even on Sunday.” Every time a new congregation opened, he told me, masses of locals would flood in. But within a few months, most would leave. Curiously, many would appear again—too sporadically, though, to be counted among the faithful. I observed such patterns repeatedly during my time in northern Mozambique—of churches arriving, but without always thriving.

Scholars have rarely explored such seeming anomalies, though calls to do so are on the rise.¹⁰ Hefner, while framing his volume on global Pentecostalism in terms of extraordinary expansion, also notes an increase in defections, which “may prove to be an important horizon of research” (2013a: 27).¹¹ In their edited volume on Pentecostalism, anthropologists Simon Coleman and Rosalind Hackett note that “cases of failure or halfhearted engagement” may disclose new dimensions and fresh insights (2015: 28). Stimulated by such suggestions, I intend with this book to advance what is clearly an emerging research agenda, one that eschews triumphalist accounts by querying rather than assuming the linearity of Pentecostal growth.

My aim, however, is not to replace conventional narratives of Pentecostal explosion with an equally generic account of Pentecostal decline. I have neither the data nor the inclination to make sweeping claims of this sort. A guiding premise of this book—the principle of existential mobility, which I detail later in this Introduction—holds that religious identity is an imperfect indicator of religious activity. I therefore critique the narrative of Pentecostal explosion not because I find the statistics behind them to be wrong, but because there is more to the story than statistics can convey.

One quantitative study, though, deserves special consideration. It not only poses one of the most original, and pointed, challenges to assumptions of a generalized Pentecostal surge. It also happens to be based in Mozambique. Analyzing national census records from the past many decades, Éric Morier-Genoud (2014) concludes that there is no basis for commonplace claims of a massive demographic shift toward Pentecostalism. What did change, in 1989, is that Mozambique’s erstwhile socialist state adopted policies of economic and cultural liberalization. New religious movements stepped in, suddenly free to project themselves into public space. They constructed large buildings, dominated mass media, and proselytized in the streets. It is the considerable visibility of these movements, argues Morier-Genoud, that has created the impression of extraordinary Pentecostal growth. It is an impression, however, belied by the data.

Researchers who predefine their studies as being about Pentecostalism are especially susceptible to reading too much into such impressions. That is because framing one’s work around any single tradition draws one, understandably enough, to where that tradition is most vibrant—and away from everywhere else. The recent effort of cultural anthropologists to organize a research program under the rubric of the anthropology of Christianity illustrates the bias. This subfield arose in response to anthropology’s historical neglect of Christianity as an object of inquiry.¹² Avoidance came increasingly to be seen as untenable given Christianity’s—particularly Pentecostal Christianity’s—apparent rise in the very locales anthropologists have long gone for fieldwork. But if those outside the anthropology of Christianity have neglected the religion, while anthropologists of Christianity focus on where it most stands out—where “members practice their faith in ways that make their commitments hard to ignore” (Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins 2008: 1141)—a large middle terrain remains largely unexplored.¹³

This book aims to help fill that gap. It shifts attention from the amply documented places where Pentecostal churches flourish to the relatively unknown places where they fail, from the centers of global Christianity to the fringes. In those places where Pentecostals are present but not prominent—where they are, in fact, easy to ignore—might there still be a story worth telling, a story in part about Pentecostalism itself?

Circular Migrations

What scholars tend to report about Pentecostal conversions—that they are universally on the rise—is just as often assumed about urban migrations (cf. Potts 2012). There is no disputing that most African cities are growing rapidly. So too are rates of transnational migration. In his more recent work on post–Cold War Togo, Piot pairs this “exit strategy” with conversion to Pentecostalism: “If Charismatic Christianity represents one response to the current sovereignty crisis, playing the visa lottery is another” (2010: 77).

But, as with conversion, so too with migration there is no shortage of stories to puncture the prevailing narrative. Consider Gildon, whom I met in Niassa’s rural district of Maúa, where I based my fieldwork and also where Gildon had grown up before pursuing advanced studies in Lichinga. He recalled the optimism with which his teachers had filled him: “They said about a person who studies that some will be presidents, some nurses, some teachers, some engineers.” Yet upon finishing school, reality set in. Since urban survival required a cash income, Gildon needed a job to survive. But since public examiners demanded bribes, he also needed cash to get a job. Lacking the money and the connections he needed, Gildon’s education eventually came to nothing. He took to selling tomatoes at the market, tomatoes that were always too quick to spoil. Unable to make ends meet, he decided finally to return to Maúa. He was devastated, but at least there he would have land off which to live.

In his study of the once vibrant Zambian copperbelt, anthropologist James Ferguson (1999) dismantles what he calls “the myth of permanent urbanization,” part and parcel of modernization narratives. These narratives refer to the “progress” and “development” attending labor migrations, relocations to that which Westerners consider the pinnacle of civilization: the polis, where people settle, work, and prosper. Yet the overwhelming evidence from copperbelt towns—of deindustrialization and depopulation—points to quite the opposite. On the basis of that evidence, Ferguson argues against evolutionary models that posit linear movement from one discrete stage to another. Such modernist teleologies have devastating effects well beyond the social scientific disciplines that promote them: “For the workers at the Nkana mine, the breakdown of the myth of modernization was no mere academic development but a world-shattering life experience” (1999: 14). The same could be said of Gildon’s sense of failure in the city. He had, after all, been promised that school, the great motor of modernization, opens boundless opportunities.

Not everyone from Maúa district had a chance to advance in their studies, though, and so not everyone imbibed the myth of modernization. Cewalusa, for example, is a middle-aged man who tried his fortune in Cuamba, Niassa’s second-largest city, before returning to the Maúa countryside. In Cuamba, rather than employment he encountered only hunger. Yet, despite my suggestive questions, he said he never associated return with resignation or with a sense of shattered worlds. When an opportunity arose to try his fortune in the city, he went. When it failed to bear fruit, he returned. Regress was as seamless as egress.¹⁴ Cewalusa’s perspective is by far the more common in Maúa, where formal educational opportunities and thus modernist thinking are scarce. Yet whether accompanied by despair or dispassion, both Gildon’s and Cewalusa’s stories put the lie to unidirectional conceptions of urbanization trends.

None of this is to imply that people who return do so permanently. Retreat to the countryside did not preclude forays back to the cities—whether to visit relatives, seek treatment in hospitals, or sell surplus crops. Better than “reverse migration,” the notion of “circular migration” (Potts 2010) captures such patterns, marked as they are by both transience and repetition. They entail not so much the permanence of outward movements as the multiplicity of lateral movements.

Modernization narratives, by contrast, presume a trajectory. Teleological assumptions about civilizational progress are explicitly denied by those who have recently theorized rupture (e.g., Appadurai 1996: 9). Nevertheless, the trajectory remains. Pentecostalism, it is argued, differs from hybrid forms of religion (e.g., popular Catholicism and African Initiated Churches) in the same way that urban and transnational migration differs from nomadic forms of habitation. Against such thinking, there may be value in applying the same critique made of “permanent urbanization” to the comparable issue of “permanent Christianization.” If migrations are circular, so too may be conversions.¹⁵

Phenomenology and Critique

How might anthropology better account for such deviations from the standard narrative of unidirectional breaks and irreversible shifts? It turns out that Piot, despite purveying this narrative in his more recent work, provides therein an answer. Extending his thesis that both Pentecostalism and emigration independently bespeak discontinuity, Piot notes that the two reinforce one another: “Not surprisingly, perhaps, prayer is routinely called on to enhance peoples’ [sic] chances in the [visa] lottery. Entire Lomé congregations have even been known to engage in prayer … so that members will get visas.” Yet, Piot adds, “the lottery fuels not only church attendance but also visits to spirit shrines. One selectee I know hedged his bets and did both, stepping up church attendance while also returning to the village to consult a diviner” (2010: 91; emphasis mine). An important shift has taken place from one passage to the next: from “entire Lome congregations” to “one selectee,” from the general to the particular, from ethnography to ethnographic biography.¹⁶ Although his book centers on wide-scale, post–Cold War aspirations to break with villages and spirit shrines, Piot in this brief but telling anecdote reveals what his theoretical model conceals: the often circular and situational character of both migration and conversion.

Inherent in much academic writing is a tendency to eclipse such variations in lived experience with grand theories and metanarratives. Inherent specifically in much social science is a tendency to reduce human thought and behavior to social structures, cultural meanings, and other antecedent conditions amenable to conceptual grasp. Arguing for the disciplinary integrity of the anthropology of Christianity, Robbins (2007) contrasts this subfield with Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff’s (1991, 1997) influential work on Christianity and colonial capitalism. According to Robbins, the Comaroffs fail to do what an anthropology of Christianity must: take up Christian culture “as a system of meanings with a logic of its own” (Robbins 2007: 7). Logocentric concerns with meaning and logic—often centered on what people say, what they claim to believe, and what “language ideology” they ascribe to—have driven much of the anthropology of Christianity.¹⁷ Yet while there is no disputing the need to take informants at their word, there are obvious limits to discourse and representation. As Meyer makes plain in the subtitle of her seminal essay, the Pentecostal claim of rupture—conveyed in the phrase “make a complete break with the past”—is a discursive claim. In practice, most notable is “believers’ inability to make a complete break with what they conceptualize as ‘the past’” (1998: 318; emphasis mine).

Phenomenological approaches go further than most in stressing the limits of language. Anthropologists working in this vein attend to the frequent disjuncture between ideology and experience, between worldviews and lifeworlds.¹⁸ A phenomenological perspective on the anthropology of religion would take as its starting point not the reified terms whereby institutional religions are conventionally classified—Buddhism, Islam, Christianity—but the idiosyncrasies and indeterminacies of everyday life (Schielke and Debevec 2012).¹⁹ Crucial to this book, as a work of specifically existential-phenomenological anthropology (Jackson 2005; Jackson and Piette 2015), are its detailed portraits of the individual in situation. It employs storytelling techniques that eschew the consolations of category thinking, privileging instead the messiness of mundane events and interactions.²⁰ Narrative ethnography has the added virtue of resonating with the pluralistic approach to life that characterizes societies relatively less encumbered by the West’s outsized Greek metaphysical inheritance. That Africa, as theorized by Négritude philosophers, offers tools for deconstructing Western rationalism and reductionism perhaps explains why phenomenological approaches have been so generative in Africanist anthropology.²¹ Out of their respective fieldwork engagements in West Africa, phenomenological anthropologists Paul Stoller and Michael Jackson have helped pioneer a more humanistic mode of anthropological research and writing.²² I follow their lead in accentuating the textured, multiplex lives of my interlocutors. Those lives are worthy of attention in their own right, but also as a critique of the disembodied epistemologies that are as alien to African villages as they are paramount to Western academies.

Without discounting the impact of global forces and discursive formations, phenomenological anthropology recognizes that macro-scale phenomena, “explosive” though they may be, never exhaust the intricacies of life as lived. These intricacies often present themselves at such easily overlooked registers as corporeal dispositions, mundane metaphors, and quotidian practices. Robbins’s starting point for the anthropology of Christianity is much different—more discursive than experiential, more intellectual than embodied, more structural than existential. Concerned to identify that which uniquely characterizes Pentecostal culture, Robbins ultimately settles on a negative definition—“a culture ‘against culture’” (2010: 159–62). He insists nonetheless that it is meaningfully spoken of as a whole. In his rejoinder to Robbins’s initial critique, John Comaroff argues that by “treat[ing] the faith primarily as culture,” Robbins commits the once common flaw of analyzing cultural or religious traditions separately from their historical and material entailments (Comaroff 2010: 529).²³ I could not agree more with Comaroff on this point, though I do not endorse the Comaroffs’ alternative that reifies impersonal powers and processes of another type—for example, neoliberalism, commodification, and modernity.²⁴

Against all forms of abstraction, phenomenological anthropology intervenes by reinserting the individual and refusing to infer lived experience from identities and epochs. Comaroff is as dismissive of this approach as he is of the anthropology of Christianity. He faults it for fetishizing the local and failing to deal with theory. Yet a turn to critical situations and lived events need not imply disregard for global dynamics (Abu-Lughod 1993: 8). It is simply a refusal to see what Comaroff calls the “macro-cosmic forces and determinations in the world” (2010: 528) as so forceful or so determinative that they leave people with little to do but acquiesce.

Existential Mobility

Along with identifying and characterizing “Christian culture,” a parallel research priority for anthropologists of Christianity has been that of specifying what it means to be a “Christian self.” Social theorists have long noted the role of Christianity, particularly Protestantism, in individualizing and interiorizing subjectivity. Among those for whom the self is defined relationally, conversion to Christianity involves conversion not just to a religion but to a modern conception of autonomous personhood.²⁵

Yet just as surely as unidirectional models of conversion and migration oversimplify, so too do trajectories of individualization and the typology they assume. Against claims anthropologists once made about the mystical interrelations of “primitive” people, Godfrey Lienhardt highlights the eccentricities, slips of tongue, and clever calculations at the heart of traditional African folktales. Without foreclosing relationality, these reveal an “African concern, also, on occasion, with individuals as individuals” (1985: 143). Conversely, against claims that Christian converts become self-governing free agents, numerous recent studies show that, after conversion, forms of sociality get newly formed while others persist from the past.²⁶ To honor this variability, Simon Coleman proposes replacing the language of trajectory with that of negotiation, since “the spiritual, moral, and ethical movements involved in such negotiation are not one way and certainly do not seem inevitable” (2011: 244; see also Bialecki and Daswani 2015: 272–73). Rather than reducing subjectivity to one relatively stable modality or another, phenomenological anthropologists similarly call attention to the variety of ways of being—egocentric and sociocentric—that remain viable and negotiable whatever the cultural context (Jackson 2012).

Philosophers associated with the existential branch of phenomenology emphasize this irreducibility of the self to any singular essence or identity. Martin Heidegger (1962), for example, describes the existing human as ever entangled, and therefore as ever changing, with the temporal world; Jean-Paul Sartre (1968) defines freedom as the individual’s ability to make something of what he or she has been made; and Lewis Gordon (2000) develops his critique of antiblack racism on the grounds that human beings are incomplete possibilities. Presupposed in all these views is the epistemic openness of lived experience, the indeterminacy of individuals in the immediacy of their situations.

Rather than taking Pentecostal religion and indigenous culture as themselves objects of analysis, I follow such insights by privileging critical events: moments of being that are existentially most imperative and analytically least conducive to closure.²⁷ This book records a series of such events—snakebites and elephant invasions, chronic illnesses and recurring wars, disputes within families and conflicts with the state—each of which stretches individuals in ways not always predictable by or reducible to their ascribed identities. Existential anthropology aims to honor such ambiguities. Against the tendency to pin personhood to one sort or another, it endeavors to disclose life in all its aspects: its contingencies no less than its norms, its shadows no less than its centers.

To reject the myth of the essential self, continuous and constant across space and time, is to recognize that identities are not identical with experience and that the individual is multiple (James 1950: 294). We do not have cultural identities but cultural repertoires. Which aspect of one’s repertoire will come to the fore, and which will remain latent, depends on the particular demands and opportunities of the moment. Those I came to know over the course of my fieldwork limited their actions to neither a “Pentecostal” nor a “traditional” frame, neither an urban nor a rural one, neither an individual nor a relational one. Rather, they experimented with and oscillated between the various options available to them. Such options are open to all who inhabit the kinds of complex, pluralistic worlds that have recently led a variety of scholars to question anthropological frameworks focused narrowly on Christianity, Islam, or any other single religion.²⁸ It is in line with such critiques that I present this book. What follows is less an anthropology of religion than an anthropology of religious eclecticism.²⁹

It is, thus, an anthropology of mobility—or, better, of existential mobility. For Ghassan Hage, existential mobility expresses the imperative to feel that one’s life has direction, that one is not in any way “stuck.” Well-being is contingent on things going well, not necessarily on people going places (2005: 470–74). Similarly, Jackson describes existential mobility as inclusive of but more fundamental than geographic migration. It is the proclivity for improvisation that manifests in “the minor, fugitive, and often unremarked events that momentarily change a person’s experience of being-in-the-world” (2013: 229). What these movements—imagined or physical, local or translocal—point to is a situational, shape-shifting mode of existence, a capacity to navigate different societies, different people, and different moments in the life course. By so emphasizing the plasticity of personality, the notion of existential mobility portrays the human being as several rather than singular, shifting rather than settled. If there is an essence to this kind of selfhood it would be its inbuilt multiplicity, its intrinsic mobility. Existentialists have captured well this paradox, coining such terms as the “journeying self” (Natanson 1970) and the “homo viator” (Marcel 1962).

Those among whom I lived would have their own metaphor to deploy—that of the polygamous man. He must provide for the well-being of each of his wives and all of their children, a less than enviable role in a society so wracked by scarcity. Given matrilocal residence patterns, discharging this responsibility requires that he spend much of his time walking—sometimes all day, usually alone, between the widely dispersed compounds of his wives. Once, while returning to the district capital after a week of work in the villages, I happened to cross paths with an acquaintance, a man I knew to have multiple wives. After exchanging greetings I asked whether he was also heading home. He replied with a hearty laugh. “The polygamous man has no home. He lives on the road!”

Mobility in Context

So, in a sense, does the ethnographer. Although I started off in Lichinga, intending to conduct fieldwork exclusively there, the evidence I encountered of circular migrations moved me to partake in my interlocutors’ own movements. I followed them back to their rural homes.

Thus I found myself, by the start of the 2012 dry season, in the savanna woodlands of Maúa district, in the Makhuwa-speaking south of Niassa Province. Half of Maúa’s fifty thousand inhabitants lived in the district capital, also called Maúa—or Maúa town, as I will refer to it. Getting there from Lichinga required a half day’s drive along mostly unpaved roads. I foresaw numerous benefits to carrying out the remainder of my research in a rural district like Maúa. First, Pentecostal churches are present there. It is an important but overlooked fact that the Pentecostal movement is not limited to the urban centers where most studies of it are set.³⁰

A second reason is inherent to long-term, localized fieldwork. Ethnography as a method involves researchers in the practical exigencies of life in a place. It allows one to essay some understanding only after prolonged periods of concentrated immersion. Delimitation is key. As a Makhuwa proverb asserts about another kind of fieldwork, Wunnuwa ematta kahiyene oruwerya (To have too big a field is to fail to produce), a recognition of the greater crop yield resulting from a well-defined plot. Living in so nondescript a locale as Maúa may have afforded me little to work with in terms of breadth, but much to work with in terms of depth. It forced me to account for individual lives rather than collective types, to learn an indigenous language rather than rely only on Portuguese, and to consider the history of a specific set of communities rather than collapse it within that of Africa writ large. In so circumscribing my focus, the intent was not to satisfy that romantic yearning, once common among anthropologists, to live in a remote village assumed to be self-contained. Even seemingly isolated settings, as this book shows throughout, are replete with instabilities and encounters (see Tsing 1993; Piot 1999).

Narrowing my field to Maúa also allowed me to study Pentecostalism in terms not solely of transnational flows—a prevailing thrust in the scholarship—but of the reception of churches that in every case originate elsewhere. This book focuses on the recipients more than the transmitters of Pentecostalism, on that from which more than that to which people convert. It attempts to trace the local dynamics that illuminate the counternarrative at the heart of this study.

As already mentioned, phenomenological approaches to anthropology are criticized for attending so much to the fine-grained and experience-near that they lose sight of the big picture. They are regarded as decontextualized—indifferent to social forces and cultural formations. The notion of existential mobility is likely vulnerable to the same critiques. Existentialism, after all, is a philosophy of the individual, while mobility suggests context transcendence, not context dependence. Neither of these commonplace assumptions, however, applies to the ethnographically grounded works of existential mobility that inspire this study.³¹ Indeed, as stressed by the anthropologists who first elaborated the term, existential mobility may manifest as resilience and endurance, not only as resistance and escape (Hage 2009; Jackson 2013: 207–8).

More basically, assumptions about the deracinated self miss key features of the existential tradition itself. Existentialism is not so much a philosophy of the individual as it is a philosophy of the individual in relation. The first person to call himself an existential thinker, Søren Kierkegaard, defined the self as “a relation which relates to itself, and in relating to itself relates to something else” ([1849] 1989: 43). As with Kierkegaard’s (1985) famous example of the biblical Abraham, who risked making himself monstrous so as to be true to the divine, the self only comes into being through means of an unconditional commitment. Similarly, Heidegger (1962) casts his project as a critique of Cartesian subjectivism and individualism. His notion of being-in-the-world—of subjects and objects as intertwined, of the self as inseparable from surroundings—sought to correct for founding phenomenologists’ emphasis on the ahistorical, transcendental ego (Zigon 2009). As with Kierkegaard, so too with Heidegger: commitment and passion, involvement and care, are constitutive of what it means to be human.

Mobility, by definition, also seems antithetical to contextual analysis. Social theorist Charles Taylor considers migration one of two quintessential expressions of what he calls modernity’s “great disembedding”—the ability “to imagine the self outside of a particular context” (2004: 55). The other, suitably enough for this study, is conversion. But there is no good reason to counterpose migration and milieu, conversion and context. Mobility always transpires within a field. Moreover, some contexts and some cultures promote mobility from within. A central argument of this book is that the Makhuwa culture, in the paradoxical way I use this term, is one; the Pentecostal culture is another. The more committed to either (in a Kierkegaardian sense) or involved with either (in a Heideggerian sense) that one finds oneself, the more prone one is to making moves: sometimes within it, sometimes beyond it. Hence, the title of this book, Faith in Flux, which conveys the idea of an inconstant faith, but also of faith in the virtue of inconstancy, and thus in any tradition that helps foster it.

By exploring existential mobility ethnographically, through fieldwork among a particular people in a particular place, I endeavor to show that contextual and cultural analysis is entirely compatible with the aims and assumptions of existential anthropology.³² Existential mobility is not only about going beyond what has been prescribed by custom or internalized as habit. It is, at least potentially, about going beyond because of what has been prescribed by custom or internalized as habit. Of Virginia Woolf’s famous line “I am rooted, but I flow” (1998: 83), one could posit a paraphrase befitting this point: I am rooted, so I flow.

The Peripheries of Pentecostalism

In the rural district of Maúa, no less than in the provincial capital of Lichinga, the few Pentecostal churches present have been tepidly embraced. The first to arrive was the African Assembly of God (Assembléia de Deus Africana, or ADA), which originated in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1968 but crossed national borders almost immediately.³³ After establishing itself in Mozambique’s central provinces, nearest to Zimbabwe, the ADA gradually spread north. In 1992, it arrived in Maúa, brought by a local schoolteacher who discovered it in Cuamba. When I began my fieldwork in 2011, Maúa was home to one central ADA congregation in Maúa town and two congregations in outlying villages. At the central congregation I regularly observed twenty-five to thirty worshippers at Sunday services. Approximately half of these were vientes, those residing in Maúa town for employment purposes but who considered home to be elsewhere.

When I first met Pastor Simões, the locally born but externally trained head of the central congregation, he seemed proud to tell me that wherever he ministers he gathers congregants every morning for prayer. His enthusiasm waned, however, when I expressed interest in attending the next day. He may not have wanted me to see what I later learned to be the case—that the only regular attendees (except on Sunday) were Pastor Simões, his wife, and their children. The satellite congregations fared similarly. In Kaveya, the seven-hundred-person village where this book’s opening narrative—and most of its ethnographic material—is set, approximately a dozen adults regularly attended the local ADA’s Sunday services. (Here there were no weekday gatherings, nor any pretense of them.) The third ADA congregation, in another distant village, counted only four regular attendees who held their weekly meetings in one of their homes.

The other Pentecostal presence in the district was the Evangelical Assembly of God (Evangélica Assembléia de Deus, or EAD). Unlike the ADA, the EAD operated only in Maúa town. When it was brought by itinerant Brazilian missionaries in 2001, a few dozen individuals took part. But those numbers steadily declined. In 2004, the structure of the building disintegrated. It is common enough that mud walls incur damage during the rainy season. What varies is the level of commitment to replastering them. This time, when the church walls collapsed, so did the church. Yet six years later, slightly before I began fieldwork, the national EAD organization sent a young Mozambican pastor named Manuel to revive its Maúa ministry. He succeeded. On Sunday morning visits during my fieldwork year, I could always count on worshipping alongside twenty-five or so others. Yet most, even more so than at the central ADA congregation, were vientes.

Altogether, these numbers may seem paltry; relative to the district’s total population, they are. Either for simple distance from one or (an argument I elaborate in the Conclusion) for the reputation these churches have developed, most locals never set foot in the ADA or the EAD. At the heart of this study, though, are those who did. Whether identifying as members of a congregation or by chance living close to one, these men and women involved themselves situationally and selectively. While the relationship of vientes to the churches may have been more stable (though this is an open question), this book takes as its study population the vast majority of Maúa’s inhabitants who, by contrast to vientes, are locally born, Makhuwa-speaking, and economically disadvantaged. Insofar as they relate to Pentecostalism, I argue, they do so powerfully, but they do not do so permanently.

Pentecostalism is only the most recent religious body to arrive in Maúa. Already on the scene were Islam and Catholicism. Still today these are the two most prevalent religious traditions, each claiming almost half the district population.³⁴ Islam came first, spreading from the Swahili coast in the late nineteenth century. This was, and continues to be, an Islam integrated with ancestor-based practices. In 1938, Catholicism arrived via Italian missionaries. Initially, these missionaries proscribed ancestor veneration and denied baptism to healers and diviners. The Church’s stance opened radically in the 1960s, such that today Maúa’s Catholic leaders go so far as to sponsor annual initiation rites.

The openness of Islam and Catholicism to “tradition” fosters considerable resentment among Pentecostal leaders. It makes Maúa, as they see it, singularly sinful and thus unusually unreceptive to God’s truth. As Pastor Manuel once told his congregation (clearly one of vientes): “This is a battle we brought from Maputo, from Nampula, from Beira. When we arrive here, sometimes people come with energy, with great energy, but just crossing the border into Maúa, it seems like angels of the devil stop us. Yes, the word of the Lord here is difficult. If not for us, I would say that here there is no Holy Spirit, only evil spirits.” So framing his struggle as a cosmic battle serves, in part, to rationalize his failure to attract locals to his church. It also goes far toward assuring him of the valor in waging this struggle where he does—on the uncharted peripheries of Pentecostalism, at the farthest fringes of the faith.

Conversion as a Spatial Practice

Besides pastoral claims of demonic impediments are scholarly explanations for why Pentecostalism does not or would not thrive in a place like Maúa. Conventional assumptions that the tradition grows most rapidly in previously Christianized areas imply that growth would be weak in places where Christianity has not established itself. It may well be that “the more Muslim north” of Mozambique is itself a barrier to Pentecostal growth (van de Kamp 2016: 11n20). However, it should be noted that although the region is indeed heavily Islamic, Catholicism also has long been prevalent.³⁵ Another demographic sector frequently associated with Pentecostalism is that of the urban and upwardly mobile. An implication could be drawn from this as well, that a rural district of subsistence farmers lacks the socioeconomic conditions for Pentecostalism to flourish. There may be more explanatory value here, although, as already noted, the provincial capital of Lichinga seemed scarcely receptive to Pentecostalism despite being an urban setting. Meanwhile, researchers in other rural parts of Africa have reported significant Pentecostal impact (e.g., Jones 2011).

In attempting to understand the ambivalence displayed toward Pentecostalism, what struck me most was that whenever I asked people why they joined, why they left, or why they circulated in and out, most struggled to articulate an answer. This absence of ideological formulations and reasoned justifications should be taken seriously (Ahmad 2017). It suggests a need to think beyond the explanatory impulse typically guiding outsiders, whether religious leaders or academic scholars. Rather than trying to find ways to reduce complex and contradictory phenomena to some sensible pattern of cause and effect, I was forced by the pragmatism of those I worked with to turn elsewhere: to mundane metaphors and everyday practices. In the Makhuwa case, these were largely metaphors and practices of mobility.

According to one Portuguese-Makhuwa dictionary, converter (to convert) translates as opittukuxa murima, literally “to change heart” (Filippi and Frizzi 2005: 1034). Yet whenever villagers talked with me about switching religious allegiance, they never used that term. Much more common were routine verbs denoting spatial movement: to move in the sense of migrating (othama) or in the sense of leaving one religion and entering another (ohiya ettini ekina, ovolowa ettini ekina). In contrast to introspective conceptions of conversion presupposed in Western thought (Swift 2012), conversion among the Makhuwa is embodied and embedded. It is a migratory movement—less spiritual than physical, less a change of heart than a change of place.³⁶

While, in local parlance, othama and ohiya ni ovolowa translate “conversion,” neither term is particular to religious change. Both designate all sorts of geographic relocations. In order to understand the nature of conversion, therefore, I had to study the nature of migration. I discovered in short order that movement—going, but just as often coming—is foundational to the Makhuwa sense of self. One may speak of a Makhuwa disposition toward mobility, a kinetic conception of being that finds expression in migration histories, agricultural techniques, and life-cycle rituals. A typical greeting—what I was met with on the path between the cinema and the healing grounds—is not “are you well?” but “are you walking well?” And as seen on the healing grounds themselves, restoration to health entails bodily transformations, bodily transformations premised on bodily transportations.

Plan of the Book

This book thus unfolds as a series of variations on the theme of mobility—religious, regional, and above all existential. Part I (othama, to move) and Part II (ohiya ni ovolowa, to leave and to enter) are named for the two commonest renderings of “to convert.” Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 (in Part I) attend to histories and mythologies of geographic movement, evidence of how wrong it would be to restrict mobility to modernity. To be “rooted” in Makhuwa tradition is paradoxically to be grounded in a transient, seminomadic way of life. Makhuwa historical experience and selfhood manifest an ability to adapt quickly to changing political and environmental circumstances, circumstances that remain unpredictable and precarious up to the present.

Part II begins by shifting attention to the lived body. In Chapter 3, I argue that initiation rituals serve not only to express mobility but also to cultivate dispositions toward it. This chapter also highlights the resonance of discontinuous spheres—between, for example, male and female, young and old, bush and village, night and day—even prior to what I discuss in Chapter 4: the colonial-era fragmenting of social life into discrete domains, and of spiritual life into reified religions. Thus, movement, including interreligious movement, is best seen not as frictionless flux but as the crossing, and recrossing, of borders.

Part III takes its title (okhalano, to be with) from another Makhuwa term, not one for “conversion” but one that sheds light on the symbiotic manner by which the Makhuwa carry out their lives. Chapter 5 documents the matricentric character of Makhuwa society, contending that women, especially, maintain Makhuwa pluralistic propensities amid the ever-increasing hegemony of market logics. Chapter 6 takes up what it means “to be with” Pentecostalism. No less than ancestral traditions, Pentecostalism also is marked by mobility. It presents itself, thus, as continuous with Makhuwa ways of being, continuous precisely through its dynamics of change.

All of this points up a profound irony, the nuances of which the Conclusion explicates and the implications of which it explores. That is the irony of radical change as a cross-cultural constant. Convertibility as a mode of being is present as much in Makhuwa traditions as in Pentecostal traditions, and therefore also in people’s oscillations between the two.

This insight sheds valuable light on the ambivalence with which the Makhuwa have received Pentecostalism. It also suggests a need for nuance in the largely unchallenged narrative of Pentecostalism’s worldwide “explosion.” The propensity for novelty and change that contributes to the rise of Pentecostalism can also contribute to its decline. For just as Makhuwa mobility draws people to the churches and finds reinforcement in the churches, it also facilitates exit from the churches. The Makhuwa are predisposed to convert. But having done so once, they feel little need to stop.