on the paradoxes of global pentecostalism and the perils of continuity thinking

On the paradoxes of global Pentecostalism and the perils ofcontinuity thinking

Joel Robbins*

Department of Anthropology (0532), University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla,CA 92093-0532, USA

Received 17 March 2003; received in revised form 15 April 2003; accepted 17 April 2003

I begin with a statement phrased so bluntly that it is bound to draw a skeptical response,though I think it is true enough in its outlines to be worth making none the less. The statementis as follows: cultural anthropology has generally been a science of continuity. I mean by thisthat cultural anthropologists have for the most part either argued or implied that the thingsthey study—symbols, meanings, logics, structures, power dynamics—have a fundamental andenduring quality and are not readily subject to change. One might imagine that several decadesgiven over to the study first of practice and history and then of modernity and globalizationwould have rendered this untrue, putting matters of cultural change at the forefront ofanthropological concern. Yet even in the grip of these recent trends there remains, I wouldargue, a tendency among anthropologists to stress cultural continuity even in the course ofarguments that take change as their ostensible subject. Conceptions of localization, indigeniz-ation, and syncretism, along with foundational arguments about the inability of people to viewthe world except through their received categories, all serve to foster this tendency. Given itsstrength, the most common and satisfying anthropological arguments are those that find someenduring cultural structure that persists underneath all the surface changes and that in the lastanalysis, serves to guide them and determine the sense they make—a sense that, in spite ofwhatever foreign elements might be part of it, should still be a local one displaying somecontinuities with those of the past.

While recognizing that my claim that anthropology has mostly been a science of continuitymay be contentious, I am going to take it as given in what follows for the sake of making a pointabout how the globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity raises an interesting

* Corresponding authorE-mail address: [email protected] (J. Robbins).

Religion 33 (2003) 221–231

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predicament for the discipline understood in these terms.1 On the one hand, I will argue, the wayPentecostal Christianity has interacted with the cultures it has come into contact with seems toplay into the hands of those who want to argue that continuity is more fundamental than change.Yet on the other, its spread also seems to foster very dramatic changes that demand to be seen asintroducing real discontinuities into people’s lives. Pentecostal Christianity can appear to do bothof these things at once because its globalization has been marked by two apparent paradoxes. Idiscuss these paradoxes in order to argue that a full understanding of the globalization ofPentecostalism requires the development of an anthropology of discontinuity at least as robust asthe existing anthropology of continuity.

In the course of a broader argument about religion and globalization, Jose Casanova makestwo points about Pentecostalism that lie at the base of the first paradox. Casanova’s initial pointis that Pentecostalism globalizes so successfully because it is de-territorialized. It is not tied downto any one place by virtue of having localized traditions or place-based centers. His second pointis that Pentecostalism localizes remarkably well in that it tends everywhere it goes to be carried bylocal people and to set itself quickly to addressing local concerns. Taken on their own, there isnothing very original about these points. They are in fact the stock in trade of contemporaryPentecostal studies (e.g., Cox, 1995; Freston, 1998; Martin, 1990; Maxwell, 1998; Robbins, 2001).What is of interest in Casanova’s argument is his willingness to face the fact that these twoassertions sit only uneasily alongside each other. Let me quote nearly in full from a strikingparagraph in which he takes this problem up:

But how can it [Pentecostalism] be de-territorialized and local at the same time? Because it is anuprooted local culture engaged in spiritual warfare with its own roots. This is the paradox ofthe local character of Pentecostalism. It cannot be understood in the traditional sense ofCatholic ‘inculturation,’ that is, as the relationship between the catholic, i.e. universal and thelocal, i.e. particular. . Pentecostalism is not a translocal phenomenon which assumes thedifferent particular forms of a local territorial culture. Nor is it a kind of syncretic symbiosis orsymbiotic syncresis of the general and the local. Pentecostals are, for instance, everywhereleading an unabashed and uncompromising onslaught against their local cultures: againstAfro-Brazilian spirit cults in Brazil; against Vodou in Haiti; against witchcraft in Africa;against shamanism in Korea. In this they are very different . from the traditional Catholicpattern of generous accommodation and condescending toleration of local folklore andpopular magical beliefs and practices, so long as these assume their subordinate status withinthe Catholic hierarchic cosmos, and from the typical sober, matter-of-fact, rational, anddisenchanting monotheistic attitude of ascetic Protestantism against magical or supernaturalforces or beings, by denying their very existence. The Pentecostal attitude is neither compro-mise nor denial but frontal hand-to-hand combat, what they call ‘spiritual warfare.’. It is intheir very struggle against local culture that they prove how locally rooted they are. (Casanova,2001:437–438)

1 I adhere to the general convention of calling “charismatic” those churches that emphasize the gifts of the Spirit whilemaintaining their ties to non-Pentecostal denominations. The argument of this article applies to both kinds of churches.As a shorthand in this article, however, I will generally use “Pentecostal” as an unmarked term meant to refer to bothPentecostal and charismatic churches and will use “charismatic” only when talking about particular charismaticchurches or movements.

J. Robbins / Religion 33 (2003) 221–231222

What Casanova captures so well here is the way Pentecostalism is at once extremely open tolocalization and utterly opposed to local culture. A crucial point that Casanova leaves onlyimplied is that the struggle against local culture can locally root Pentecostalism because, inattacking local cultures, Pentecostalism tends to accept their ontologies—including their ontolo-gies of spirits and witches and other occult powers—and to take the spiritual beings theseontologies posit as paramount among the forces it struggles against (Glazier, 1980:75; Meyer,1994, 1999). For this reason, it is not for a moment irrelevant to local concerns, even as it neverseeks to forge any continuity with them.

This, then, is the first paradox of global Pentecostalism: it becomes local without ever takingthe local into itself. In the context of my present argument, I want to point out that this paradoxis not an easy one for an anthropology of continuity to work with. Precisely becausePentecostalism has to accept the existence of the world posited by local culture in order to attackit, anthropologists trained to spot continuities are likely to be impressed by how well thetraditional ontology has held up in the face of the Pentecostal onslaught. With their attentiondrawn in this direction, they may not take the full measure of the extent to which people’schanging relation to their traditional ontology—a change Pentecostalism has wrought byintroducing its own ontology and situating the traditional one within it—has made change ratherthan continuity the real story in particular cases.

The second paradox of global Pentecostalism is one that I think is more apparent than real, butsince its appearance is also seductive to those interested in continuity, I want to discuss it as well.I have elsewhere borrowed Appadurai’s (1996:90) distinction between hard and soft culturalforms to describe Pentecostalism as a form at the hard end of the continuum (Robbins, 2001:7–8).While soft cultural forms are easily taken apart, allowing people to adopt them in bits and piecesand fundamentally transform them as they do so, hard cultural forms “are those that come witha set of links between value, meaning, and embodied practice that are difficult to break and hardto transform” (Appadurai, 1996:90). At the core of Pentecostalism understood as a hard form inthis way is the set of charismatic practices that make it distinctive in the Protestant world:glossolalia, spirit possession, healing, etc. These practices appear to be very similar wherever theyare found, establishing a sort of global norm of Pentecostal charismatic practice.

But even as they appear to constitute of global norm that does not allow for really significantlocal modifications, they often appear to Western observers as also representing something thathas probably always been at the heart of local religious practice. For these observers, thesecharismatic practices represent a return to traditional or “primal” religious behaviors that remainfundamentally the same despite the fact that they are now expressed through Christianity. Cox(1995:82) refers to them as forms of “primal piety,” perhaps a “universal spiritual syntax,” and theotherwise astute David Martin (1990:122) argues that Pentecostalism has successfully expandedbecause it is “in touch the therapeutic cults embedded in a world-wide ‘archaic’ religiosity”(Martin, 1990:122) and is more in tune than other types of Christianity with the oral cultures stilldominant in so many parts of the world (Martin, 1990:133). Cox and Martin are, respectively, atheologian and a theologically informed sociologist. Anthropologists are generally careful toavoid the sweeping us/them binaries that lie behind their broadly phrased observations. Yet indiscussing Pentecostalism, anthropologists often float somewhat similar arguments, albeit onesfocused on discussing continuities that hold within single cultural situations. They are, that is tosay, quick to equate Pentecostal charismatic practices with indigenous ones in order to make

J. Robbins / Religion 33 (2003) 221–231 223

space for continuity arguments that allow them to spot the indigenous substrate underlying thesurface appearance of Pentecostal change. In doing so, they engage only one side of the secondparadox of global Pentecostalism: highlighting the supposed continuity of charismatic practiceswithout noting that they are also the practices that are most widely standardized and shared byPentecostals around the globe.

When you put the two paradoxes of global Pentecostalism together, you have a religion thatlocalizes easily yet claims to brook no compromise with traditional life and that at the same timeseems to have at its a heart a set of globalized practices that often look very local in their makeup.As I have said, what is attractive to an anthropology of continuity in all this is the localization ofreligious authority, the willingness to credit the reality of local ontologies, and the apparentsupport for or revival of traditional practices. What I want to argue in the remainder of this articleis that anthropologists also need to attend to the other face of these paradoxes—the face ofrupture with the local and of discontinuity with old practices—and to take that face as a challengeto their usual commitment to continuity arguments. As a step in this direction, I suggest two waysthat we can begin to develop an anthropology of rupture adequate to addressing this second faceof global Pentecostalism. One is to begin paying attention to native models of Pentecostaldisjunction, to appreciate the various forms these models take and to find a way to make themcentral to ethnographic accounts of Pentecostal cultures. The second is to set up some rigorousstandards by which to judge continuity arguments, so that they become less easy to make andchange becomes correspondingly easier to spot.

The ethnography of disjunctive discourses and rituals of rupture

Pentecostalism in many of its local manifestations is rich in disjunctive discourses and practicesaimed at making ruptures with the past. Most forms of Christianity provide their adherents someforms of disjunctive narrative by virtue of plotting conversion as a decisive break with a past self.But Pentecostalism is notable for how often it goes beyond simply establishing general discoursesof disjunction to set up ritual practices designed continuously to create or defend the disjunctionsthose discourses construct. Looking at how Pentecostal discourses and rituals of disjunction worktogether to pry the present loose from the past thus provides an important focus for a nascentanthropology of discontinuity.

According to Meyer (1998:182), Ewe Pentecostals in Ghana often state that people must “makea complete break with the past.” Taking this slogan to heart, Ewe Pentecostals struggle to cutthemselves off from the practices and deities of traditional religion. In practice, accomplishing thistask generally means also breaking with one’s kin. For many Pentecostals, this is necessarybecause their kin still practice traditional Ewe religion. But even those whose living relatives havealso converted have cause for concern, for the past practices of their parents, grandparents andgreat-grandparents have often brought traditional gods into their families and opened them totheir influence. Even if converts are not aware of the compacts family members living and deadhave made with the traditional deities, they are still vulnerable to the ill-fortune those deitiescause. Ultimately, coverts understand that they are safest in both moral and physical terms whenthey live as individuals, unburdened both by the ties that once bound them to their kin and by thetraditional culture in terms of which those ties were formulated.


In order to break with the past, Pentecostals turn to a ritual of deliverance designed to lay thepast to rest by exorcising the evil spirits with which it has invested them. Those who seekdeliverance begin by filling out personal history questionnaires, or giving personal historyinterviews, in which they list everything they know about how their own past and that of membersof their family might have opened them to spiritual influence (Meyer, 1998:193–195). Afterundertaking this careful accounting, they undergo the deliverance ritual proper. This ritual aimsto rid them of the demons their pasts have lodged in them by having ritual functionaries first layhands on them, forcing the evil spirit to manifest itself by visibly possessing the person beingdelivered, and then call on the Holy Spirit to drive the evil spirit out. Often those seeking suchdeliverance are urban dwellers who are also in the process of severing or attenuating their materiallinks with kin left in the village. But just as those links prove difficult to break with finality, so toodo Pentecostals understand deliverance as a long-term process, and they tend to repeat thedeliverance ritual many times. As they do so, breaking with the past becomes an enduring projectfor them—a project that makes the creation of discontinuity central to their sense of what isimportant in their lives.

Discussing a similar case from Malawi, van Dijk describes the way young, urban Pentecostalswork to distance themselves from Malawian society and its tradition-bound and state-sponsored gerontocracy (van Dijk, 1992, 1995, 1998). The “Born Again” movement these youngPentecostals participate in does not aim to recreate an idealized, traditional village life but israther distinctly anti-nostalgic and focused on the power of the present to disempower the past.Its aim is to create for young urbanites “room for maneuver” in the face of a traditional culturethat places them firmly under the control of their elders and a single-party state that invokes thistradition in organizing and legitimating its own power (van Dijk, 1992:173). In its efforts to reachthis goal, the Born Again movement has become, as van Dijk (1998:149, 166, 169) nicely puts it,a “project of cultural discontinuity” that counsels the “rejection of central elements in Malawiancultural traditions” and creates among its followers a “rupture” in “the subjective sense of culturalcontinuity.”

The movement has developed several rituals of rupture that serve to anchor this sense ofdiscontinuity in the lives of its followers. At the heart of its ritual life are sessions devoted toseeking “in-filling” with the Holy Spirit and the gift of tongues. These sessions aim to “seal off”practitioners from the surrounding society and protect them from the evil forces that it harbors(e.g., those of witchcraft) (van Dijk, 1998:172–174, van Dijk, 1992:165). In their sermons atchurch services and on street corners, preachers also mock and attack traditional elders and the“symbolic repertoire” that underlies their model of personal empowerment (“ripening”) throughtraditional ritual practice, the possession of witchcraft substances, and political involvement (vanDijk, 1998:168). Even more pointedly, preachers also lead anti-witchcraft “crusades” to the ruralvillages they think of as bastions of traditional culture. By means of these crusades they work tocut off gerontocratic power at its root and prevent the flow of the witchcraft substances thatsupport it to the cities in the hands of elderly migrants. All of these rituals—in-filling sessions,services, and crusades—have as their explicit goal the creation of a gap between the places andtraditions the movement’s followers have come from and the ones toward which they are heading.

Van Dijk (1998) in particular, but also Meyer (1998:182–183) to some extent, are careful tolocate the Pentecostal projects of rupture they study in relation to state projects of nostalgicnation-building based on the reconstruction of local “traditions.” Both of them thereby succeed


in showing that Pentecostal efforts at fostering discontinuity have a political edge thatPentecostalism is often thought to lack by those who see it as a retreat from worldly pressures andconcerns. More generally, their analyses alert us to the need to examine the temporal politics ofdiscontinuity alongside our consideration of the discourses and rituals that make it possible.

Among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, these politics take a very different shape. A remotegroup of some 390 people who converted to a charismatic form of Christianity during a revivalmovement in the late 1970s, the Urapmin have also seized on the discontinuity-making potentialof Pentecostalism. For them, however, the break with the past does not fly in the face of statemandates, nor does it reveal major cleavages within the community, which is unified in its supportfor it. Rather, it engages a long-fought politics of nature in which the Urapmin have, since thebeginning of their existence, sought some way to live with the spirits (motobiil) who are theoriginal owners of their land and all its major resources.

Before the creation of human beings, the Urapmin say, there were only spirits. Afek, thecreator woman, wanted to create humans, but she wondered where she would put them, sincethe spirits were everywhere. Finally, she decided to clear the spirits off in to the bush, telling themthey could own all the land, the trees, and the animals there in return for leaving the villages shewould create for human beings. Because Afek gave so much of the world to the spirits, humanshave always had to garden on cleared bush land that belongs to them and have had to huntanimals that are their wards. Whenever the spirits feel people have used their resources withoutshowing proper respect, they punish them by making them sick. People used to respond to theseillnesses by sacrificing pigs to the spirits. When a person gets sick now, however, the person callson a woman possessed by the Holy Spirit to identify the spirit at the root of the illness and callon God to make the spirit release the person and bind the spirit so it can no longer cause harm.Whereas traditional sacrifices attempted to maintain continuity by repairing relations with spirits,the work of these spirit mediums is aimed at introducing discontinuity by severing these relationsforever.2

Carried out on a grand scale, rituals similar to these rites of healing are central to one of themajor Urapmin projects of discontinuity. In these rituals, female Holy Spirit mediums aim tobanish all of the spirits from Urapmin, or at least from particular areas within the Urapminterritory. They become possessed and call on God to clear out the spirits collectively, bindingthem in hell. Then they plant small wooden crosses in the ground to make a kind of spiritual fencepreventing the spirits from ever returning to the land God has chased them from. Were theserituals fully to succeed, they would introduce a profound discontinuity in Urapmin history andexperience by going beyond Afek’s original banishment of the spirits and giving the Urapmin forthe first time full possession of their land and its resources. This would both free them fromsickness and, as important, enable them to alienate their land to potential takers such as miningcompanies without fear of spiritual reprisal (Robbins, 1995).

2 The use of healing rituals to sever rather than rebuild relations among people is common among Pentecostal andrelated Christian groups (Kiernan, 1992:240; Meyer, 1998:201). The Urapmin case brings this tendency into thespiritual realm. It should be noted that the Urapmin do sometimes resort to sacrifice when a sprit has made a child illbecause sprits, although they cannot kill adults, can kill children. But the Urapmin strongly prefer to avoid sacrifice,and when they do turn to it as a last resort, they believe it is called for the Holy Spirit and they embed it in a framingChristian prayer ritual that, like other Christian healing rituals, aims not to repair relations with the spirits but to endthem.


The rites of rupture that figure in these three cases differ from one another in important ways.They aim, for example, to help people jettison quite different parts of their past, as is evidencedby the way the evil spirits in each case represent or model different aspects of social reality. InEwe, the evil spirits travel along and represent kin links that people seeking to become urbanindividuals feel the need to rupture, whereas in Malawi the powers of witchcraft represent thestate sponsored gerontocratic control that people want to liberate themselves from. In Urapmin,the spirits represent traditional ideas of personal and group possession of property that peoplenow consider an impediment to their hopes for development. In the present context, however, itis the similarities among these rites that I want to highlight, for in their shared emphasis on thecreation of discontinuity they can reasonably be seen to form a class for comparative purposes.And it is once we recognize them as constituting such a class that we can begin to ask interestingquestions about how to account for their differences and how to account for those cases in whichpeople appear to put the discontinuity-creating potential of Pentecostalism to less extensive use(see, for example, another Malawian case discussed by Englund, 2001:236). Posing suchcomparative questions about Pentecostal discourses and rituals of disjunction would constitute agood starting point from which to develop an anthropology of discontinuity.

On continuity and similarity

The previous section considered some of the material available to anthropologists, should theydecide to study Pentecostal Christians from the point of view of their projects of discontinuity.Yet people’s efforts to create discontinuity do not necessarily succeed, and even those consciouslymost devoted to rupture may still in some cases be unwittingly reproducing their traditionalculture in significant ways. Certainly the Ewe, the Malawian Pentecostals van Dijk studied, andthe Urapmin have not ceased to live in a world where traditional spirits are powerful actors. Inkeeping with the Pentecostal trend I noted above, they have not in any sense thrown over theirtraditional spiritual ontology. Moreover, scholars who are inclined to look for continuity canpoint to traditional practices in all of these groups that look similar in some respects to theircurrent rituals of discontinuity. Traditional Ewe religion, for example, involves possession andsometimes requires confession during its healing rituals (Meyer, 1999:67–68). It thus appears tocontain in at least some form elements that are also important in the deliverance rites of EwePentecostals. Likewise, the anti-witchcraft emphasis of the Malawian Pentecostals echoes thethemes of witchcraft-eradication movements popular in Malawi earlier in this century (van Dijk,1995). And in the Urapmin case, even as I highlight the differences between the work of the femaleHoly Spirit mediums and traditional practices of sacrifice, others might choose to play thedifferences down and be impressed instead by the way the two address very similar issues of howto control relations with nature spirits. With apparent continuities so easy to find even in caseslike these, where people’s own energy is quite clearly devoted to rupture, it is obvious that simplydocumenting people’s interest in discontinuity and examining the rituals by which they work toeffect is not enough to lay to rest claims that fostering cultural continuity is actually at the heartof what is going on when people convert to Pentecostal Christianity.

Realizing the those who want to make continuity arguments when studying Pentecostals can inalmost all cases find a foothold from which to launch them, I want to turn in this section from


presenting cases in which people work toward rupture to interrogating in theoretical terms one ofthe foundations of continuity thinking and showing what I take to be some of its primaryweaknesses. The previous section, one might say, was the carrot part of my argument for ananthropology of Pentecostal discontinuity: an offer of something new in return for giving up oldhabits of analysis. This section has more the quality of the stick: it suggests that those old habitslead anthropologists into error and that for intellectual reasons they need to think aboutmodifying them whether they want to or not.

The foundation of continuity thinking I want to examine here consists in the role judgments ofsimilarity play within it. My claim is that judgments of continuity tend to depend on underlyingjudgments of similarity: a belief or practice that looks new actually manifests a continuity with apast belief or practice because the two are similar. So routine are such arguments in culturalanthropology that is it hard to imagine what might be wrong with them. But even a passingacquaintance with philosophical ruminations on the topic indicates that judgments of similarityare notoriously tricky by virtue of the way they are relative to the standard of comparison used.Apples and oranges are surely alike in both being fruit, yet we proverbially would want to avoidcomparing them in most cases. The same is true with many cultural practices: similarity on onedimension does not preclude difference on another. And this fact raises the question of whetherit is right always to weight the dimension on which similarity occurs more heavily in our analyses,as anthropologists tend to do.

In a remarkable article that sadly seems to be not so well known as it should be, J.P. Kiernan(1992) takes up this issue in regard to the widely accepted claim that the prophets who play animportant part in the charismatic Zulu Zionist churches of South Africa are in most respects justslightly modified versions of non-Christian Zulu diviners. Sundkler (1961:238–242), one of thepioneers of continuity thinking in the study of charismatic Christianity, made the equation of thetwo types of religious functionaries the opening step in his famous continuity argument that ZuluZionist Christianity is simply “new wine in old wineskins.” Looking closely at Sundkler’sarguments, and at those of others, Kiernan shows that they are marked by a variety of weaknessesthat make their claim for the fundamental continuity of Zulu religion within the Zionist churchesdifficult to uphold.

Kiernan’s article deserves to be read in its details, but I will just summarize his three keyarguments here to give a sense of their flavor. His first charge is that the similarities that linkprophets and diviners also link many other kinds of people both Christian and non-Christian,Zulu and non-Zulu, so that “the comparison cannot always be confined to prophets and divinersalone” (Kiernan, 1992:237). For example, one of the purported links between the two is that bothreveal things that are hidden or clarify things that are obscure. But all cultures probably have suchroles: this is what detectives do, and clinical psychologists and even, Kiernan points out, someacademics (Kiernan, 1992:233–234). Since we have to do here with a very general kind of humanaction, to argue that the fact that both diviners and prophets do it shows that the prophet issimply modeled on the diviner seems precipitous. Both breathe, after all, but since peopleeverywhere do this we would not want to make too much of this link between them. The questionthen becomes what kinds of differences are unique enough to traditional culture that theirapparent carry-over into new cultural forms can reliably be taken as an index of continuity?

Kiernan’s second argument is in some ways a version of his first, though in this case he isconcerned with the difficulty of limiting the comparison within Zulu society alone. As he puts it,


another problem with arguments equating the diviner with the prophet is that even within Zulusociety “the unit of comparison can be blurred and ambiguous” (Kiernan, 1992:237). Forexample, one of the parallels linking the two kinds of specialists is that both diviners and prophetscome to their positions by suffering some kind of affliction. Yet it is also true that in this regardthe prophet is no different from other Zionists, since all of them come to Zionism throughaffliction and there is nothing distinct about the afflictions that future prophets suffer (Kiernan,1992:234). Should we thus say that prophets are like diviners, or that all Zionists are like diviners?Similarly, Zionist priests share certain things with diviners and prophets share some things withtraditional lightening specialists, so should the unit of comparison really be all four religiousspecialists (Kiernan, 1992:234–235)? As in the cross-cultural case above, within Zulu society toothe characteristics held to be similar appear to be so widely shared that they do not support asstrongly as they might the claim that the prophet is essentially a diviner in all but name. At thevery least, Kiernan notes, we have to acknowledge that “there is no single Zulu prototype forprophetic conduct and the comparison [between prophet and diviner] as it stands becomes blurredwith ambiguity” (Kiernan, 1992:235).

Kiernan’s third and final argument, and in many ways his most important, turns on what hecalls the “import” of the similarities upon which the equation of the diviner and the prophet isbuilt (Kiernan, 1992:237). One example he discusses in making this argument involves claimsmade for the similarity in the ways that the roles of diviner and prophet tend both to be filledmore often by women than men. Though this is true in a strictly numerical sense, it masksimportant differences between these roles in terms of how they formulate the relations betweenwomen and men. Female diviners exercise considerable leadership and creative independence.Female prophets, by contrast, are very much embedded in male-dominated church institutionsand are, furthermore, overshadowed even in their own realm of competence by the greaterinfluence of the male prophets (Kiernan, 1992:235–236). Hence to dwell on the numericalsimilarity is to miss important differences in the ways these two roles and the traditions they arepart of construct gender dynamics and religious life more broadly.

Having laid out these three arguments against the claims Sundkler and others make for thesimilarities that hold between diviners and prophets, Kiernan emphasizes that he is not trying toargue that Zulu notions about diviners have nothing to do with they way they understand Zionistprophets. He even goes as far as to admit that “it is undeniable that, in some respects and to somedegree, Zionist prophets (some more than others) model their behavior on that of diviners”(Kiernan, 1992:237). But crucially, he goes on to note that “the question is, how to weight thisscaled-down resemblance against the distinctive Christian content of prophecy” (Kiernan,1992:237). In answer to this question, he adopts the position that it is crucial to look at themeanings in which any two practices are embedded in order to determine if they are similar. Ifprophets understand themselves in different terms than diviners understand themselves, then wewould do well to attend to the differences, and to look at the differences those differences makein how the two practices play out in social life. (In this regard he makes much of the observationthat diviners aim in their healing to restore the status quo ante while prophets aim to sever theirpatients’ links to their pasts (see fn. 1 above); (see also Maxwell, 1999:195–196.) It might appearthat in making this argument Kiernan is only adopting good anthropological firstprinciples—attending carefully to the meanings people use in constructing their actions—but hisdetermination to do so is noteworthy in this case because other anthropologists so often disregard


these first principles when, caught in the grip of continuity thinking, they aim to find the pastvibrantly alive in the present.

Arguments of continuity based on similarity are particularly important for those who favor thecontinuity reading of what I called the second paradox of global Pentecostalism: the one thatfollows from the way Pentecostalism’s most widely distributed and seemingly most highlystandardized charismatic practices appear in many ways to be analogues of traditional forms ofcharismatic behavior. Kiernan’s argument should sensitize us to the difficulties involved in tooreadily letting some dimensions of similarity between these practices blind us to the possibilitythat the real story is in the differences: differences that we can only explore if we pay attention tohow Pentecostals understand what they are doing in these rituals.

At this point, the two lines of argument I have pursued in this article come together. For whenone takes seriously what Pentecostals understand themselves to be doing, one discovers that mostoften they are trying to change. They are involved, that is, in personal and collective projects ofdiscontinuity framed very much in Christian terms. In developing an anthropology attuned todiscourses and rituals of discontinuity then, anthropologists will simultaneously collect the kindsof data that will give the lie to unsophisticated continuity arguments based on incautiousjudgments of similarity.

Conclusion

In this article I have argued for the value of a focus on cultural discontinuity in the study ofPentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Looking at Pentecostal discourses and rituals from theperspective of discontinuity allows us to highlight aspects of their content that have often beenoverlooked or dismissed as unimportant. It also allows us to free our analyses from a reliance onunsophisticated arguments about similarity. I hope that even these few rationales might beenough to make an anthropology of discontinuity seem worth considering in this case.

At the same time, I have no illusions about how difficult it will be to move beyond theanthropology of continuity. For there is a fundamental assumption at the heart of continuitythinking that is so foundational to cultural anthropology as a whole that it will be far moredifficult to dislodge than habits of downplaying native discontinuity projects or relying onquestionable arguments about similarity to prove continuity. This assumption has to do with howanthropologists imagine that people perceive the world. Sundkler (1961:240) lays it out starklywhen he states that the Zionist prophet Elliot had to understand Christianity in traditional termsbecause “he was not in a position to understand Christianity in any other way. He had to interpretit in the only terms he knew: the pattern of traditional religion..” The assumption here is thatpeople only understand the world in terms of their received categories. There really is no othercultural anthropological theory of perception (unless we count that strand of Marxist thinking,retained in Bourdieu’s [e.g., Bourdieu, 1977] work, that in some instances people simply perceivethe world as it really is), and hence it is an enduring one. The Comaroffs (Comaroff andComaroff, 1997:115) imply it in their recent work on Tswana Christianity, and in a bookpublished just two years ago LiPuma (2000:212) states that it is a “truism of religioustransformation” that people cannot but view the new “through the prism of indigenouscategories.” I bring this assumption up at the end here to alert us to the fact that by virtue of thedictates it lays down, continuity arguments are embedded very deeply in the common sense of the


discipline. I do not doubt that this common sense has a lot of truth to it, and I cannot imaginejettisoning it completely. But it is important to recognize that arguments based on it almostalways beg the question of how long reliance on indigenous categories has to last in any given caseof change. The globalization of Pentecostal Christianity forces anthropologists to confrontprecisely this question and to try to think beyond their foundational assumptions to develop atheory of truly radical cultural change—a theory that recognizes that people really do learn newthings and cultures really do change. I have not developed that theory here, but I hope to at leasthave put the need for it on the table.

References

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University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Cox, H., 1995. Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century.

Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.Englund, H., 2001. The quest for missionaries: transnationalism and township Pentecostalism in Malawi. In: Corten, A.,

Marshall-Fratani, R. (Eds.), Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. IndianaUniversity Press, Bloomington, pp. 235–55.

Freston, P., 1998. Evangelicalism and globalization: general observations and some Latin American dimensions. In: Hutchinson, M.,Kalu, O. (Eds.), A Global Faith: Essays on Evangelicalism and Globalization. Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity,Sydney, pp. 69–88.

Glazier, S.D., 1980. Pentecostal exorcism and modernization in Trinidad, West Indies. In: Glazier, S.D. (Ed.), Perspectives onPentecostalism: Case Studies from the Caribbean and Latin America. University Press of America, Washington, DC, pp. 67–80.

Kiernan, J.P., 1992. The herder and the rustler: deciphering the affinity between Zulu diviner and Zionist prophet. African Studies 51,231–42.

LiPuma, E., 2000. Encompassing Others: the Magic of Modernity in Melanesia. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.Martin, D., 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Blackwell, Oxford.Maxwell, D., 1998. Editorial. Journal of Religion in Africa 28, 255–7.Maxwell, D., 1999. Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People. Praeger, Westport, CT.Meyer, B., 1994. Beyond syncretism: translation and diabolization in the appropriation of Protestantism in Africa. In: Stewart, C.,

Shaw, R. (Eds.), Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. Routledge, London, pp. 45–68.Meyer, B., 1998. ‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’: memory and postcolonial modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostal discourse. In:

Werbner, R. (Ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. Zed Books, London, pp.182–208.

Meyer, B., 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Africa World Press, Trenton.Robbins, J., 1995. Dispossessing the spirits: Christian transformations of desire and ecology among the Urapmin of Papua New

Guinea. Ethnology 34, 211–24.Robbins, J., 2001. Introduction: global religions, Pacific Island transformations. The Journal of Ritual Studies 15, 7–12.Sundkler, B.G.M., 1961. Bantu prophets in South Africa. Oxford University Press, London.Van Dijk, R., 1992. Young Puritan preachers in post-independence Malawi. Africa 62, 159–81.Van Dijk, R., 1995. Fundamentalism and its moral geography in Malawi: the representation of the diasporic and the diabolical.

Critique of Anthropology 15, 171–91.Van Dijk, R., 1998. Pentecostalism, Cultural Memory and the State: Contested Representations of Time in Pentecostal Malawi. In:

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Joel Robbins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. He has written widely on issues ofChristianity, modernity and ritual. His book length study of Christianity and cultural change in Papua New Guinea, “BecomingSinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society” is forthcoming from University of California Press.


on the paradoxes of global pentecostalism and the perils of continuity thinking

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