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The evolution of American spirituality over the past fifty years is the subject of this book. The book uses in-depth interviews and a broad range of resource materials to show how Americans, from teenagers to senior citizens, define their spiritual journeys. The findings are a telling reflection of the changes in beliefs and lifestyles that have occurred throughout the United States in recent decades. The book reconstructs the social and cultural reasons for an emphasis on a spirituality of dwelling (houses of worship, denominations, neighborhoods) during the 1950s. Then, in the 1960s, a spirituality of seeking began to emerge, leading individuals to go beyond established religious institutions. In subsequent chapters, the book examines attempts to reassert spiritual discipline, encounters with the sacred (such as angels and near-death experiences), and the development of the “inner self.” The final chapter discusses a spirituality of practice, an alternative for people who are uncomfortable within a single religious community and who want more than a spirituality of endless seeking. The diversity of contemporary American spirituality comes through in the voices of the interviewees. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and Native Americans are included, as are followers of occult practices, New Age religions, and other eclectic groups. The book also notes how politicized spirituality, evangelical movements, and resources such as Twelve-Step programs and mental health therapy influence definitions of religious life today. The book explains the changes in personal spirituality that have come to shape our religious life.

A collection of classic and contemporary ethnographic explorations of Catholicism, by anthropologists and religious studies scholars. The book approaches Catholicism through a variety topics and across a wide range of geographical settings. Includes material whose theme is ‘religion’, as well as contributions that expand on Catholicism’s intersection with politics and economics, secularism and modernity, sex and gender, kinship and heritage, and technologies of mediation.

The phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism around the world in recent decades has forced us to rethink what it means to be religious and what it means to be global. The success of these religious movements has revealed tensions and resonances between the public and the private, the religious and the cultural, and the local and the global. This volume provides an interesting perspective on what has become a truly global religious trend, one that is challenging conventional analytical categories within the social sciences. This book considers the character of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism not only as they have spread across the globe, but also as they have become global movements. Adopting a broadly anthropological approach, the chapters synthesize the existing literature on Pentecostalism and evangelicalism even as they offer new analyses and critiques. They show how the study of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism provides a fresh way to approach classic anthropological themes; they contest the frequent characterization of these movements as conservative religious, social, and political forces; and they argue that Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are significant not least because they encourage us to reflect on the intersections of politics, materiality, morality, and law. Ultimately, the volume leaves us with a clear sense of the cultural and social power, as well as the theoretical significance, of forms of Christianity that we can no longer afford to ignore.

So much has been written about the Rastafari, yet we know so little about why and how people join the Rastafari movement. Although popular understandings evoke images of dreadlocks, reggae, and marijuana, Rastafarians were persecuted in their country, becoming a people seeking social justice. Yet new adherents continued to convert to Rastafari despite facing adverse reactions from their fellow citizens and from their British rulers. This book draws on in-depth interviews to reveal the personal experiences of those who adopted the religion in the 1950s to 1970s, one generation past the movement's emergence. By talking with these Rastafari elders, the author seeks to understand why and how Jamaicans became Rastafari in spite of rampant discrimination, and what sustains them in their faith and identity. Utilizing new conceptual frameworks, the book explores the identity development of Rastafari, demonstrating how shifts in the movement's identity—from social pariah to exemplar of blackness—have led some of the elder Rastafari to adopt, embrace, and internalize Rastafari and blackness as central to their concept of self.

The author extends his path-breaking work in existential anthropology by focusing on the interplay between two modes of human existence: that of participating in other peoples' lives and that of turning inward to one's self. Grounding his discussion in the subtle shifts between being acted upon and taking action, he shows how the historical complexities and particularities found in human interactions reveal the dilemmas, conflicts, cares, and concerns that shape all of our lives. Through portraits of individuals encountered in the course of his travels, including friends and family, and anthropological fieldwork pursued over many years in such places as Sierra Leone and Australia, the author explores variations on this theme. As he describes the ways we address and negotiate the vexed relationships between “I” and “we”—the one and the many—he is also led to consider the place of thought in human life.

Reaching beyond sensational headlines, this book offers a three-dimensional portrait of Afghan women. In a series of wide-ranging, deeply reflective chapters, scholars, humanitarian workers, politicians, and journalists—most with extended experience inside Afghanistan—examine the realities of life for women in both urban and rural settings. They address topics including food security, sex work, health, marriage, education, poetry, politics, prisoners, and community development. Eschewing stereotypes about the burqa, the chapters focus instead on women's empowerment and agency, and their struggles for peace and justice in the face of a brutal ongoing war. A fuller picture of Afghanistan's women past and present emerges, leading to social policy suggestions and pragmatic solutions for a peaceful future.

What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How are miracles something that are at once unanticipated, and yet worked for? Finally, what do miracles tell us about Christianity, and even about the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with those questions through an detailed ethnographic study of the Vineyard, a Southern-California originated American Evangelical movement known for believing that biblical-style miracles are something that all Christians can perform today. This book sees the miracle a resource and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, and as an immanently-situated and fundamentally social means of producing change that operates through taking surprise and the unexpected, and using it to reimagine and reconfigure the will. A Diagram for Fire shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices such as prophesy, speaking in tongues, healing, and battling demons; but it also shows how the miraculous as a configuration also ends up shaping other practices that seem far from the miracle, such as a sense of temporality, music, reading, economic choices, and both conservative and progressive political imaginaries. This book suggests that the open potential of the miracle, and the ironic constriction of the miracle’s potential through the intentional attempt to embrace it, has much to tell us not only about how contemporary Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity both functions and changes, but about an underlying mutability that plays an important role in Christianity and even in religion writ large.

The practices of Daoism – China’s indigenous religion – have become increasingly popular in the West over the past decades. But what does the Americanized “Tao” of healing, health, energy, sex and alchemical spirituality have to do with the ancient monastic tradition as it is practiced in China? Dream Trippers follows American spiritual tourists, practitioners and scholars as they journey to the land of Daoism’s birth, at the monasteries and caves of Huashan, one of China’s most sacred peaks. The book captures the encounters between them and the Chinese monks and hermits who host them and attempt to teach them the “true Dao,” as they interact with each other in obtuse, often humorous, and sometimes enlightening and transformative ways. At stake is the predicament of a globalized spirituality that wavers between an elusive traditional authenticity and a fragile individual autonomy. Dream Trippers untangles the anxieties, confusions, and ambiguities that arise as the Chinese and American practitioners attempt to work through the tensions between cosmological attunement and radical spiritual individualism.

Sociocultural anthropologists have taken increasing interest in the global communities established by Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, but the many streams of Eastern Christianity have so far been neglected. This book fills this gap in the literature. The chapters in this collection examine the primary distinguishing features of the Eastern traditions—iconography, hymnology, ritual, and pilgrimage—through ethnographic analysis. Particular attention is paid to the revitalization of Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches that were repressed under Marxist–Leninist regimes.

From eighteenth-century slave rebellions to contemporary responses to police brutality, Caribbean methods of problem-solving “spiritual work” have been criminalized under the label “obeah.” Connected to justice-making force, obeah remains a crime in many nations of the anglophone Caribbean today. Experiments with Power addresses the complex question of what obeah is, providing the first book-length ethnography devoted to the subject. Instead of arguing for obeah’s decriminalization under terms of religious recognition enshrined in most modern constitutions, this work shows how obeah lays bare the moral and racial foundations of modern ideas of religious tolerance. Tracing these ideas back to the Enlightenment, this book examines how such tolerance was premised upon the idealized separation of religion and power. Although this separation has undergirded ideas of secularism for centuries, religion remains entangled with questions of power and justice in contemporary worlds. This entanglement is common, but the ways that it has been mobilized to criminalize or denigrate certain practices as “black magic” reveals the interrelation of religious and racial discourses. This book details how the exclusion of obeah and other racialized tropes of “black magic” have defined religion from the eighteenth century to the present. Rather than seeing Afro-Caribbean spiritual workers as overdetermined by these influential discourses, this monograph shows how they elaborate alternate theories, describing their practices with terms that are often taken as antonyms for religion—science, work, or criminal justice. Experiments with Power argues that these theories redefine popular and scholarly understandings of religion, offering new ways to theorize religious practice.

One of the critical issues in interreligious relations today is the connection, both actual and perceived, between sacred texts and the justification of violent acts as divinely mandated. Unfortunately, the connection has been relatively little studied in a way that makes solid text-based scholarship accessible to the general public. This volume begins with the premise that a balanced approach to religious pluralism in our world must build on a measured, well-informed response to the increasingly publicized and, sadly, sensationalized association of terrorism and other forms of large-scale violence with religion. The introduction provides background on the major scriptures of seven religious traditions. Eight main chapters then explore aspects of the interpretation of selected facets of scripture in seven traditions: Jewish, Christian (including chapters on Old as well as New Testaments), Islamic, Baha’i, Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Sikh. Focus is on sacred texts often claimed, both historically and more recently, as inspiration for and justification of every kind of violence, from individual assassination to mass murder. A balanced approach to this complex topic also means that this is not merely a book about the religious sanctioning of violence, but about diverse ways of reading sacred texts.

The British and Foreign Bible Society is one of the most illustrious Christian charities in the United Kingdom. Founded by evangelicals in the early nineteenth century and inspired by developments in printing technology at the time, its goal has always been nothing less than making Bibles universally available. Over the past several decades, though, the Bible Society has faced a radically different world, especially in its domestic work in England. Where the society once had a grateful and engaged reading public, it now faces apathy—even antipathy—for its cause. These days, it seems, no one in England wants a Bible. And no one wants other people telling them that they should: religion is supposed to be a private matter. The culture is secular. Undeterred, staff at the society have gone about trying to spark a renewed interest in the Word of God. They’ve turned away from publishing and toward publicity to “make the Bible heard.” God’s Agents is a study of how religion goes public in today’s world. Based on over three years of anthropological research, Matthew Engelke traces how a small group of socially committed Christians tackle the challenge of publicity within (what they understand to be) a largely secular culture. In the process of telling their story, Engelke offers an insightful new way to think about the relationships between secular and religious formations more generally. More than the resurgence of “public religion,” what we’re witnessing today are the dynamics of religious publicity.

Los Angeles is the epicenter of the American gang problem. Rituals and customs from Los Angeles' eastside gangs, including hand signals, graffiti, and clothing styles, have spread to small towns and big cities alike. Many see the problem with gangs as related to urban marginality. For a Latino immigrant population struggling with poverty and social integration, gangs offer a close-knit community. Yet, as the book argues, gang members can be successfully redirected out of gangs through efforts that change the context in which they find themselves, as well as their notions of what it means to be a man. The book illuminates how Latino men recover from gang life through involvement in urban, faith-based organizations. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Homeboy Industries, a Jesuit-founded non-profit that is one of the largest gang intervention programs in the country, and with Victory Outreach, a Pentecostal ministry with over six hundred chapters, the book demonstrates that organizations such as these facilitate recovery from gang life by enabling gang members to reinvent themselves as family men and as members of their community. The book offers a window into the process of redefining masculinity. It shows that gang members are not trapped in a cycle of poverty and marginality, and with the help of urban ministries, such men construct a reformed barrio masculinity to distance themselves from gang life.

Every December 12, thousands of Mexican immigrants gather for the mass at New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe's feast day. They kiss images of the Virgin, wait for a bishop's blessing—and they also carry signs asking for immigration reform, much like political protestors. It is this juxtaposition of religion and politics that this book investigates in Guadalupe in New York. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a profound symbol for Mexican and Mexican-American Catholics and the patron saint of their country. Her name has been invoked in war and in peace, and her image has been painted on walls, printed on T-shirts, and worshipped at countless shrines. For undocumented Mexicans in New York, Guadalupe continues to be a powerful presence as they struggle to gain citizenship in a new country. Through rich ethnographic research that illuminates Catholicism as practiced by Mexicans in New York, the book shows that it is through Guadalupan devotion that many undocumented immigrants are finding the will and vocabulary to demand rights, immigration reform, and respect. It also reveals how such devotion supports and emboldens immigrants in their struggle to provide for their families and create their lives in the city with dignity.

The “Hizmet” (“Service”) Movement of Fethullah Gülen is Turkey's most influential Islamic identity community. Widely praised throughout the early 2000s as a mild and moderate variation on Islamic political identity, the Gülen Movement has long been a topic of both adulation and conspiracy in Turkey. This book suggests that the Gülen Movement should be given credit for playing a significant role in Turkey's rise to global prominence. The book draws on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and the United States. It argues that the Movement's growth and impact both inside and outside Turkey position both its leader and its followers as indicative of a “post political” turn in twenty-first-century Islamic political identity in general, and as illustrative of Turkey's political, economic, and cultural transformation in particular.

This book examines the intersections of social marginality, morality, and magic in contemporary Brazil by analyzing the beliefs and religious practices related to the Afro-Brazilian spirit entity Pomba Gira. Said to be the disembodied spirit of an unruly harlot, Pomba Gira is a controversial figure in Brazil. Devotees maintain that Pomba Gira possesses an intimate knowledge of human affairs and the mystical power to intervene in the human world. Others view this entity more ambivalently. This book provides an account of the intricate relationship between Pomba Gira and one of her devotees, Nazaré da Silva. Combining Nazaré's spiritual biography with analysis of the gender politics and violence that shapes life on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, it highlights Pomba Gira's role in the rivalries, relationships, and struggles of everyday life in urban Brazil.

This book examines the charismatic Christian reformation presently underway in Botswana's time of AIDS and the moral crisis that divides the church between the elders and the young, apostolic faith healers. It focuses on Eloyi, an Apostolic faith-healing church in Botswana's capital. It shows how charismatic “prophets”—holy hustlers—diagnose, hustle, and shock patients during violent and destructive exorcisms. The book also shows how these healers enter into prayer and meditation and take on their patients' pain, and how their ecstatic devotions create an aesthetic in which beauty beckons God. It challenges theoretical assumptions about mimesis and empathy, the power of the word, and personhood.

This book explores the vibrancy and variety of humans' sacred encounters with the natural world, gathering a range of stories culled from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Mayan, Himalayan, Buddhist, and Chinese shamanic traditions. Readers will delight in tales of house cats who teach monks how to meditate, shamans who shape-shift into jaguars, crickets who perform Catholic mass, rivers that grant salvation, and many others. In addition to being a collection of wonderful stories, this book introduces important concepts and approaches that underlie much recent work in environmental ethics, religion, and ecology. The book prompts readers to engage their own views of humanity's place in the natural world and question longstanding assumptions of human superiority.

In Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return, Napolitano shows the rendering of migration present at the heart of the twenty-first-century Roman Catholic Church and why this is a key battleground for a changing Europe. She shows how Catholic Latin American lay and religious migrants and their histories in Rome point to an Atlantic Return from the Americas that challenges a Euro-centric, Roman Catholic identity. The book queries national, municipal histories and Vatican pastoral teachings through documented and undocumented migrants’ experiences and devotions and shows how multiple forms of being Catholic inform gender, labor and sexuality at the heart of Catholicism in Europe. By studying present celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe and El Señor de los Milagros, Papal Encyclicals, the Latin American Catholic Mission, and the order of the Legionaries of Christ in Rome, Napolitano bridges the long-standing divide between the study of popular and institutional Catholicism. Doing so she connects current circulations of affects around migration in Italy and the Catholic Church’s historical anxieties and hopes of conversion since the early missionization of the Americas. Through an Atlantic and transnational perspective, Napolitano shows how the Roman Catholic Church is a passionate machine, an ethical and political subject that reignites a passion for Catholicism based, on one hand, on Papal liturgy and the importance of the moral truth, and on the other, on how diverse Catholic migrants can become an apostolic vessel for new blood in a Europe perceived as having cooled to the Catholic faith.

This ethnography examines the hopes, frustrations, and activist strategies of American evangelical Christians as they engage socially with local communities. Focusing on two Tennessee megachurches, it reaches beyond political controversies over issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and public prayer to highlight the ways that evangelicals at the grassroots of the Christian Right promote faith-based causes intended to improve the state of social welfare. The book shows how these ministries both help churchgoers embody religious virtues and create provocative new opportunities for evangelism on a public scale. The book challenges conventional views of U.S. evangelicalism as narrowly individualistic, elucidating instead the inherent contradictions that activists face in their efforts to reconcile religious conservatism with a renewed interest in compassion, poverty, racial justice, and urban revivalism.