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
