Mobility Beyond Modernity
The insistence on rupture, on a total break with the past, is not unique to Pentecostal forms of Christianity. Historians trace it to the first-century apostle Paul. In his classic study on conversion, A. D. Nock (1933) describes Paul’s as the first Christian conversion insofar as it made the new a substitute for, rather than a supplement to, the old.9 Conversion as transference between mutually exclusive faiths was the evangelical ideal in colonial-era missions as well, and consequently became part of social scientific discourse (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 248–51). That discourse changed significantly beginning in the 1980s, with such terms as bricolage, hybridity, and syncretism soon permeating historical and anthropological studies of cross-cultural encounter (McGuire 2008: 185–213). Only in a more recent recalibration have anthropologists studying Christianity swung the pendulum back to the rituals and rhetoric of rupture, doing so largely in response to their prominence in the Pentecostal ministries flourishing today. These do, in fact, instantiate the Pauline ideal.
The intensification of rupture—historically, through Pentecostalism, and theoretically, through the anthropology of Christianity—coincides with coterminous shifts marked by critical theorists and political economists: from modern to postmodern conditions, from Fordist to post-Fordist economies, and from centralized to neoliberal governance (Piot 2010: 12–13). Underwriting each of these are the “meta-narratives of modernity” that posit the modern as a break from the traditional (Englund and Leach 2000). Assumptions about irreversible time thus govern processes of both conversion and modernization. Anthropologists of Christianity have noted the consonance well: “Insofar as [modernity] implies an irreversible break with the past, after which the world is utterly transformed in mysterious ways, it is itself modeled on the Christian idea of conversion” (Cannell 2006: 39).10 With respect to Pentecostalism, in particular, while its enchanted supernaturalism gives it something of a nonmodern cast, its emphasis on discontinuity “maps neatly onto modernist ideas about the need for radical change and about transformation as progress” (Robbins 2010: 168). Conversion to various forms of Christianity, but particularly to Pentecostal forms, can thus be readily viewed as “conversion to modernities” (van der Veer 1996), both formations entailing or at least enjoining a break with what comes to be seen as a backward past.
Pentecostal pastors in Maúa district, as elsewhere, see themselves as implementing this progressive agenda through their efforts to “mobilize” what they regard as a stagnant population stuck in its ancestral ways. Yet here a paradox emerges. While the kind of movement characterizing Pentecostal conversion may be a movement of rupture, the end of this movement is repose. It is a conversion to end all conversions, a move to end all moves. Pentecostals are not the only recent purveyors of such thinking in Mozambique. At the height of its program of socialist reform (1975–80), the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, or Frelimo)—the anticolonial guerilla force turned postindependence ruling party—conceived its work as the “mass mobilization” of the peasantry (see Bowen 2000: 53–57). Yet, simultaneously, it adopted from Karl Marx what Marx adopted from Hegel: the view that the successful revolution is less about movement than about the end of history, that the telos of radical change is perennial stasis. Political and religious reformers operating in postcolonial Mozambique share in common what modernization programs most basically assume: border transgressions permitting no regression, great leaps forward allowing no slides back.
This same theme suffused Pastor Simões’s graveside homily. Luisinha’s transition from life to death, he taught, is not a passage from one zone to another. Rather, it is a shift from one state to another: from movement to rest, from flux to finality. Thus death, like the ideal conversion, is a rebirth—rebirth conceived as an irreversible break, a point of no return, a deliverance unto rest. Rest and permanence, stability and serenity may be self-evident ideals for self-conscious modernizers; they often are for academics under the sway of Western philosophy’s “search for the immutable” (Dewey 1929: 26–48). Yet immutability—and, likewise, immobility—is impractical, if not downright odd, for many Makhuwa. For them, rebirth is entirely compatible with return, rupture with reversal. Of course, no shortage of Makhuwa men and women, Jemusse and Fátima among them, have embraced Pentecostalism. That embrace, however, is less helpfully seen as a marker of their modernity than as the latest (and not necessarily the last) marker of their mobility.
Fight or Flight
Soon after Pastor Simões returned to the district capital, discussions at the compound turned to the tragedy’s real cause. The elder was deemed correct. This was not just any snake. The bite of the evili is usually not fatal—all the proof needed that this one had been transformed. A sorcerer had sent it, and the identity of that sorcerer—Atata Mukwetxhe, an estranged uncle (tata) of Fátima’s—was known to all. This same man had caused a similar death only one year earlier. The occupants of that compound responded by abandoning it and reconstructing a new one in a distant corner of Kaveya village.
Jemusse and Fátima were now making similar plans—“to leave Atata Mukwetxhe here alone to do his sorcery,” Fátima said. Because the rainy season was fast approaching, and because they wanted to remove their two surviving children from further danger, they planned quickly. After consulting with clan elders, it was decided they would decamp to the district capital. Among Maúa town’s twenty-five thousand inhabitants were both biological kin and surrogate kin (members of the ADA’s central district congregation). Jemusse and Fátima would be able to lean on them for support. Jemusse also foresaw opportunities to reestablish his carpentry trade; although timber was only available in the forested regions of outlying villages, the clients who bought his doors and window frames all resided in town.
Only two concerns held Jemusse and Fátima back. One was limited means with which to transport their belongings—corn and beans, mortar and pestle, carpentry tools, a bundle of clothes. The other concern was for me. With as much generosity as they had shown in allowing me into their lives, they worried about abandoning the compound I had come to use as my rural base. I begged them not to think at all about the second problem and to let me help with the first. I hired a truck from town that could pick them up and transport them there. It was a small and inadequate reciprocation for their hospitality and companionship. Just before the rains arrived, they returned to the cemetery to tell Luisinha they were leaving, loaded their belongings and children onto the flatbed pickup, and set out for the district capital.
I was happy to see my friends do what they thought was best, as were their family and fellow congregants. Not, however, Pastor Simões. “It’s not correct to just get up and leave,” he said. “They should have remained there. They should have had the courage to fight.” Turning sermonic, though it was just us talking, he invoked Jesus’s response to Satan testing him in the desert. Jesus did not flee, but remained firm. He stood up to Satan. “A strong person would stay, use the power of prayer and fasting. Only if the person is weak will he leave the situation, change locations.” Besides, merely fleeing the problem does nothing to solve it. “You cannot flee from Satan. If this is sorcery, you cannot flee from sorcery. People here say that the sorcerer travels by night.”
Pastor Simões did not deny that the occult forces of the sorcerer were real and responsible. He merely maintained that the Holy Spirit is stronger, that it holds the power to protect those who serve it. If only their faith were firm, Jemusse and Fátima could have stayed, fought, and prevailed. This emphasis on fixity recalled the pastor’s graveside message from only a few weeks earlier: his insistence that Luisinha’s munepa would go to heaven and rest eternally there. Nearly everyone and everything around Jemusse and Fátima, however, told them differently. Not only was Luisinha’s munepa on the move. So, too, to protect their remaining children, must they be.
Evident in Pastor Simões’s critique, besides the value of fixity, is the value of ferocity. One also hears this in his frequent sermons enjoining militaristic vigilance against “traditional” customs and practices. At least two discursive contexts help situate this bellicosity.
