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’
