It forced me to account for individual lives rather than collective types, to learn an indigenous language rather than rely only on Portuguese, and to consider the history of a specific set of communities rather than collapse it within that of Africa writ large. In so circumscribing my focus, the intent was not to satisfy that romantic yearning, once common among anthropologists, to live in a remote village assumed to be self-contained. Even seemingly isolated settings, as this book shows throughout, are replete with instabilities and encounters (see Tsing 1993; Piot 1999).
Narrowing my field to Maúa also allowed me to study Pentecostalism in terms not solely of transnational flows—a prevailing thrust in the scholarship—but of the reception of churches that in every case originate elsewhere. This book focuses on the recipients more than the transmitters of Pentecostalism, on that from which more than that to which people convert. It attempts to trace the local dynamics that illuminate the counternarrative at the heart of this study.
As already mentioned, phenomenological approaches to anthropology are criticized for attending so much to the fine-grained and experience-near that they lose sight of the big picture. They are regarded as decontextualized—indifferent to social forces and cultural formations. The notion of existential mobility is likely vulnerable to the same critiques. Existentialism, after all, is a philosophy of the individual, while mobility suggests context transcendence, not context dependence. Neither of these commonplace assumptions, however, applies to the ethnographically grounded works of existential mobility that inspire this study.31 Indeed, as stressed by the anthropologists who first elaborated the term, existential mobility may manifest as resilience and endurance, not only as resistance and escape (Hage 2009; Jackson 2013: 207–8).
More basically, assumptions about the deracinated self miss key features of the existential tradition itself. Existentialism is not so much a philosophy of the individual as it is a philosophy of the individual in relation. The first person to call himself an existential thinker, Søren Kierkegaard, defined the self as “a relation which relates to itself, and in relating to itself relates to something else” ([1849] 1989: 43). As with Kierkegaard’s (1985) famous example of the biblical Abraham, who risked making himself monstrous so as to be true to the divine, the self only comes into being through means of an unconditional commitment. Similarly, Heidegger (1962) casts his project as a critique of Cartesian subjectivism and individualism. His notion of being-in-the-world—of subjects and objects as intertwined, of the self as inseparable from surroundings—sought to correct for founding phenomenologists’ emphasis on the ahistorical, transcendental ego (Zigon 2009). As with Kierkegaard, so too with Heidegger: commitment and passion, involvement and care, are constitutive of what it means to be human.
Mobility, by definition, also seems antithetical to contextual analysis. Social theorist Charles Taylor considers migration one of two quintessential expressions of what he calls modernity’s “great disembedding”—the ability “to imagine the self outside of a particular context” (2004: 55). The other, suitably enough for this study, is conversion. But there is no good reason to counterpose migration and milieu, conversion and context. Mobility always transpires within a field. Moreover, some contexts and some cultures promote mobility from within. A central argument of this book is that the Makhuwa culture, in the paradoxical way I use this term, is one; the Pentecostal culture is another. The more committed to either (in a Kierkegaardian sense) or involved with either (in a Heideggerian sense) that one finds oneself, the more prone one is to making moves: sometimes within it, sometimes beyond it. Hence, the title of this book, Faith in Flux, which conveys the idea of an inconstant faith, but also of faith in the virtue of inconstancy, and thus in any tradition that helps foster it.
By exploring existential mobility ethnographically, through fieldwork among a particular people in a particular place, I endeavor to show that contextual and cultural analysis is entirely compatible with the aims and assumptions of existential anthropology.32 Existential mobility is not only about going beyond what has been prescribed by custom or internalized as habit. It is, at least potentially, about going beyond because of what has been prescribed by custom or internalized as habit. Of Virginia Woolf’s famous line “I am rooted, but I flow” (1998: 83), one could posit a paraphrase befitting this point: I am rooted, so I flow.
The Peripheries of Pentecostalism
In the rural district of Maúa, no less than in the provincial capital of Lichinga, the few Pentecostal churches present have been tepidly embraced. The first to arrive was the African Assembly of God (Assembléia de Deus Africana, or ADA), which originated in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1968 but crossed national borders almost immediately.33 After establishing itself in Mozambique’s central provinces, nearest to Zimbabwe, the ADA gradually spread north. In 1992, it arrived in Maúa, brought by a local schoolteacher who discovered it in Cuamba. When I began my fieldwork in 2011, Maúa was home to one central ADA congregation in Maúa town and two congregations in outlying villages. At the central congregation I regularly observed twenty-five to thirty worshippers at Sunday services. Approximately half of these were vientes, those residing in Maúa town for employment purposes but who considered home to be elsewhere.
When I first met Pastor Simões, the locally born but externally trained head of the central congregation, he seemed proud to tell me that wherever he ministers he gathers congregants every morning for prayer. His enthusiasm waned, however, when I expressed interest in attending the next day. He may not have wanted me to see what I later learned to be the case—that the only regular attendees (except on Sunday) were Pastor Simões, his wife, and their children. The satellite congregations fared similarly. In Kaveya, the seven-hundred-person village where this book’s opening narrative—and most of its ethnographic material—is set, approximately a dozen adults regularly attended the local ADA’s Sunday services. (Here there were no weekday gatherings, nor any pretense of them.) The third ADA congregation, in another distant village, counted only four regular attendees who held their weekly meetings in one of their homes.
The other Pentecostal presence in the district was the Evangelical Assembly of God (Evangélica Assembléia de Deus, or EAD). Unlike the ADA, the EAD operated only in Maúa town. When it was brought by itinerant Brazilian missionaries in 2001, a few dozen individuals took part. But those numbers steadily declined. In 2004, the structure of the building disintegrated. It is common enough that mud walls incur damage during the rainy season. What varies is the level of commitment to replastering them. This time, when the church walls collapsed, so did the church. Yet six years later, slightly before I began fieldwork, the national EAD organization sent a young Mozambican pastor named Manuel to revive its Maúa ministry. He succeeded. On Sunday morning visits during my fieldwork year, I could always count on worshipping alongside twenty-five or so others. Yet most, even more so than at the central ADA congregation, were vientes.
Altogether, these numbers may seem paltry; relative to the district’s total population, they are. Either for simple distance from one or (an argument I elaborate in the Conclusion) for the reputation these churches have developed, most locals never set foot in the ADA or the EAD. At the heart of this study, though, are those who did. Whether identifying as members of a congregation or by chance living close to one, these men and women involved themselves situationally and selectively. While the relationship of vientes to the churches may have been more stable (though this is an open question), this book takes as its study population the vast majority of Maúa’s inhabitants who, by contrast to vientes, are locally born, Makhuwa-speaking, and economically disadvantaged. Insofar as they relate to Pentecostalism, I argue, they do so powerfully, but they do not do so permanently.
Pentecostalism is only the most recent religious body to arrive in Maúa. Already on the scene were Islam and Catholicism. Still today these are the two most prevalent religious traditions, each claiming almost half the district population.34 Islam came first, spreading from the Swahili coast in the late nineteenth century. This was, and continues to be, an Islam integrated with ancestor-based practices. In 1938, Catholicism arrived via Italian missionaries. Initially, these missionaries
