Abstract
This chapter provides a critical examination of anthropological approaches to broadly Pentecostal forms of ritual. Studies of such ritual have provided important insights into language, space, embodiment, temporality, conversion, and personhood. I point to the strengths and weaknesses of much of the work done so far, leading me to reflect on what I call the ‘partiality’ of Pentecostal ritual. In deploying this term, I aim to show how ethnographers have been assiduous in tracing the more spectacular and distinctive dimensions of Pentecostal ritual, but less thorough in capturing its more subtle, subjunctive, fragmented forms. I also briefly place these observations on the complexities of Pentecostal ritual engagement alongside wider anthropological discussions that have asked how rhetorical commitment to pious practices might actually be realized in people’s lives. I draw on case studies from Australia, England, Nigeria, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States.
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Notes
- 1.
Also discussed in Coleman (2000).
- 2.
I do not go into the finer points of distinctions among Pentecostal, charismatic, and evangelical Christians here (but see e.g. Coleman and Hackett 2015).
- 3.
I have simplified the notation.
- 4.
- 5.
In his book Fire from Heaven, Cox described his search to find what he called “Pentecostalism’s inner meaning” and “source of its enormous appeal” (1994, xvii), and it is worth noting the language he uses to describe what he concludes as a form of “primal spirituality that had been all but suffocated by centuries of western Christian moralism and rationality” (ibid., 101). What might in the past have been criticized by academic theologians as primitive is now characterized more positively as having a primal energy.
- 6.
Though the case of charismatic Catholics, studied by Csordas (1997), provides an interesting combination of institutional forms.
- 7.
Similarly, work on a charismatic church in Stockholm by Jessica Moberg (2013, 117) has carried out some fascinating explorations of how material pieties include conventional participation in services but also for instance the use of Yoga, the deployment of prayers from the Liturgy of the hours, and so on.
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Coleman, S. (2021). On the Partiality of Pentecostal Ritual. In: Stewart, P.J., Strathern, A.J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anthropological Ritual Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76825-6_16
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