David Mosse begins his book The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (UC Press, 2012) with the story of a miracle-working tree in the rural village of Alapuram (a pseudonym) in Tamil Nadu, southern India. As long ago as the late 1600s, the story goes, four brothers brought a tree cutting to the village from a coastal shrine. It was a banyan tree: the tree known for its complex, tangled growth and roots-turned-branches. In the tree was St James (Santiyakappar). The brothers' descendants are said to have settled in the village and become the subordinated Pallar caste -- among the so-called "untouchables." Already in the 1730s, Jesuit missionaries in the area wrote home about the crowds of people that traveled to the tree shrine to ask the saint for favors and to fulfill vows. Some centuries later, in the 1980s, David Mosse first visited the village to conduct anthropological fieldwork, and observed how people from different castes in the village participated in what had become the elaborate, Catholic Santiyakappar festival. And that is how the story of The Saint in the Banyan Tree begins. Then it grows into a complex, rich story about a village and about India, about a saint and about Christianity, about dalits ("untouchables") and caste society, about Jesuit letters and history, fieldwork bike trips and anthropology.

Why are places important to Christians? I recently had an article published on this in Religion, and here I want to summarize the main points I tried to develop. (For anyone interested in reading the whole thing you can download the article here, or go to Religion).
 
Introduction: Christian theories of place
 
I’m intrigued by Christianity and place-making: How do Christians decide what kind of places to use for their gatherings (e.g. cathedral or warehouse?), and how do these places in turn shape their Christianity? There has been a lot of research on religion and place/space in several disciplines, but, from an anthropological perspective, I still find myself missing a sustained comparative, anthropological conversation on local Christian theories of place – i.e. comparing how particular Christian groups use and think about their places (in order to think anthropologically about Christianity). I use the article to demonstrate what this might look like, by "thinking across" ten ethnographic accounts of evangelical Christian communities, and I try to pay attention to what these evangelicals pay attention to in their everyday place-making.
 
(If at this point you’re thinking: But why evangelicals? How does she even begin to define "evangelicalism"? And does she take a "politics" or a "poetics" approach to place/space? – then you are probably one of those people who should just bite the plowshare and go ahead and read the whole article. Everyone else, let’s continue–)
 
So, here’s my theoretical starting point: Simon Coleman and Peter Collins have proposed that the ideal form of revivalist Christian space might be represented by "the tent." The tent can be used for enthusiastic revival meetings, creating an infused space set apart from the world, and the next day it can be packed up and moved on. Revivalists, they suggest, mistrust being tied to a "place"; instead, they prefer non-conformist "space." While Coleman and Collins point to important aspects of the evangelical orientation, I want to pause here to present the other side of the case. It seems to me that evangelical communities do not usually mistrust or try to efface the concrete places to which they are anchored. Rather, most evangelical communities engage in careful, sustained work to actualize their Christian concerns in specific, enduring places. In the article I argue, therefore, that a central tenet of evangelicals’ place-making is a simultaneous taking apart and bringing together of faith and place.
 
Ten ethnographic cases; seven recurring concerns
 
I chose ten ethnographic accounts of evangelical communities to work with. In the article I spend some time describing each one of these, to give a sense of how certain similar problematics recur across different evangelical groups. At the same time I also wanted to use the extended descriptions to give a sense of some of the differences within evangelicalism, and some of the shifts in this movement over time.
 
But I will hold back on any details here, and simply list the ten cases that I use: Jeanne Kilde’s work on the first "free church" Presbyterian amphitheater in New York in the 1830s; my own work on pietistic mission stations in Southern Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century; Joe Webster’s work on dispensationalist Brethren fishermen on the Scottish coast; Tanya Lurhmann and Jon Bialecki on the worship and small group gatherings in the charismatic evangelical Vineyard; Omri Elisha on a multi-church "prayer month" in Tennessee; Brian Howell on Southern Baptists in the Philippines; Anna Strhan on a large conservative Anglican congregation in London; Matthew Engelke on a Christmas installation organized by the British Bible Society; and James Bielo on the urban commitments of "Emerging" evangelicals in the US.
 
Now, when looking closely at how these different groups use and think about place-making, there are some concerns that recur across the cases. Seven concerns are particularly striking to me, and in the article I discuss them under the following headings, and develop the following points:
 
(1) Linguistic concerns: evangelicals tend, on the whole, to want places that facilitate attentive listening and speech that can be clearly heard
 
(2) Material concerns: evangelicals tend to create places that employ a toned-down, utilitarian material environment (but do not eschew materiality)
 
(3) Temporal concerns: evangelicals usually want places that can aid them in both being ordered by Christian time and ordering time in a Christian manner (which means they value temporal continuity as well as discontinuity, and that they invest in the near future as well as the distant future)
 
(4) Personhood concerns: evangelicals gravitate toward places where the individual can relate to God both as an individual and in a community (not just as an individual, and not just in a community)
 
(5) Translocal concerns: evangelicals create spaces that help to build an understanding of translocal "Christian space" as opposed to "worldly space"
 
(6) Transcendent concerns: evangelicals are oriented toward spaces that connect to and are of a different, transcendent order: of the order of God
 
(7) Worldly concerns: evangelicals usually want their places to be "counter-spaces" in, not out of, the world
 
Some of these concerns draw evangelicals’ attention toward concrete "places" (such as their local church), while others pull them toward more abstracted "spaces" (such as the translocal space of the global church, or the transcendent space of the divine).
 
Conclusion: Bringing together and taking apart faith and place
 
This two-way tugging at evangelicals’ attention leads them, in practice, to a type of place-making that I don’t think ought to be labeled either "dis-placement" or, reversely, thorough "emplacement" (as other scholars have suggested). Instead I argue that evangelical place-making can best be understood as a simultaneous taking apart and bringing together of faith and place. A different way of saying this is that evangelicals seek to both fuse and "unfuse" situation and setting.
 
In the conclusion I also touch on how these points might relate to other Christian traditions (albeit very briefly, and regrettably I had to leave out discussion of some good work here, such as RDG Irvine’s analysis of a Benedictine monastery). Then I suggest that while evangelicalism provides a modern example of deterritorialization (with simultaneous re-territorialization), it is qualitatively different from the alleged modern sense of a "loss" of place, "rootless-ness" or "placeless-ness." The evangelical case is more agentive. But in turn, the intentional agency that surrounds evangelical place-making does not seem to be put into effect very straightforwardly (since some of the places I describe in the article end up having effects counter to those that were intended), which means that the evangelical case is also a good example to use when thinking about how complicated it is for human groups to hold ideals.
 
 

Here are some of the latest review essays from the Marginalia Review of Books:

"Charisma and the Place of the Prophet in Our Times" - Girish Daswani on Ruy Llera Blanes's A Prophetic Trajectory: Ideologies of Place, Time and Belonging in an Angolan Religious Movement

"Why Place Matters" - James Bielo on Mark Mulder's Shades of White Flight: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure

"Pressing On: Pentecostalism and Perseverance" - Anna Strhan on Girish Daswani's Looking Back, Moving Forward: Transformation and Ethical Practice in the Ghanaian Church of Pentecost

"Tracing out the Limits of Pentecostalism in Africa" - Konstanze N'Guessan on Martin Lindhardt's (ed) Pentecostalism in Africa: Presence and Impact of Pneumatic Christianity in Postcolonial Societies

"Piety, Peril, and the Politics of Place" - Jill DeTemple on Kevin Lewis O'Neill's Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala

Today in Marginalia Review of Books: Jessica Hardin reviews Religion and AIDS Treatment in Africa (ed. Rijk van Dijk et al, 2014). Read the full review at Marginalia: “‘From Despair to Hope’: Antiretroviral Therapy, Redemption, and Christianity in Africa.”

Here are two excerpts that especially made me think:

“In 2009, an estimated 2.1 million people with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa had access to antiretroviral therapy (ART). Given that antiretroviral drugs suppress the HIV virus in order to stop the progression of HIV disease, this therapeutic transformation has raised a number of questions about the ethics of prolonging life. For scholars of religion, this biomedical innovation raises questions about the politics of hope. How does biomedically prolonged life productively intersect with religious theories of redemption? The editors propose the concept of “co-productivity” to articulate the dynamic ways that technological innovations have variously shaped religious experience, the religious organization of care, and theological claims.”

“Robbins argued in 2007 that the anthropology of Christianity had previously failed to develop because of the tendency to emphasize cultural continuity, which belies how discontinuity and radical change is emphasized in many forms of Christianity. Authors in this volume highlight the newness of hope derived from the mass-introduction of ART. This raises questions for me, such as, is this redemptive moment one expression of that discontinuity that Robbins describes? Redemption from this perspective would suggest that redemption is historically situated yet ideologically universal. When taking this line of enquiry one step further, as a medical anthropologist I wonder: how are the synergies and conflicts between biomedical renderings of hope and related religious practices of redemption articulated through time-based notions of life? I generated the questions above because the volume examines a novel way of studying the intersection of medicine and Christianity: how particular illnesses, epidemics, and related technologies shape religious thought and vice versa.”

 

I am one of the subject review editors for the Marginalia Review of Books, and today the first Marginalia review under the rubric "the anthropology of Christianity" was published. It is a wonderfully provocative piece by Naomi Haynes, taking as its starting point Ilana van Wyk's intriguing case in her book The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa: A Church of Strangers.

Head over to Marginalia for the full review essay, titled "The Politics of Prosperity: Pentecostalism as Critique."

Just to give you a taster, here are two excerpts:

"Ilana van Wyk’s monograph The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa: A Church of Strangers offers a thorough (and often troubling) account of the UCKG in South Africa, and more specifically of one large congregation located in Durban. Van Wyk’s analysis hinges on the fact that the UCKG is very different from other Pentecostal or charismatic churches found in the region. While participation in one of these latter groups often produces key social relationships and institutions, van Wyk describes the UCKG as “a church of strangers,” a group that “looked and acted like a multinational business.” [...] Moreover, the endless requirements to give to the church meant that money earmarked for things like rent or school fees wound up in the offering plate instead, easily leading to further resentment on the part of family members whose needs became secondary to the demands of the UCKG. [...] why would anyone want to be part of it?"

"Around the world Pentecostal churches are sites of struggle, places where believers engage the problems facing their communities, families, and nations. Pentecostal practice is therefore, I would argue, political in the truest sense of the word. As the political theorist Ruth Marshall points out, Pentecostalism is an intervention, a commentary on how power should be used and articulated. Add to this observation the fact that the retributive aspects of Pentecostalism often take aim at those who appear to have enriched themselves through nefarious means, and it is clear that through Pentecostal adherence believers are making a claim to power, a claim that asserts that the contemporary order of things is not what it should be. Little wonder then that Marshall refers to the recent rise of Pentecostalism in Africa as a revolution. Little wonder then that this form of Christianity is so compelling to millions around the world. Seen from this angle, followers of the prosperity gospel emerge not as hapless juggins deceived by Elmer Gantry-like preachers, but rather as political actors pushing back against often-faceless powers that they believe are propped up by occult forces. Pentecostals, who are frequently found on the margins of the global political economy, are inserting themselves in this field of power, getting God on their side, and claiming victory."

[       ]: Hey!

Ingie: What?

[       ]: Hey!

Ingie: Who's that?

[       ]: It's me – a thing!

Ingie: Oh, sorry. I didn’t notice you there, thing.

Thing: You anthropologists of Christianity usually don’t.

Ingie: Now wait, that’s not fair. Several prominent anthropologists of Christianity write about things. Webb Keane instantly comes to mind, for instance.

Thing: Oh, Webb Keane. You know what Webb Keane loves?

Ingie: Things?

Thing: Words and selves.

Ingie: And things.

Thing: As conceptualized by words and selves.

Ingie: Well, how else would he write about you, thing?

[Pause]

Ingie: Oh come now. I’m sorry. I see you feel a little snubbed in general. Look, I’ll study you for a moment. What kind of thing are you?

Thing: I am a handmade bandage.

I have at times tried to think theologically about Christianity, imagining it as something like a pyramid: some Christianities seem closer to the Christian promises, as I interpret them (or as I would like them to be), than others. When I was doing doctoral work in anthropology I also tried out an anthropological model, imagining Christianity as bundles: each Christian community or tradition carries a bundle of attributes, and though many of these attributes reoccur, there is no single attribute that can be found across all the bundles. But this month I read the article “Virtual Christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology” by Jon Bialecki (Anthropological Theory, 2012), and it has introduced me to thinking of Christianity as a virtual idea: a generative field of old, new, and unknown problems. 

But – some of you may ask – why do we need an analytical tool to tell us what Christianity is? Isn’t it rather obvious? Broadly speaking it seems to be a world religion in which members believe in God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and go to church and read the Bible and pray. Give or take some variations.