Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies

http://trn.sagepub.com/ Analyzing Emerging Christianities: Recent Insights from the Social Sciences
Paul Kollman Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 2012 29: 304 DOI: 10.1177/0265378812457753 The online version of this article can be found at: http://trn.sagepub.com/content/29/4/304

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

The Oxford Centre for Mission Studies

Additional services and information for Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://trn.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://trn.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://trn.sagepub.com/content/29/4/304.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Oct 9, 2012 What is This?

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

457753

12

TRN29410.1177/0265378812457753TransformationKollman

Article

Analyzing Emerging Christianities: Recent Insights from the Social Sciences

Paul Kollman

Transformation 29(4) 304314 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0265378812457753 trn.sagepub.com

University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

Abstract
The social sciences contribute in important ways to our understanding of current Christian realities, especially newer or emerging Christianities. Recent research by social scientists on contemporary Christian groups in historical anthropology and more recently in the anthropology of Christianity has yielded important insights into modes of Christian agency and identity. Those interested in the spread of Christianity today including missiologists should familiarize themselves with such anthropological and sociological research. For their part, those engaged in social-scientific research on newer Christianities should attend more closely to Christianity in its historical and communal dimensions by developing an historical sociology.

Keywords
anthropology of Christianity, historical anthropology, missiology,Vincent Donovan, World Christianity

The Purple Hibiscus, an acclaimed 2003 novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, marks a breakthrough in African novels addressing Christianity. Most earlier distinguished African novels in which Christianity played a prominent role for example, Ngugi wa Thiongos The River Between, Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart, or Mongo Betis The Poor Christ of Bomba present Christianity as a foreign and disorienting import that accompanied colonial overrule and disrupted pre-existing social harmonies. In The Purple Hibiscus, however, which is set in 1990s Nigeria, the Catholicism of nearly all of the main characters comes across as an integral part of their lived world. This is not to say that the novels Catholics nearly all Igbos live their Catholicism the same way. In fact, the diversity of their faith lives represents one of the major fulcrums of the novels considerable drama. But for nearly all characters, being Catholic is taken for granted as part of their sense of themselves. The Purple Hibiscus captures in fiction what statistics display with numbers: sub-Saharan Africa is an increasingly Christian place, with more and more people untroubled in their identity as Christians. The continent exemplifies one of the most salient historical facts of the past halfcentury: the southward movement of Christianity, which is no longer primarily a religion of Europe and North America. The unprecedented growth of Christianity on the continent has meant that Africans becoming Christian represent, numerically speaking, possibly the largest forty-year transformation to a new religious identity in human history (Bonk, 2009).
Corresponding author: Rev Dr Paul Kollman, Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, 130 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, Indiana, 46556, USA Email: pkollman@nd.edu
Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

Kollman

305

Anyone who studies so-called newer Christianities, that is, Christianity in places like subSaharan Africa where the growth in Christianity has been prodigious recently, knows that the past few years have seen a corresponding proliferation of new scholarship on the topic. This remarkable growth creates problems for scholars, however, for there are so many ways to be Christian in, for example, Africa, that the label African Christian risks losing a precise meaning. There are more Africans who are cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church than ever before, and also many more independent African churches that name their own cardinals. There are more Anglicans in Nigeria worshipping on a given Sunday than anywhere else, but lots of Nigerian Anglicans who roil easy assertions about their identity by contesting the place of the Archbishop of Canterbury in representing their religious convictions (Ward, 2008). There are African Christians who use Christs name to ward off demonic spirits before they sit for physics exams at their university; others who disdain the Bible, fearing the taint of anything that stands between them and God live and direct (Engelke, 2007). Some African Pentecostal Christians embrace the Prosperity Gospel, other African Christians embrace rigorous asceticism some under the Holy Spirits influence to become itinerant preachers, emulating John the Baptist, and thousands of others to enter Catholic religious orders and congregations of consecrated life. One gathers that the adjective African means little when applied to such a variety of ways to be Christian and the same could likely be said about Asia. Christian places where newer Christians pray also vary widely. There are thousands of humble shacks in Africa or Philippines where preachers exhort flocks of a handful of earnest disciples each week, and then there is also the largest Catholic basilica in the world in Ivory Coast, not to mention some of the largest outdoor Christian gathering places. The numbers who share religious practices together in one location in Africa, for example, can be astounding. Zionist Christians head, 2 million strong annually, to a mountainous pilgrimage destination in South Africa, while Nigerian Christians go millions strong every Sunday to outdoor mega-churches on the so-called Glory Road between Lagos and Ibadan. In addition to the amount of work being churned out to describe such phenomena, to keep track of important work one of necessity must become promiscuous, intellectually speaking, since a number of different academic disciplines yield important insights into the subject. Thus, to keep up with relevant research, one must both read much and read widely. Each of the disciplines has its own advantages in addressing the subject of emerging Christianities. Much of the most important work, for example, has been and is being done by anthropologists, yet they traditionally show little interest in the specifically religious nature of the forces that have shaped Christianity as it grows. Anthropologists instead tend to place religion among an array of factors shaping human history and behavior. Sociologists have also attended to broad religious dynamics in places like contemporary Africa, but they resemble anthropologists in often showing little interest in the particularities of the religious discourses and practices that shape human action. Historians looking at new Christianities, for their part, usually focus on important events and major figures but can overlook structuring realities like culture, colonialism, and racism, as Ben Knighton noted in his recent review of several works in African church history (Knighton, 2010). Finally, theologians, who have contributed a considerable amount of insight into the historical unfolding of specific Christian groups and more recently into the implications of the growth in world Christianity, resemble historians in rarely considering questions that preoccupy social scientists like gender, power, and other structuring forces. Then of course there are the smaller, often more recent approaches sometimes labeled subdisciplines that self-consciously specify or narrow the broad assumptions of a larger discipline, or combine what are seen to be the advantages of two or more disciplines. These include social

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

306

Transformation 29(4)

history, urban studies, the psychology of religion, and various area studies fields. In the study of emerging Christianities in particular, historical anthropology and the anthropology of Christianity have generated important research. My own research into Christianity in Africa especially eastern Africa has convinced me that many of these various fields and subfields have their own value. The purpose of this paper is to offer a missiological perspective on the range of current scholarship in the area, especially work deriving from social scientists. Making no promise to be comprehensive, the goal lies in highlighting both insights gained and also acknowledging ongoing challenges that require further work.

A Tale of Two Studies

One way to introduce some of the implications of recent social science research for missiology is to contrast two important treatments of a similar subject several decades apart. In 1978, Vincent Donovan wrote Christianity Rediscovered, a description of his work as a Catholic missionary among the Maasai of Tanzania during the 1960s. Donovans work has become a missiological classic, both for its stirring prose and its missiological insights, with a 25th-anniversary edition published in 2003 by Orbis Books. He not only captures the frustrations of missionary work but also its joys, and does so with eloquence and insight. Donovan, who died in 2001, also offers what seems a very reasonable explanation for longstanding missionary failure and then presents an evocative and compelling new strategy in a personal and engaging format. Those who have read the work will find it hard to forget the theological implications of the phrase the lion is God recalled to consider how grace works or the clever adaptations of Jesus parables for the Maasai context. Few students who read the work fail to enjoy it and most come away in admiration of Donovan and his work.1 In 2005, anthropologist Dorothy Hodgson published The Church of Women, a study of the Catholic evangelization of the Maasai over the previous half-century or so. She only alludes to Donovan briefly but she includes extensive descriptions of work by his Catholic confreres also members of his religious congregation, the Holy Ghost missionaries or Spiritans in northern Tanzania. Hodgsons main purpose lies in explaining why it is that Maasai women mostly become Catholic instead of Maasai men, despite missionary efforts that focus on men. She connects the appeal of Catholicism for women to anthropological and historical factors disclosed by her research into the Maasai. Hodgson joins a number of anthropologists and historians who exhibit a renewed attention to missionary activity and the spread of Christianity, something that preoccupied Donovan. She also studies the same missionary process as Donovans earlier classic, yet comparing these two works leads to some uncomfortable conclusions for fans of Donovan, like myself. Most importantly, Hodgsons book like Donovans an enjoyable one to read and to teach fundamentally calls into question many of the descriptions Donovan offers of the Maasai. First, she clearly shows the limitations of structural-functionalism as a way to approach peoples like the Maasai, and diagnoses the resulting romanticist views of other peoples, typified by Donovans depictions of the Maasai. Hodgsons work suggests the need to historicize ethnic and cultural identities as well as other facets of the taken-for-granted world, in ways that Donovan fails to do. Second, she is much more sophisticated about how missionary activity actually works and is received by local people. Both works describe striking individuals and complex processes, but Hodgson depicts them in a less stereotyped and more sharply drawn way. The contrast between the two is striking, so much so that, in light of Hodgsons work, I think that teaching Christianity Rediscovered in a missiological context without reference to work like

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

Kollman

307

Hodgsons (and hers is not an impeccable work in the eyes of all; it has been criticized quite strongly by other Spiritans who worked in the region) is at least problematic and maybe indefensible. There is possible ongoing theological value to Donovan and I will continue to teach it in order to introduce the spread of Christianity in the early church to beginning theology students. For that purpose I find it a very useful way to create a thought-experiment, to encourage students to think of the challenges facing the early Christians as they sought to make sense of the complex legacy they inherited. But its historical, anthropological, and thus missiological value, by itself, despite the inspiration it has given many, is at least questionable. To teach it standing alone, without supplement with more recent anthropological and other social-scientific work on emerging Christianities like Hodgsons, would today be irresponsible. That said, Donovan taught with other works like Hodgsons represents a great pedagogical strategy into the spread of Christianity today, in Africa and elsewhere. And such a comparison creates a platform to consider the changing ways that social scientists have studied newer Christianities in the past several decades.

Christianity Rescrutinized: Historical Anthropology

Hodgson is only one of many anthropologists studying emerging Christianity today, but it is worth noting that such work represents a somewhat recent phenomenon in the discipline of socialcultural anthropology. For much of its history, ethnographic practitioners treated the Christian faith of those it studied as inauthentic and thus unworthy of study compared to the so-called traditional or primitive cultures and religions of the peoples they prioritized. Hodgson obviously builds on recent and preceding anthropological studies of Christianity in Africa and elsewhere. Notable among such influential precursors are the very influential works by Jean and John Comaroff on non-Conformist missionary work among the Tswana (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991, 1997), which have raised the bar and the profile for the study of Christianity by anthropologists. The Comaroffs, epitomizing the practice of historical anthropology and widely recognized standard-bearers for the sub-discipline, set the missionary encounter within the contrapuntal histories of all those involved. Their work, while generating considerable criticism,2 shows with theoretical sophistication and elegant prose how appreciating different modalities of power at work among distinctly situated human agents can disclose new insights into notions like cultural and religious identity as they operate in everyday practice (Merry, 2003). I am convinced that serious missiology must engage work like the Comaroffs as it seeks responsibly to understand the missionary past and self-consciously address the inevitable complexities of missionary practice today. In even more recent years there has appeared a group of anthropologists who have sought to produce what they call the anthropology of Christianity. Though dependent on work like the Comaroffs, they differ in making Christianity itself the object of their study, and most of their work focuses on present-day Christians rather than historical episodes. Both of these movements in anthropology raise fundamental questions about longstanding approaches to the study of Christianity and ask new questions that have not been asked before. In particular, they foreground and disclose the variety of forces shaping Christian agency and identity, thereby raising the question of what makes a Christian in new ways.

Implications of the Anthropology of Christianity

Those schooled in theology know that different Christian groups like other religious bodies have their own criteria for determining who is a Christian and who is not. Catholics like most

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

308

Transformation 29(4)

Orthodox and many Protestant Christians officially define a Christian as a validly baptized person who has not left the church by a formal act. Internal Catholic discourse, for example, speaks of lapsed Catholics who no longer practice the faith into which they were once baptized. Nonetheless they remain Catholics in the eyes of the Church regardless of their state of sin or even their own self-understanding, not to be ever rebaptized. Other Christians emphasize other criteria, however, perhaps most famously subjective experiences like being saved by Jesus or born again in the Holy Spirit. Of course neither answer the Catholic or the Keswick, one might say satisfies most social scientists, who quite rightly given their focus tend to interrogate theological claims instead of accepting them. One still finds those for whom the question of how to define a Christian seems not to be asked. But one gathers quickly, if alerted to the fact, that a Christian can be defined in a variety of distinguishable ways, including: one initiated in a formal process like baptism or one who has had a certain kind of other experience deemed defining; one considered a Christian by others or considering oneself a Christian; one who believes in propositions defined as Christian, who belongs to a Christian body, or who behaves in ways considered Christian. And each of these ways of defining a Christian can themselves be analyzed, critiqued, and deconstructed after all, who decides what is and is not Christian behavior? And what constitutes sufficient belonging? When is baptism seen as valid and why? Is belief, understood as self-conscious assent to propositions, really something that is typical of most Christians? In studying Christianity, social scientists have always had their own criteria for considering who is a Christian and who is not. Those criteria, however, can be hard to discover because a great deal of social-scientific research on Christians has proceeded without self-consciously considering the question of who is a Christian at all, assuming the answer to the question to be self-evident. Consequently some operative and unspoken notion usually guides the research Christians are assumed to be those thought to be Christian, for example. Social scientists have undertaken a renewed interest in these sorts of preoccupations traditionally attended to Christians for their own purposes and bring to them their own questions. Proponents of the emerging discipline of the anthropology of Christianity in particular believe that a longstanding latent unselfconsciousness about such questions has been problematic and hindered a broader understanding of Christianity. They thus seek to take a self-conscious and comparative approach to questions such as What is a Christian? as part of an effort to deepen anthropological understanding of Christianity across space, time, and cultures (Robbins, 2003b). Research associated with this growing subfield has studied Christianity in a number of times and places, generating a new seriousness and sense of shared undertaking about the socialscientific approach to Christianity. Predictably, if anything, such research, far from definitively answering the question What is a Christian?, instead has shown how complex a question it is (Garriott & ONeill 2008; Lampe, 2010). Why has the question what is a Christian? become alive today for social scientists when it used to be able to be assumed as self-evident? One reason is the increasing awareness of the diversity of those who call themselves and are called Christians. This of course matters for us who think about the world from a North Atlantic, minority-world context shaped by rather massive de-Christianization, though taking different forms. What about, for instance, the many millions of Europeans who have been baptized but no longer practice their Christianity in any visible way? Does it matter if they claim to believe even if they do not belong as sociologist of religion Grace Davie has said so many English people do? Are they Christians? What about others who attend Sunday services but who claim no allegiance to Christian truths that is, they belong but do not believe? Are they Christians? (Davie, 1994, 2000). That Christian communities have their own

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

Kollman

309

ways to answer such questions variable though they might be does not mean that social scientists should merely pass over them without consideration. Without ignoring Christianity in the West, researchers who embrace the anthropology of Christianity have particularly attended to emerging Christianities in the majority world. Those familiar with contemporary issues in mission, for example, know about Muslim- and Hindu-background believers people who profess Christ but do so more or less secretly, continuing to live as their predominantly Muslim and Hindu neighbors (Singh, 2008). Should they be called Christian? There are other questions like this that arise in places like south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa questions about who is a Christian different than those arising from Europe or the US. To turn to another example: how much is reverence for the Bible a part of being a Christian? There has been a long appreciation for the Bibles place in Christian self-understanding in places of new Christianities as related to the empowerment offered through literacy, for example, or connected to the formation of linguistic and cultural identities (Sanneh, 1989; Vail, 1989). Important work in this area continues (Bielo, 2008; Cabrita, 2010; Kirsch, 2008; Larson, 2009; Volz, 2008). In most such research it has been assumed that Christians have a reverence for the word of God instantiated in the Bible. What, then, about people who by all other accounts are certainly Christian, but who avoid the Bible? We might think such people rare and they are but they raise the question acutely. And anthropologist Matthew Engelke has written a book (alluded to in the introduction) about a group of the vapostori or Apostolics of Zimbabwe who refuse to allow the Bible into their worship (Engelke, 2007). They prefer their prayer to be live and direct and see the Bible like anything viewed as material as getting in the way of the live and direct prayer they pursue as they make God present. Engelkes is only one of a group of recent ethnographies many in the University of California Press series entitled The Anthropology of Christianity of newer Christian groups that raise innovative questions about what it means to be a Christian. Many show how Christianity affords believers a sense of empowerment or meaningfulness or agency that comes with their new faith. Those becoming Christian often claim a stronger sense of themselves, sometimes through a heightened self-awareness about the inner-directed nature of their religious beliefs even when those beliefs are considered to be faith convictions that are ultimately due to Gods grace. Joel Robbins, for example, has studied new Christians in New Guinea who have, as his title puts it, become sinners due to their new religious identity. Even if they experience moral anguish due to the abiding attachment to the supposed pagan practices that linger and tempt them when they are supposed to have been left behind, these Christians appreciate their new Christian selves (Robbins, 2003a). Heightened self-awareness and fuller agency also appears as a typical feature of Christian identity among Fijians studied by Matthew Tomlinson. Drawing on a term used previously by Kenelm Burridge (1991), Tomlinson shows that Christianity operates as a metaculture that offers adherents a new perspective on their innate assumptions and habits. Tomlinson writes,
[C]ulturally speaking, Christianity is especially effective at generating metacultural reflections expressed as dissatisfaction with reified culture. It prompts people to reflect on social processes in which they are enmeshed and to see the mesh as a net or trap rather than a liberating network. (Tomlinson, 2009: 20)

In an interesting counterpoint, Liana Chua argues that young Christian converts in Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo assert that they do not know the old, pre-Christian religion and thus cannot adhere to it. They thus position themselves as free of it and able to embrace fully a Christian identity. Here, too, Christianity operates as somewhat of a metaculture, though one that operates by

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

310

Transformation 29(4)

allowing claims of ignorance to produce a confident Christian self-understanding opposed to a past shrouded in murky mysteriousness left behind (Chua, 2009). There are numerous other studies as well that show how Christianity augments believers experiences of agency, often in complex circumstances like those facing Africans in urban settings, at home or in the West (Jeannerat, 2009; Nieswand, 2010; Rabelo, Mota & Almeida, 2009; Vsquez, 2009). Such studies show how being Christian assists people in the social navigation that Henrik Vigh discusses (2009) or, alternately, partakes in the tactical cosmopolitanism that Loren Landau discerns as a common adaptation among believers to trying situations (Landau, 2009). In other places of newer Christianities, however, anthropologists of Christianity argue that the faiths prominent and appreciated role seems less to create new agency or self-awareness and more to shape relationships with others. Frederick Klaits, for example, studies a group of Pentecostals in Botswana. Klaits argues that these Christians consider their identity as Christians not primarily in relation to adherence to Christian beliefs, or even by other typical facets of Christian identity like liturgical participation, nor to a particular approach to material objects like Engelkes Zimbabwean Apostolics. Instead, Klaits church members prioritize as distinctly Christian certain concrete practices of love especially the care offered to the many church members and others who suffer from and die of AIDS. For these Christians, the faith that defines one as a Christian is connected to the Tswana word tumelo, and it bespeaks more a sentimental orientation then either notional belief or a way to orient oneself in the world, or other typical approaches to religious belonging. Instead tumelo is a method of sustaining particular kinds of intersubjectivity that mark the Christian (Klaits, 2010: 285). Warm social relationships also seem to define Christian identity among the Caribbean islanders studied by Francio Guadeloupe as well the African Catholics whom James Pritchett has discussed. Pritchetts study analyzes a group of friends who graduated from the same secondary school and he shows how this cohort of Zambians see their faith as bound up in the abiding friendships that have defined them for decades (Pritchett, 2007). Guadeloupes subject, the content of radio disc jockeys language on the binational island of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten, shows how Christianity functions as a discourse that creates a metalanguage of inclusiveness (Guadeloupe, 2009: 74ff). It does so by presenting creolized Christianity as a public religion that does not privilege any of the faiths practiced, not even itself (Guadeloupe, 2009: ix). Writings associated with the anthropology of Christianity have tended to set aside the notion of conversion as the primary way to define a Christian and instead looked to more differentiated approaches to identity. This has led to a widespread appreciation of the complexity of identity, religious and otherwise, among new Christians. When conversion is the rubric through which Christian identity is considered, then one well-grooved path of analysis considers what kinds of remnants continue in the convert habits of mind and heart that persist after becoming Christian. Yet these days the sort of hybridized identity that so often supposedly persists after conversion tends to be seen as the norm. Myriad studies show the dubiousness of any univocal understanding of identity, stressing the ways identity is socially performed and thus shaped by situations in which such social performances occur. Sociologists speak of nested identities, of different modes in which identity is enacted, of circumstances that make some facets or aspects of identity salient at sometimes and invisible at others. Identity is less a script from which one reads and more a toolbox of potentialities constantly undergoing reform, replacement, and regeneration.3 One study that engages the notion of religious identity in ways that lend themselves to the comparative approaches desired in the anthropology of Christianity is Webb Keanes Christian Moderns (2007), which looks at Sumbanese Calvinists in Indonesia. Keane notes the astringent morality to which converts aspire a morality that, among other things, emphasizes developing the proper

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

Kollman

311

relation to material things instead of the supposed fetishism of so-called traditional religion. Keane (2007: 5, 24) connects this missionary-fostered morality to what Latour (1993) calls the work of purification often at work in modernizing discourses the assumption that proper attachment to and investment in things represents a human advance. Keane develops the notion of semiotic ideology to describe this often taken-for-granted approach to material objects held by believers. The Christians studied by Engelke that have an aversion for the Bible in Zimbabwe, for instance, have an unusual semiotic ideology, to be sure. But all Christians operate from within a semiotic ideology and the value of Keanes and Engelkes work is that they draw attention to it so that what is easily overlooked becomes worthy of attention. Once such a notion is seen to be part and parcel of religious identity then varying modalities of such a semiotic ideology can be analyzed and compared. The notion of semiotic ideology is useful, therefore, because it names a category through which one can distinguish different ways of being religious from one another using categories that believers themselves can acknowledge, even if they are often unconscious about them. It also encourages a way to consider aspects of what has been called conversion or inculturation, but with a terminology less prone to value judgments of a theological sort that can frustrate objective analysis. After all, Christianity has no single semiotic ideology. Instead, arguments about the proper approach to religious objects have characterized different official Christian thinkers and communities for centuries. Catholic sacramentality, for example, differs from Calvinist approaches to the Word of God, and these are in turn different from the ways certain African independent churches look at, for example, water. Attending to different groups semiotic ideology encourages anthropologists to understand theology as an operative reality for believers not simply to accept theological answers but to make the theological discussions and assertions that Christians care about part of what they want to understand.

The Limits of the Anthropology of Christianity and the Need for an Historical Sociology
As a student of Christianity in Africa in particular, I have drawn a great deal from both historical anthropology and the more recent efforts associated with the anthropology of Christianity. The Comaroffs efforts to situate evangelizers and evangelized in contexts saturated with symbolic and material dynamics have quickly become an expectation for serious work in missionary history and stories of Christian origins in Africa and elsewhere. And the anthropology of Christianity, by close study of particular Christianities, raises up cases and concepts pregnant with comparative possibility. Notions like Tomlinsons metaculture and Keanes semiotic ideology are tools to think with in considering emerging Christianity. And they certainly have missiological implications, emphasizing aspects of developing religious identities that can be easily overlooked. Several lacunae, however, can be recognized in existing literature on Christianity in places like Africa. In the first place, nearly all the work in the anthropology of Christianity has engaged current realities primarily, not historical processes. Second, except in relation to Pentecostal groups, those associated with the anthropology of Christianity have shown little interest in the development of African Christian communities per se. There are exceptions such as William Hanks recent study of the evangelization of the Maya in the early modern period and resulting changes that ensued, especially linguistically (Hanks, 2010) but the primary level of analysis has been of individuals and in the present. What are lacking are both more longitudinal studies and studies that prioritize the experiences of communities.

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

312

Transformation 29(4)

Elsewhere I have advanced the argument that the study of Christianity in Africa in particular needs to develop a comparative and historical sociology4 that can grasp the profound changes that African Christian communities like the Catholics described in Adichies The Purple Hibiscus have undergone (Kollman, 2010). In particular I have suggested that studies of African Christian bodies directly traceable to missionary activity might develop a theory of generations in order to grasp the stages of individual and collective agency and identity through which such communities pass. Such work would build upon advances already made in historical anthropology and the anthropology of Christianity but it would prioritize the social role that religious adherence plays for believers as it modulates their shifting belonging along with their changing beliefs and behavior. There are obvious challenges facing such a project. These include accounting for the role of missionaries and their practices while always remembering that such practices have effects on emerging Christianities invariably because of the way they are received, rejected, and/or modified by those evangelized. Another challenge lies in a proper appreciation of denominational affiliations as these shaped both initial evangelization and subsequent local Christians. There are settings where denominations matter little for places with lots of new Christians and others where they matter a great deal and understanding the different reasons for their importance or lack of importance in various cases represents an important challenge for researchers. It is this sort of research that will make sense of the experiences of people like the Nigerian Catholics depicted in novels like Adichies The Purple Hibiscus, people for whom being Christian is a taken-for-granted part of their sense of themselves, of whom there are already millions, with the number growing rapidly. It is the kind of work that the study of Christianity in places like subSaharan Africa needs. Acknowledgements
I thank the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, and especially David Singh, for the invitation to deliver a lecture under this title on 10 May 2011. I have adapted my remarks in light of the fruitful discussion that day, and am grateful for the warm welcome given me and the lively engagement accorded my presentation.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1 2 Recently Donovans letters have also been published (Bowen, 2011). For a discussion of those criticisms and the Comaroffs responses, see the relevant sections of Comaroff & Comaroff (1997) as well as the entirety of volume 3, issue 1 of the journal Interventions in 2001. For a more recent discussion of historical anthropology, see the excerpts in Dube (2007), especially Dubes own introduction. Recent works on this theme include the following: Escobar (2008), Burke (2009) and Greenblatt, upanov, Meyer-Kalkus, et al. (2010). The works of Pierre Bourdieu have been very influential in this regard. For a discussion of Bourdieus work and its influence on historical and cultural sociology, see volume 5, issue 1 of the journal Cultural Sociology in 2011. For an overview of historical sociology and a programmatic view of its future, see the articles in Adams, Clemens and Orloff (2005), especially their introduction.

3 4

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

Kollman Bibliography

313

Achebe C (1959) Things Fall Apart. New York, NY: Astor-Honor. Adichie CN (2003) The Purple Hibiscus. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. Adams J, Clemens E and Orloff AS (Eds.) (2005) Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology. Durham, NC & London, UK: Duke University Press. Beti M (1971) The Poor Christ of Bomba (G. Moore, Trans.). London, UK: Heinemann. Bielo JS (2008) On the Failure of Meaning: Bible Reading in the Anthropology of Christianity. Culture and Religion 9(1): 121. Bonk J (2009) Africa and the Christian Mission. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 33(2): 5758. Bowen J (Ed.) (2011) The Missionary Letters of Vincent Donovan, 19571973. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Burke P (2009) Cultural Hybridity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Burridge K (1991) In the Way: A Study of Christian Missionary Endeavors. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press. Cabrita J (2010) Texts, Authority, and Community in the South African Ibandla lamaNazaretha (Church of the Nazaretha), 19101976. Journal of Religion in Africa 40(1): 6095. Chua L (2009) To Know or Not to Know? Practices of Knowledge and Ignorance among Bidayuhs in an Impurely Christian World. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 15(2): 332348. Comaroff J and J Comaroff (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution Vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff J and J Comaroff (1997) Of Revelation and Revolution Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davie G (1994) Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Davie G (2000) Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Donovan V (1978; 2003) Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle from the Masai. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Dube S (Ed.) (2007) Historical Anthropology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Engelke M (2007) The Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Escobar A (2008) Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham, NC & London, UK: Duke University Press. Garriott W and ONeill KL (2008) Who Is a Christian? Toward a Dialogic Approach in the Anthropology of Christianity. Anthropological Theory 8(4): 381398. Greenblatt S, upanov I, Meyer-Kalkus R, et al. (2010) Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Guadeloupe F (2009) Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hanks WF (2010) Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hodgson D (2005) The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters Between Maasai and Missionaries. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jeannerat C (2009) Of Lizards, Misfortune and Deliverance: Pentecostal Soteriology in the Life of a Migrant. African Studies 68(2): 251271. Keane W (2007) Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kirsch TG (2008) Spirits and Letters: Reading, Writing and Charisma in African Christianity. New York, NY: Bergham. Klaits F (2010) Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion During Botswanas Time of AIDS. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Knighton B (2010) Review Article: The Determination of Religion in Africa. African Affairs, 109: 325335. Kollman P (2010) Classifying African Christianities, Part Two: The Anthropology of Christianity and Generations of African Christians. Journal of Religion in Africa 40(2): 118148.

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012

314

Transformation 29(4)

Lampe FP (2010) The Anthropology of Christianity: Context, Contestation, Rupture, and Continuity. Reviews in Anthropology, 39(1): 6688. Landau LB (2009) Living within and beyond Johannesburg: Exclusion, Religion, and Emerging Forms of Belonging. African Studies 68(2): 197214. Larson PM (2009) Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Latour B (1993). We Have Never Been Modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merry SE (2003) Hegemony and Culture in Historical Anthropology: A Review Essay on Jean and John L Comaroffs Of Revelation and Revolution. The American Historical Review 108(2): 460470. Nieswand B (2010) Enacted Destiny: West African Charismatic Christians in Berlin and the Immanence of God. Journal of Religion in Africa 40(1): 3359. Pritchett JA (2007) Friends for Life, Friends for Death: Cohorts and Consciousness among the LundaNdembu. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Robbins J (2003a) Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in Papua New Guinea. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Robbins J (2003b). What Is a Christian? Notes toward an Anthropology of Christianity Religion 33, 191199. Rabelo M, Mota SR and Almeida CR (2009) Cultivating the Senses and Giving in to the Sacred: Notes on Body and Experience among Pentecostal Women in Salvador, Brazil. Journal of Contemporary Religion 24(1): 118. Sanneh LO (1989, 2009) Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Singh D (Ed.) (2008) Jesus and the Cross: Reflections of Christians from Islamic Contexts. Oxford, UK: Regnum Books. Tomlinson M (2009) In Gods Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Vail L (Ed.) (1989) The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. London, UK: James Currey. Vsquez MA (2009) The Global Portability of Pneumatic Christianity: Comparing African and Latin American Pentecostalisms. African Studies 68(2): 273286. Vigh H (2009) Motion Squared: A Second Look at the Concept of Social Navigation. Anthropological Theory 9(4): 419438. Volz S (2008) Written on Our Hearts; Tswana Christians and the Word of God in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Journal of Religion in Africa 38(2): 112140 wa Thiongo N (1965). The River Between. London, UK: Heinemann. Ward K (2008) The Empire Fights Back: The Invention of African Anglicanism. In Adogame A, Gerloff R and Hock K (Eds.), Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage. London, UK: Continuum, 8696.

Author Biography Rev Dr Paul Kollman is associate professor of the History of Christianity in the Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA.

Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 29, 2012