SYMBOLIC ENACTMENTS AND RITUALIZED CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE ENVIRONMENT AMONG PENTECOSTAL CHRISTIANS IN SOUTH AFRICA
Keywords:
PENTECOSTAL CHRISTIANS, ENACTMENTSAbstract
This research paper is about the relationship between religious belief, actions and attitudes of Pentecostal Christians towards the environment. Ethnographically positioned, it captures the ritualized and symbolic cognitive beliefs and practices of Pentecostal Christians in South Africa as well as the associated discourses. The paper also offers a discussion of the need to properly understand religion and shifting from text to territory. This requires methodological change of not just studying religion as written text but repositioning ourselves by studying it as a lived phenomenon to be studied through ethnographic accounts. It further explores some resilient Pentecostal belief patterns by showing how the environment is increasingly being seen in ritual terms.
References
A. E. Clarke, Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory after the Postmodern Turn, London: Sage Publications, 2005.
N. Fairclough, "Linguistic and Intertextual Analysis with Discourse Analysis", in A. Jaworski, and N. Coupland, eds., The Discourse Reader, London: Routledge, 1999, 183-212.
E. W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, New York: Verso, 1989; T. A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Catholic Shrine in Miami, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
R. A. Orsi, Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, Bloomington: Indianna University Press, 1999.
K. Hastrup, The Challenge of the Unreal. Cultural History, London: Routledge, 1987, 1:50-62 ..
E.M. Bruner, "Experience and Its Expressions," in V. Turner, and E. M. Bruner eds., The Anthropology of Experience, Chicago: University of lllinois Press, 1986.
K. A. Hastrup, Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory, London: Routledge, 1995
B. Okri, The Famished Road, London: Vintage, 1991
Achille Mbembe, "'The Thing' and Its Double in Cameroonian Cartoons" in K. Barber, ed., Readings in African Popular Culture, Oxford: James Currey, 1997.
Knorr-Cetina, "The Micro-Social Order," in Fielding. N., ed., Actions and Structures, London: SAGE, 1989.
CliffordGeertz, "Thick Description" in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Lisa Malkki, "National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and Territorialisation of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees" in Gupta A. and Ferguson 1. eds., Culture, Power, and Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, London: Duke University Press, 2002.
ErnestGellner, Muslim SOciety,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Herietta Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991; H. Moore, Space, Text and Gender: An Anthropological Study of Marakwet of Kenys, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Vivian Besem Ojong and Mpilo Pearl Sithole, "The Substance of Identity: Territoriality, Culture, Roots and the Politics of Belonging," African Anthropologist 14, 1&2 (2007), 89-98.
M.A. Dougan, "Spectre Is Haunting Europe ... Free Movement of Persons and the Eastern Enlargement" in C. Hillion, ed., Enlargement of the European Union: A Legal Approach, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004.
R. Fardon, ed., Localising Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writin~, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.
A. Appadurai, "Introduction: Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory," Cultural Anthropology 3 (1988), 16-20; "Putting Hierarchy in Its Place," Cultural Anthrof,ology 3 (1988), 36-49. _
S.Ellis, and G. T. Haar, Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa, Johannesburg: Wit University Press, 2001.
E. McAlister, Rara: Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
J. La Fontaine, Initiation, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.
Dag Heward-Mills, Demons and How to Deal with Them, Wellington: Lux Verbi, BM, 2008.
John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony," American Ethnologist 26, 2 (1999),279-303.
A. R. Radcliff-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society, Glencoe: Free Press, 1952; Max Gluckman, Politics, Law. and Ritual in Tribal Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1965.
