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On the paradoxes of global Pentecostalism and the perils of continuity thinking

Joel Robbins
a a

Department of Anthropology (0532), University of California, 9500 Gilman Drive, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0532, USA E-mail: Version of record first published: 22 Feb 2011.

To cite this article: Joel Robbins (2003): On the paradoxes of global Pentecostalism and the perils of continuity thinking, Religion, 33:3, 221-231 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0048-721X(03)00055-1

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On the paradoxes of global Pentecostalism and the perils of continuity thinking

Joel Robbins*
Department of Anthropology (0532), University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0532, USA Received 17 March 2003; received in revised form 15 April 2003; accepted 17 April 2003

I begin with a statement phrased so bluntly that it is bound to draw a skeptical response, though I think it is true enough in its outlines to be worth making none the less. The statement is as follows: cultural anthropology has generally been a science of continuity. I mean by this that cultural anthropologists have for the most part either argued or implied that the things they studysymbols, meanings, logics, structures, power dynamicshave a fundamental and enduring quality and are not readily subject to change. One might imagine that several decades given over to the study rst of practice and history and then of modernity and globalization would have rendered this untrue, putting matters of cultural change at the forefront of anthropological concern. Yet even in the grip of these recent trends there remains, I would argue, a tendency among anthropologists to stress cultural continuity even in the course of arguments that take change as their ostensible subject. Conceptions of localization, indigenization, and syncretism, along with foundational arguments about the inability of people to view the world except through their received categories, all serve to foster this tendency. Given its strength, the most common and satisfying anthropological arguments are those that nd some enduring cultural structure that persists underneath all the surface changes and that in the last analysis, serves to guide them and determine the sense they makea sense that, in spite of whatever foreign elements might be part of it, should still be a local one displaying some continuities with those of the past. While recognizing that my claim that anthropology has mostly been a science of continuity may be contentious, I am going to take it as given in what follows for the sake of making a point about how the globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity raises an interesting
* Corresponding author E-mail address: jrobbins@weber.ucsd.edu (J. Robbins). 0048-721X/03/$ - see front matter  2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0048-721X(03)00055-1

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predicament for the discipline understood in these terms.1 On the one hand, I will argue, the way Pentecostal Christianity has interacted with the cultures it has come into contact with seems to play into the hands of those who want to argue that continuity is more fundamental than change. Yet on the other, its spread also seems to foster very dramatic changes that demand to be seen as introducing real discontinuities into peoples lives. Pentecostal Christianity can appear to do both of these things at once because its globalization has been marked by two apparent paradoxes. I discuss these paradoxes in order to argue that a full understanding of the globalization of Pentecostalism requires the development of an anthropology of discontinuity at least as robust as the existing anthropology of continuity. In the course of a broader argument about religion and globalization, Jose Casanova makes two points about Pentecostalism that lie at the base of the rst paradox. Casanovas initial point is that Pentecostalism globalizes so successfully because it is de-territorialized. It is not tied down to any one place by virtue of having localized traditions or place-based centers. His second point is that Pentecostalism localizes remarkably well in that it tends everywhere it goes to be carried by local people and to set itself quickly to addressing local concerns. Taken on their own, there is nothing very original about these points. They are in fact the stock in trade of contemporary Pentecostal studies (e.g., Cox, 1995; Freston, 1998; Martin, 1990; Maxwell, 1998; Robbins, 2001). What is of interest in Casanovas argument is his willingness to face the fact that these two assertions sit only uneasily alongside each other. Let me quote nearly in full from a striking paragraph in which he takes this problem up: But how can it [Pentecostalism] be de-territorialized and local at the same time? Because it is an uprooted local culture engaged in spiritual warfare with its own roots. This is the paradox of the local character of Pentecostalism. It cannot be understood in the traditional sense of Catholic inculturation, that is, as the relationship between the catholic, i.e. universal and the local, i.e. particular. . Pentecostalism is not a translocal phenomenon which assumes the dierent particular forms of a local territorial culture. Nor is it a kind of syncretic symbiosis or symbiotic syncresis of the general and the local. Pentecostals are, for instance, everywhere leading an unabashed and uncompromising onslaught against their local cultures: against Afro-Brazilian spirit cults in Brazil; against Vodou in Haiti; against witchcraft in Africa; against shamanism in Korea. In this they are very dierent . from the traditional Catholic pattern of generous accommodation and condescending toleration of local folklore and popular magical beliefs and practices, so long as these assume their subordinate status within the Catholic hierarchic cosmos, and from the typical sober, matter-of-fact, rational, and disenchanting monotheistic attitude of ascetic Protestantism against magical or supernatural forces or beings, by denying their very existence. The Pentecostal attitude is neither compromise nor denial but frontal hand-to-hand combat, what they call spiritual warfare.. It is in their very struggle against local culture that they prove how locally rooted they are. (Casanova, 2001:437438)
I adhere to the general convention of calling charismatic those churches that emphasize the gifts of the Spirit while maintaining their ties to non-Pentecostal denominations. The argument of this article applies to both kinds of churches. As a shorthand in this article, however, I will generally use Pentecostal as an unmarked term meant to refer to both Pentecostal and charismatic churches and will use charismatic only when talking about particular charismatic churches or movements.
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What Casanova captures so well here is the way Pentecostalism is at once extremely open to localization and utterly opposed to local culture. A crucial point that Casanova leaves only implied is that the struggle against local culture can locally root Pentecostalism because, in attacking local cultures, Pentecostalism tends to accept their ontologiesincluding their ontologies of spirits and witches and other occult powersand to take the spiritual beings these ontologies posit as paramount among the forces it struggles against (Glazier, 1980:75; Meyer, 1994, 1999). For this reason, it is not for a moment irrelevant to local concerns, even as it never seeks to forge any continuity with them. This, then, is the rst paradox of global Pentecostalism: it becomes local without ever taking the local into itself. In the context of my present argument, I want to point out that this paradox is not an easy one for an anthropology of continuity to work with. Precisely because Pentecostalism has to accept the existence of the world posited by local culture in order to attack it, anthropologists trained to spot continuities are likely to be impressed by how well the traditional ontology has held up in the face of the Pentecostal onslaught. With their attention drawn in this direction, they may not take the full measure of the extent to which peoples changing relation to their traditional ontologya change Pentecostalism has wrought by introducing its own ontology and situating the traditional one within ithas made change rather than continuity the real story in particular cases. The second paradox of global Pentecostalism is one that I think is more apparent than real, but since its appearance is also seductive to those interested in continuity, I want to discuss it as well. I have elsewhere borrowed Appadurais (1996:90) distinction between hard and soft cultural forms to describe Pentecostalism as a form at the hard end of the continuum (Robbins, 2001:78). While soft cultural forms are easily taken apart, allowing people to adopt them in bits and pieces and fundamentally transform them as they do so, hard cultural forms are those that come with a set of links between value, meaning, and embodied practice that are dicult to break and hard to transform (Appadurai, 1996:90). At the core of Pentecostalism understood as a hard form in this way is the set of charismatic practices that make it distinctive in the Protestant world: glossolalia, spirit possession, healing, etc. These practices appear to be very similar wherever they are found, establishing a sort of global norm of Pentecostal charismatic practice. But even as they appear to constitute of global norm that does not allow for really signicant local modications, they often appear to Western observers as also representing something that has probably always been at the heart of local religious practice. For these observers, these charismatic practices represent a return to traditional or primal religious behaviors that remain fundamentally the same despite the fact that they are now expressed through Christianity. Cox (1995:82) refers to them as forms of primal piety, perhaps a universal spiritual syntax, and the otherwise astute David Martin (1990:122) argues that Pentecostalism has successfully expanded because it is in touch the therapeutic cults embedded in a world-wide archaic religiosity (Martin, 1990:122) and is more in tune than other types of Christianity with the oral cultures still dominant in so many parts of the world (Martin, 1990:133). Cox and Martin are, respectively, a theologian and a theologically informed sociologist. Anthropologists are generally careful to avoid the sweeping us/them binaries that lie behind their broadly phrased observations. Yet in discussing Pentecostalism, anthropologists often oat somewhat similar arguments, albeit ones focused on discussing continuities that hold within single cultural situations. They are, that is to say, quick to equate Pentecostal charismatic practices with indigenous ones in order to make

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space for continuity arguments that allow them to spot the indigenous substrate underlying the surface appearance of Pentecostal change. In doing so, they engage only one side of the second paradox of global Pentecostalism: highlighting the supposed continuity of charismatic practices without noting that they are also the practices that are most widely standardized and shared by Pentecostals around the globe. When you put the two paradoxes of global Pentecostalism together, you have a religion that localizes easily yet claims to brook no compromise with traditional life and that at the same time seems to have at its a heart a set of globalized practices that often look very local in their makeup. As I have said, what is attractive to an anthropology of continuity in all this is the localization of religious authority, the willingness to credit the reality of local ontologies, and the apparent support for or revival of traditional practices. What I want to argue in the remainder of this article is that anthropologists also need to attend to the other face of these paradoxesthe face of rupture with the local and of discontinuity with old practicesand to take that face as a challenge to their usual commitment to continuity arguments. As a step in this direction, I suggest two ways that we can begin to develop an anthropology of rupture adequate to addressing this second face of global Pentecostalism. One is to begin paying attention to native models of Pentecostal disjunction, to appreciate the various forms these models take and to nd a way to make them central to ethnographic accounts of Pentecostal cultures. The second is to set up some rigorous standards by which to judge continuity arguments, so that they become less easy to make and change becomes correspondingly easier to spot.

The ethnography of disjunctive discourses and rituals of rupture Pentecostalism in many of its local manifestations is rich in disjunctive discourses and practices aimed at making ruptures with the past. Most forms of Christianity provide their adherents some forms of disjunctive narrative by virtue of plotting conversion as a decisive break with a past self. But Pentecostalism is notable for how often it goes beyond simply establishing general discourses of disjunction to set up ritual practices designed continuously to create or defend the disjunctions those discourses construct. Looking at how Pentecostal discourses and rituals of disjunction work together to pry the present loose from the past thus provides an important focus for a nascent anthropology of discontinuity. According to Meyer (1998:182), Ewe Pentecostals in Ghana often state that people must make a complete break with the past. Taking this slogan to heart, Ewe Pentecostals struggle to cut themselves o from the practices and deities of traditional religion. In practice, accomplishing this task generally means also breaking with ones kin. For many Pentecostals, this is necessary because their kin still practice traditional Ewe religion. But even those whose living relatives have also converted have cause for concern, for the past practices of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have often brought traditional gods into their families and opened them to their inuence. Even if converts are not aware of the compacts family members living and dead have made with the traditional deities, they are still vulnerable to the ill-fortune those deities cause. Ultimately, coverts understand that they are safest in both moral and physical terms when they live as individuals, unburdened both by the ties that once bound them to their kin and by the traditional culture in terms of which those ties were formulated.

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In order to break with the past, Pentecostals turn to a ritual of deliverance designed to lay the past to rest by exorcising the evil spirits with which it has invested them. Those who seek deliverance begin by lling out personal history questionnaires, or giving personal history interviews, in which they list everything they know about how their own past and that of members of their family might have opened them to spiritual inuence (Meyer, 1998:193195). After undertaking this careful accounting, they undergo the deliverance ritual proper. This ritual aims to rid them of the demons their pasts have lodged in them by having ritual functionaries rst lay hands on them, forcing the evil spirit to manifest itself by visibly possessing the person being delivered, and then call on the Holy Spirit to drive the evil spirit out. Often those seeking such deliverance are urban dwellers who are also in the process of severing or attenuating their material links with kin left in the village. But just as those links prove dicult to break with nality, so too do Pentecostals understand deliverance as a long-term process, and they tend to repeat the deliverance ritual many times. As they do so, breaking with the past becomes an enduring project for thema project that makes the creation of discontinuity central to their sense of what is important in their lives. Discussing a similar case from Malawi, van Dijk describes the way young, urban Pentecostals work to distance themselves from Malawian society and its tradition-bound and statesponsored gerontocracy (van Dijk, 1992, 1995, 1998). The Born Again movement these young Pentecostals participate in does not aim to recreate an idealized, traditional village life but is rather distinctly anti-nostalgic and focused on the power of the present to disempower the past. Its aim is to create for young urbanites room for maneuver in the face of a traditional culture that places them rmly under the control of their elders and a single-party state that invokes this tradition in organizing and legitimating its own power (van Dijk, 1992:173). In its eorts to reach this goal, the Born Again movement has become, as van Dijk (1998:149, 166, 169) nicely puts it, a project of cultural discontinuity that counsels the rejection of central elements in Malawian cultural traditions and creates among its followers a rupture in the subjective sense of cultural continuity. The movement has developed several rituals of rupture that serve to anchor this sense of discontinuity in the lives of its followers. At the heart of its ritual life are sessions devoted to seeking in-lling with the Holy Spirit and the gift of tongues. These sessions aim to seal o practitioners from the surrounding society and protect them from the evil forces that it harbors (e.g., those of witchcraft) (van Dijk, 1998:172174, van Dijk, 1992:165). In their sermons at church services and on street corners, preachers also mock and attack traditional elders and the symbolic repertoire that underlies their model of personal empowerment (ripening) through traditional ritual practice, the possession of witchcraft substances, and political involvement (van Dijk, 1998:168). Even more pointedly, preachers also lead anti-witchcraft crusades to the rural villages they think of as bastions of traditional culture. By means of these crusades they work to cut o gerontocratic power at its root and prevent the ow of the witchcraft substances that support it to the cities in the hands of elderly migrants. All of these ritualsin-lling sessions, services, and crusadeshave as their explicit goal the creation of a gap between the places and traditions the movements followers have come from and the ones toward which they are heading. Van Dijk (1998) in particular, but also Meyer (1998:182183) to some extent, are careful to locate the Pentecostal projects of rupture they study in relation to state projects of nostalgic nation-building based on the reconstruction of local traditions. Both of them thereby succeed

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in showing that Pentecostal eorts at fostering discontinuity have a political edge that Pentecostalism is often thought to lack by those who see it as a retreat from worldly pressures and concerns. More generally, their analyses alert us to the need to examine the temporal politics of discontinuity alongside our consideration of the discourses and rituals that make it possible. Among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, these politics take a very dierent shape. A remote group of some 390 people who converted to a charismatic form of Christianity during a revival movement in the late 1970s, the Urapmin have also seized on the discontinuity-making potential of Pentecostalism. For them, however, the break with the past does not y in the face of state mandates, nor does it reveal major cleavages within the community, which is unied in its support for it. Rather, it engages a long-fought politics of nature in which the Urapmin have, since the beginning of their existence, sought some way to live with the spirits (motobiil) who are the original owners of their land and all its major resources. Before the creation of human beings, the Urapmin say, there were only spirits. Afek, the creator woman, wanted to create humans, but she wondered where she would put them, since the spirits were everywhere. Finally, she decided to clear the spirits o in to the bush, telling them they could own all the land, the trees, and the animals there in return for leaving the villages she would create for human beings. Because Afek gave so much of the world to the spirits, humans have always had to garden on cleared bush land that belongs to them and have had to hunt animals that are their wards. Whenever the spirits feel people have used their resources without showing proper respect, they punish them by making them sick. People used to respond to these illnesses by sacricing pigs to the spirits. When a person gets sick now, however, the person calls on a woman possessed by the Holy Spirit to identify the spirit at the root of the illness and call on God to make the spirit release the person and bind the spirit so it can no longer cause harm. Whereas traditional sacrices attempted to maintain continuity by repairing relations with spirits, the work of these spirit mediums is aimed at introducing discontinuity by severing these relations forever.2 Carried out on a grand scale, rituals similar to these rites of healing are central to one of the major Urapmin projects of discontinuity. In these rituals, female Holy Spirit mediums aim to banish all of the spirits from Urapmin, or at least from particular areas within the Urapmin territory. They become possessed and call on God to clear out the spirits collectively, binding them in hell. Then they plant small wooden crosses in the ground to make a kind of spiritual fence preventing the spirits from ever returning to the land God has chased them from. Were these rituals fully to succeed, they would introduce a profound discontinuity in Urapmin history and experience by going beyond Afeks original banishment of the spirits and giving the Urapmin for the rst time full possession of their land and its resources. This would both free them from sickness and, as important, enable them to alienate their land to potential takers such as mining companies without fear of spiritual reprisal (Robbins, 1995).
The use of healing rituals to sever rather than rebuild relations among people is common among Pentecostal and related Christian groups (Kiernan, 1992:240; Meyer, 1998:201). The Urapmin case brings this tendency into the spiritual realm. It should be noted that the Urapmin do sometimes resort to sacrice when a sprit has made a child ill because sprits, although they cannot kill adults, can kill children. But the Urapmin strongly prefer to avoid sacrice, and when they do turn to it as a last resort, they believe it is called for the Holy Spirit and they embed it in a framing Christian prayer ritual that, like other Christian healing rituals, aims not to repair relations with the spirits but to end them.
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The rites of rupture that gure in these three cases dier from one another in important ways. They aim, for example, to help people jettison quite dierent parts of their past, as is evidenced by the way the evil spirits in each case represent or model dierent aspects of social reality. In Ewe, the evil spirits travel along and represent kin links that people seeking to become urban individuals feel the need to rupture, whereas in Malawi the powers of witchcraft represent the state sponsored gerontocratic control that people want to liberate themselves from. In Urapmin, the spirits represent traditional ideas of personal and group possession of property that people now consider an impediment to their hopes for development. In the present context, however, it is the similarities among these rites that I want to highlight, for in their shared emphasis on the creation of discontinuity they can reasonably be seen to form a class for comparative purposes. And it is once we recognize them as constituting such a class that we can begin to ask interesting questions about how to account for their dierences and how to account for those cases in which people appear to put the discontinuity-creating potential of Pentecostalism to less extensive use (see, for example, another Malawian case discussed by Englund, 2001:236). Posing such comparative questions about Pentecostal discourses and rituals of disjunction would constitute a good starting point from which to develop an anthropology of discontinuity.

On continuity and similarity The previous section considered some of the material available to anthropologists, should they decide to study Pentecostal Christians from the point of view of their projects of discontinuity. Yet peoples eorts to create discontinuity do not necessarily succeed, and even those consciously most devoted to rupture may still in some cases be unwittingly reproducing their traditional culture in signicant ways. Certainly the Ewe, the Malawian Pentecostals van Dijk studied, and the Urapmin have not ceased to live in a world where traditional spirits are powerful actors. In keeping with the Pentecostal trend I noted above, they have not in any sense thrown over their traditional spiritual ontology. Moreover, scholars who are inclined to look for continuity can point to traditional practices in all of these groups that look similar in some respects to their current rituals of discontinuity. Traditional Ewe religion, for example, involves possession and sometimes requires confession during its healing rituals (Meyer, 1999:6768). It thus appears to contain in at least some form elements that are also important in the deliverance rites of Ewe Pentecostals. Likewise, the anti-witchcraft emphasis of the Malawian Pentecostals echoes the themes of witchcraft-eradication movements popular in Malawi earlier in this century (van Dijk, 1995). And in the Urapmin case, even as I highlight the dierences between the work of the female Holy Spirit mediums and traditional practices of sacrice, others might choose to play the dierences down and be impressed instead by the way the two address very similar issues of how to control relations with nature spirits. With apparent continuities so easy to nd even in cases like these, where peoples own energy is quite clearly devoted to rupture, it is obvious that simply documenting peoples interest in discontinuity and examining the rituals by which they work to eect is not enough to lay to rest claims that fostering cultural continuity is actually at the heart of what is going on when people convert to Pentecostal Christianity. Realizing the those who want to make continuity arguments when studying Pentecostals can in almost all cases nd a foothold from which to launch them, I want to turn in this section from

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presenting cases in which people work toward rupture to interrogating in theoretical terms one of the foundations of continuity thinking and showing what I take to be some of its primary weaknesses. The previous section, one might say, was the carrot part of my argument for an anthropology of Pentecostal discontinuity: an oer of something new in return for giving up old habits of analysis. This section has more the quality of the stick: it suggests that those old habits lead anthropologists into error and that for intellectual reasons they need to think about modifying them whether they want to or not. The foundation of continuity thinking I want to examine here consists in the role judgments of similarity play within it. My claim is that judgments of continuity tend to depend on underlying judgments of similarity: a belief or practice that looks new actually manifests a continuity with a past belief or practice because the two are similar. So routine are such arguments in cultural anthropology that is it hard to imagine what might be wrong with them. But even a passing acquaintance with philosophical ruminations on the topic indicates that judgments of similarity are notoriously tricky by virtue of the way they are relative to the standard of comparison used. Apples and oranges are surely alike in both being fruit, yet we proverbially would want to avoid comparing them in most cases. The same is true with many cultural practices: similarity on one dimension does not preclude dierence on another. And this fact raises the question of whether it is right always to weight the dimension on which similarity occurs more heavily in our analyses, as anthropologists tend to do. In a remarkable article that sadly seems to be not so well known as it should be, J.P. Kiernan (1992) takes up this issue in regard to the widely accepted claim that the prophets who play an important part in the charismatic Zulu Zionist churches of South Africa are in most respects just slightly modied versions of non-Christian Zulu diviners. Sundkler (1961:238242), one of the pioneers of continuity thinking in the study of charismatic Christianity, made the equation of the two types of religious functionaries the opening step in his famous continuity argument that Zulu Zionist Christianity is simply new wine in old wineskins. Looking closely at Sundklers arguments, and at those of others, Kiernan shows that they are marked by a variety of weaknesses that make their claim for the fundamental continuity of Zulu religion within the Zionist churches dicult to uphold. Kiernans article deserves to be read in its details, but I will just summarize his three key arguments here to give a sense of their avor. His rst charge is that the similarities that link prophets and diviners also link many other kinds of people both Christian and non-Christian, Zulu and non-Zulu, so that the comparison cannot always be conned to prophets and diviners alone (Kiernan, 1992:237). For example, one of the purported links between the two is that both reveal things that are hidden or clarify things that are obscure. But all cultures probably have such roles: this is what detectives do, and clinical psychologists and even, Kiernan points out, some academics (Kiernan, 1992:233234). Since we have to do here with a very general kind of human action, to argue that the fact that both diviners and prophets do it shows that the prophet is simply modeled on the diviner seems precipitous. Both breathe, after all, but since people everywhere do this we would not want to make too much of this link between them. The question then becomes what kinds of dierences are unique enough to traditional culture that their apparent carry-over into new cultural forms can reliably be taken as an index of continuity? Kiernans second argument is in some ways a version of his rst, though in this case he is concerned with the diculty of limiting the comparison within Zulu society alone. As he puts it,

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another problem with arguments equating the diviner with the prophet is that even within Zulu society the unit of comparison can be blurred and ambiguous (Kiernan, 1992:237). For example, one of the parallels linking the two kinds of specialists is that both diviners and prophets come to their positions by suering some kind of aiction. Yet it is also true that in this regard the prophet is no dierent from other Zionists, since all of them come to Zionism through aiction and there is nothing distinct about the aictions that future prophets suer (Kiernan, 1992:234). Should we thus say that prophets are like diviners, or that all Zionists are like diviners? Similarly, Zionist priests share certain things with diviners and prophets share some things with traditional lightening specialists, so should the unit of comparison really be all four religious specialists (Kiernan, 1992:234235)? As in the cross-cultural case above, within Zulu society too the characteristics held to be similar appear to be so widely shared that they do not support as strongly as they might the claim that the prophet is essentially a diviner in all but name. At the very least, Kiernan notes, we have to acknowledge that there is no single Zulu prototype for prophetic conduct and the comparison [between prophet and diviner] as it stands becomes blurred with ambiguity (Kiernan, 1992:235). Kiernans third and nal argument, and in many ways his most important, turns on what he calls the import of the similarities upon which the equation of the diviner and the prophet is built (Kiernan, 1992:237). One example he discusses in making this argument involves claims made for the similarity in the ways that the roles of diviner and prophet tend both to be lled more often by women than men. Though this is true in a strictly numerical sense, it masks important dierences between these roles in terms of how they formulate the relations between women and men. Female diviners exercise considerable leadership and creative independence. Female prophets, by contrast, are very much embedded in male-dominated church institutions and are, furthermore, overshadowed even in their own realm of competence by the greater inuence of the male prophets (Kiernan, 1992:235236). Hence to dwell on the numerical similarity is to miss important dierences in the ways these two roles and the traditions they are part of construct gender dynamics and religious life more broadly. Having laid out these three arguments against the claims Sundkler and others make for the similarities that hold between diviners and prophets, Kiernan emphasizes that he is not trying to argue that Zulu notions about diviners have nothing to do with they way they understand Zionist prophets. He even goes as far as to admit that it is undeniable that, in some respects and to some degree, Zionist prophets (some more than others) model their behavior on that of diviners (Kiernan, 1992:237). But crucially, he goes on to note that the question is, how to weight this scaled-down resemblance against the distinctive Christian content of prophecy (Kiernan, 1992:237). In answer to this question, he adopts the position that it is crucial to look at the meanings in which any two practices are embedded in order to determine if they are similar. If prophets understand themselves in dierent terms than diviners understand themselves, then we would do well to attend to the dierences, and to look at the dierences those dierences make in how the two practices play out in social life. (In this regard he makes much of the observation that diviners aim in their healing to restore the status quo ante while prophets aim to sever their patients links to their pasts (see fn. 1 above); (see also Maxwell, 1999:195196.) It might appear that in making this argument Kiernan is only adopting good anthropological rst principlesattending carefully to the meanings people use in constructing their actionsbut his determination to do so is noteworthy in this case because other anthropologists so often disregard

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these rst principles when, caught in the grip of continuity thinking, they aim to nd the past vibrantly alive in the present. Arguments of continuity based on similarity are particularly important for those who favor the continuity reading of what I called the second paradox of global Pentecostalism: the one that follows from the way Pentecostalisms most widely distributed and seemingly most highly standardized charismatic practices appear in many ways to be analogues of traditional forms of charismatic behavior. Kiernans argument should sensitize us to the diculties involved in too readily letting some dimensions of similarity between these practices blind us to the possibility that the real story is in the dierences: dierences that we can only explore if we pay attention to how Pentecostals understand what they are doing in these rituals. At this point, the two lines of argument I have pursued in this article come together. For when one takes seriously what Pentecostals understand themselves to be doing, one discovers that most often they are trying to change. They are involved, that is, in personal and collective projects of discontinuity framed very much in Christian terms. In developing an anthropology attuned to discourses and rituals of discontinuity then, anthropologists will simultaneously collect the kinds of data that will give the lie to unsophisticated continuity arguments based on incautious judgments of similarity. Conclusion In this article I have argued for the value of a focus on cultural discontinuity in the study of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Looking at Pentecostal discourses and rituals from the perspective of discontinuity allows us to highlight aspects of their content that have often been overlooked or dismissed as unimportant. It also allows us to free our analyses from a reliance on unsophisticated arguments about similarity. I hope that even these few rationales might be enough to make an anthropology of discontinuity seem worth considering in this case. At the same time, I have no illusions about how dicult it will be to move beyond the anthropology of continuity. For there is a fundamental assumption at the heart of continuity thinking that is so foundational to cultural anthropology as a whole that it will be far more dicult to dislodge than habits of downplaying native discontinuity projects or relying on questionable arguments about similarity to prove continuity. This assumption has to do with how anthropologists imagine that people perceive the world. Sundkler (1961:240) lays it out starkly when he states that the Zionist prophet Elliot had to understand Christianity in traditional terms because he was not in a position to understand Christianity in any other way. He had to interpret it in the only terms he knew: the pattern of traditional religion.. The assumption here is that people only understand the world in terms of their received categories. There really is no other cultural anthropological theory of perception (unless we count that strand of Marxist thinking, retained in Bourdieus [e.g., Bourdieu, 1977] work, that in some instances people simply perceive the world as it really is), and hence it is an enduring one. The Comaros (Comaro and Comaro, 1997:115) imply it in their recent work on Tswana Christianity, and in a book published just two years ago LiPuma (2000:212) states that it is a truism of religious transformation that people cannot but view the new through the prism of indigenous categories. I bring this assumption up at the end here to alert us to the fact that by virtue of the dictates it lays down, continuity arguments are embedded very deeply in the common sense of the

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discipline. I do not doubt that this common sense has a lot of truth to it, and I cannot imagine jettisoning it completely. But it is important to recognize that arguments based on it almost always beg the question of how long reliance on indigenous categories has to last in any given case of change. The globalization of Pentecostal Christianity forces anthropologists to confront precisely this question and to try to think beyond their foundational assumptions to develop a theory of truly radical cultural changea theory that recognizes that people really do learn new things and cultures really do change. I have not developed that theory here, but I hope to at least have put the need for it on the table.

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Joel Robbins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. He has written widely on issues of Christianity, modernity and ritual. His book length study of Christianity and cultural change in Papua New Guinea, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society is forthcoming from University of California Press.