1st Edition
Traveling Spirits Migrants, Markets and Mobilities
Maintaining and forging religious networks across borders have long been part of migrants' activities. However, due to the wide availability of communication technologies and the reduced costs of transportation, transnational social practices, including religious activities, have witnessed an enormous intensification in the last few decades around the world.
Traveling Spirits seeks to understand these processes by investigating how religion goes global. How do religious agents create and maintain transborder connections? In what way are religious practices being transformed, reinforced or newly invented when transported to different places around the world? How are power relations negotiated within transnational religious networks? How are processes of coming and going linked to religious practices and discourses?
The book’s contributors provide rich ethnographic case studies on mobile evangelists, moving spirit mediums, and traveling believers. They analyze the relationship between global, regional, national, local and individual religious processes by centering on economic activities, media representations, or politics of emplacement.
Grounded firmly in cross-cultural comparison, this book contributes significantly to the literature on globalization, migration and transnational religion.
Introduction Gertrud Hüwelmeier and Kristine Krause 1. Traveling Spirits: Unconcealment and Undisplacement Michael Lambek 2. Haunted by Spirits: Balancing Religious Commitment and Moral Obligations in Haitian Transnational Social Fields Heike Drotbohm 3. Spirited Migrations: The Travels of Len Dong Spirits and Their Mediums Karen Fjelstad 4. Ghanaian Pentecostal Prophets: Transnational Travel and (Im-)Mobility Girish Daswani 5. Religious Media, Mobile Spirits: Publicity and Secrecy in African Pentecostalism and Traditional Religion Marleen de Witte 6. Social Catapulting and the Spirit of Entrepreneurialism: Migrants, Private Initiative, and the Pentecostal Ethic in Botswana Rijk van Dijk 7. "Trading in Spirits"? Transnational Flows, Entrepreneurship, and Commodifications in Vietnamese Spirit Mediumship Kirsten W. Endres 8. Moving East: Transnational Ties of Vietnamese Pentecostals Gertrud Hüwelmeier 9. Symbolic Geographies of the Sacred: Diasporic Territorialization and Charismatic Power in a Transnational Congolese Prophetic Church David Garbin 10. From House Cells to Warehouse Churches? Christian Church Outreach Mission International in Translocal Contexts Afe Adogame 11. Constructing the Globe: A Charismatic Sublime? Simon Coleman
Biography
Gertrud Hüwelmeier is a senior research fellow and lecturer of Social Anthropology at the Humboldt University Berlin.
Kristine Krause is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen.
'The diverse, significant conversations in this volume will be of immediate use to active researchers across disciplines.' – Anthropological Forum
