Embodied Temporalities in Global

Pentecostal Conversion

Miranda Klavera & Linda van de Kampb

a
VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, email: m.klaver@vu.nl bAfrican Studies Centre, The Netherlands,
email: lvandekamp@ascleiden.nl

abstract The body is one of the most discussed topics in current studies of religion
and society. Pentecostalism displays a remarkable sensorial and experiential form of
religion and is therefore a most interesting domain to study the intersection of religion
and embodiment. To avoid the pitfall of taking the feeling body for granted as a prime
phenomenological reality, this thematic issue elaborates on the explicit strategies
through which the religious body is formed in different societies. The dynamics of
becoming and remaining a religious convert are displayed through a focus on the
three specific interrelated issues of time, spirits and the subject.

keywords Pentecostalism, conversion, embodiment, historiopraxy, time, subject

his special issue explores new directions for the study of religion by

T looking specifically at the phenomenon of the worldwide growth of

Pentecostalism and embodied conversion.1 Reshaping the face of
Christianity, Pentecostalism’s global success challenges us to rethink existing
concepts and categories, particularly in this issue of conversion and the
body. We want to pursue recent debates in the Anthropology of Christianity
(Cannell 2006; Robbins 2007; Engelke 2010) by analyzing how conversion pro-
cesses are shaped and experienced through the body.
The body has become central to the study of religion in recent years. Scho-
lars have sought to capture the concreteness of religious experience, because
they realized the limitations of meaning-centered approaches and their direct
and indirect indebtedness to internal Protestant self-descriptions of religion in
terms of inner belief (Asad 1993; Engelke & Tomlinson 2007). Taking seriously
the fact that humans are embodied (McGuire 1990), scholars instigated the

ethnos, vol. 76:4, december 2011 (pp. 421–425)

# 2011 Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis
issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.632691
422 miranda klaver & linda van de kamp

study of how people sense the divine through a particular thought, behavior, or
emotion (Csordas 1990, 1994). In this respect, Pentecostalism stands out as a reli-
gion that approaches the body as an important locus of knowledge, ranging
from revelatory sensory imagery to ritual gestures such as laying on of hands
to the sacred faint of being overcome by the Holy Spirit.
In this special issue, we want to contribute to the development of more ade-
quate conceptual tools for grasping religious bodily sensations, looking specifi-
cally at Pentecostalism, to avoid the pitfall of taking the feeling body for granted
as a prime phenomenological reality. Therefore, several articles elaborate on the
explicit strategies through which a religious habitus is acquired. With the notion
habitus or embodied culture, Bourdieu (1977) described how ‘objective social
structures’ are inscribed in people’s bodies and generate subjective experiences
of social class. However, he stressed the unconscious power of habitus and not
the explicit training of experiences that happens within religious movements
(Mahmood 2005:138 – 9). To be able to study the formation of the religious
body, Meyer coined the notion of ‘sensational form’ (2008; see also De Witte
and Klaver), which are authorized modes for invoking and organizing access
to the divine or transcendental that shape both religious content and norms.
Participating in particular practices of religious worship and patterns of
feeling, modulates practitioners as religious subjects, which demonstrates the
body as an index of spiritual power(s) as well as its formation to feature as
such (cf. Hirschkind 2001; Mahmood 2005).
This notion of sensational form that calls the attention to the organization of
religious experiences is helpful in relation to Keane’s (2007; see also Klaver and
Mafra) much appraised concept of ‘semiotic ideology’, which identifies categories
of signs in particular religious traditions and how they organize the material
world and people’s experiences of it in specific ways. Since, as Keane points
out, ideologies always require objectification in the material world, it is through
sensational forms that one can observe and investigate how signs operate
within a particular context and religious tradition. In other words, it is through
sensational forms that the status and interrelation between words, things,
images, including the body, are revealed. In short, the concern is not the body
per se, as if it were an object of study by itself, but its framing and mobilization
in relation to particular issues, based on semiotic ideologies and sensational forms.
In this overall framework, the contributions address three specific inter-
related issues: time, spirits and the subject. To begin with time, the authors
indicate an important new dimension to the way in which Pentecostalism’s
attitude to conversion, understood as ‘a break with the past’ (Meyer 1998), is

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Embodied Temporalities in Global Pentecostal Conversion 423

usually framed. The Pentecostal urge to ‘break’ with other religious traditions
calls for a detailed analysis of the interface between Pentecostalism’s position
in a specific national history, on the one hand, and its own construction of
time (and place) (cf. Engelke 2010), on the other. This can be done by exploring
what Coleman calls Pentecostal ‘historiopraxy’, drawing attention to the
centrality of the body in acting as an ‘index in the making of history’ and the
‘embodiment of temporality’. Coleman analyzes how members of the World
of Life church mutually sustain personal, national and global histories by
‘invoking’ and ‘making’ history. Mafra asks how the insights into the formation
of the Pentecostal person that largely follow a Protestant tradition, takes shape
in a context with a long Catholic tradition. She analyzes how Brazilian converts
appropriate Pentecostal dualist messages, such as between past and present, by
a pairing of Protestant ideologies of ‘sincerity’ and Catholic ideas of ‘saintliness’.
In short, approaching the question of Pentecostal temporalities from the angle
of the body allows understanding how the experience of time is shaped and
framed in particular regions of the world.
The second issue addresses the spiritual dimension. De Witte and Klaver
point out in quite some detail how Pentecostals and evangelicals seek to incor-
porate the Holy Spirit, involving concrete experiences of the ‘divine touch’ that
are enabled through sensational forms. Marleen de Witte shows how Ghanaian
Pentecostals share a strong preoccupation with scholars in religious studies who
made a distinction between the body, as the locus of senses and emotions, and
the mind, as the place of intellectual knowledge. She analyzes how the Pente-
costal training to ‘tune’ the senses towards specific divine experiences mutually
inform and shape cognitive and embodied knowledge of conversion. A related
debate about emotion and rationality appears in baptism practices of converts in
The Netherlands. Miranda Klaver discusses baptism as an embodied form of
communicative action in conversion. Converts who shifted from mainline
churches to Evangelical/Pentecostal churches experience conflicts over the
timing and modes of baptism. This shows how different modes of baptism
and conversion are embedded in distinct forms of embodiment.
However, as Haustein and van de Kamp show, the Holy Spirit is not the only
entity that may occupy the born-again believer. Haustein describes the discus-
sions among Ethiopian Pentecostals about ‘deliverance theology’ embodying
conflicting spiritual forces. Ethiopian Pentecostals intensely dispute about
whether and how a believer is capacitated to host two opposing natures of
the divine, the spirits related to traditional cosmology and the Holy Spirit.
Van de Kamp shows how the conversion of Mozambican Pentecostal

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424 miranda klaver & linda van de kamp

women implies that they engage in a ‘spiritual war’ against ‘demons’. These
women are learning to close off their bodies to local avenging spirits by becom-
ing filled with the Holy Spirit. However, as a result, converts posit themselves
outside local social-security networks and experience increased tensions in
their relationships. Thus, focusing on the body as an index for spiritual power
also means paying due attention to the ambiguities and difficulties of the
effects of conversion on people and societies.
Third, closely related to the temporal and spiritual dimensions is the issue of
the born-again subject. All authors demonstrate how personal biographies
evolve around and at the same time authenticate the reality of embodied
experiences with evil spirits and the Holy Spirit. In sum, analyzing believers’
bodily experiences allows us to gain insight into the dynamics of becoming
and remaining a religious convert. Exploring how converts learn to read and
experience their body, which entails feelings of doubt and success, offers
tools to understand the appeal and limits of religious movements in our time.

Acknowledgement
We thank Birgit Meyer for her generous and engaging suggestions.

Note
1. The new directions emerged out of the research program ‘Conversion Careers
and Culture Politics in Global Pentecostalism’ that was partly sponsored by the
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

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