Knowing the cosmos, growing the person : faith in a Nigerian Pentecostal church
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation explores how Nigerian Pentecostal Christians understand and perform Christian personhood and its place in the world. Like other evangelical Christians across the globe, Pentecostals in Yoruba-speaking southwest Nigeria view conversion as a sudden shift from non-Christian to Christian status. However, many Nigerian Pentecostals do not approach Christian personhood as complete after conversion -- in fact, they say the Christian person is never whole. During more than one year of ethnographic fieldwork with the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) in the town of Ile-Ife, Nigeria, I learned that church members defined Christian personhood as the continuous formation of an intimate, sensual relationship with the Holy Spirit, God's earthly manifestation. Redeemers described the process of developing "a relationship with God" as "faith." They explained that faith combined a state of mind -- "belief" -- with the daily and even hourly repetition of practices like prayer, Bible reading, song, and dance. Through faith, Redeemers claimed to cultivate increasingly frequent encounters with God in dreams, voices, and feelings. I examine how Redeemers used faith practices to construct and embody a cosmology, which Stanley Tambiah characterizes as a set of classifications that encompass the entire universe. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and media analysis, I show how Redeemers' cosmology was comprised of a complex web of relationships between the self, God, other Christians, the body and the senses, and time. I argue that faith was for Redeemers an embodied epistemology, a way of relating to the world that was cognitive but also performative. In other words, Redeemers framed faith as inseparable from bodily practice. Redeemers used faith for a central purpose: to become holier, more like God. Day after day, Redeemers practiced faith to shape themselves into moral copies, or icons, of God. I demonstrate the processual character and iconic aim of Nigerian Pentecostal faith by drawing an extended analogy between faith and ethnography. Specifically, I show the ongoing and embodied nature of my analysis. I illustrate how my conclusions emerged over time, through interactions in the field. In this way, I create a written icon of Redeemers' faith. The analytic and representational strategy I flesh out -- a strategy of fidelity -- extends the anthropology of religion by using ethnographic form as well as content to explore religion as an embodied mediating practice.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Davie-Kessler, Jesse E |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology. |
| Primary advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Bashir, Shahzad, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
| Advisor | Bashir, Shahzad, 1968- |
| Advisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Advisor | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Advisor | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jesse E. Davie-Kessler. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Jesse Ellen Davie-Kessler
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...