Butinage: the Art of Religious Mobility

BUTINAGE This page intentionally left blank Butinage The Art of Religious Mobility YONATAN N. GEZ, YVAN DROZ, JEANNE REY, and EDIO SOARES UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2021 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0880-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3899-6 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3898-9 (PDF) DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487538989 _______________________________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Butinage : the art of religious mobility / Yonatan N. Gez, Yvan Droz, Jeanne Rey, and Edio Soares. Names: Gez, Yonatan N., author. | Droz, Yvan, author. | Rey, Jeanne, 1980– author. | Soares, Edio, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200402803 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200402862 | ISBN 9781487508807 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487538996 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487538989 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Christian life – Brazil – Case studies. | LCSH: Christian life – Kenya – Case studies. | LCSH: Christian life – Ghana – Case studies. | LCSH: Christian life – Switzerland – Case studies. | LCSH: Brazil – Religious life and customs – Case studies. | LCSH: Kenya – Religious life and customs – Case studies. | LCSH: Ghana – Religious life and customs – Case studies. | LCSH: Switzerland – Religious life and customs – Case studies. Classification: LCC BV4501.3 .G49 2021 | DDC 248.4 – dc23 _______________________________________________________________________________________ CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Toronto Press. Published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Acknowledgments vii Part I. Rethinking Religious Normativity 1 Introduction: The Mobile Religious Practitioner 3 2 Religious Mobility: Current Debates 21 Part II. Case Studies Introduction to Part II: Methodology 39 3 Neighborliness as a Driver for Mobility in Brazil 44 4 The Kenyan Case: Dynamism and Precariousness 57 5 Mobility Intertwined: Migration, Kinship, and Education in Ghana 85 6 Religion and Mobility in Switzerland: A Most Private Affair 104 Part III. Beyond the Metaphor 7 Between Bees and Flowers 141 8 From Religious Mobility to Dynamic Religious Identities 165 9 Conclusion: The Peripatetic Practitioner 179 Appendix: Interview Guide 187 Notes 191 Bibliography 205 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments The seed for this research was sown back in the early 1990s, when Yvan Droz began studying the Kikuyu people of central Kenya. In his work, Droz observed links between urban migration and religious mobility (Droz 1999), leading him to propose the concept of religious butinage within the context of a discussion of the social practices of Kenyan Pentecostals (Droz 2000a, 2004). The concept was later developed by Edio Soares in his doctoral thesis (Soares 2007, 2009). In his own work, Soares systematized the concept and tested its coherence. Based on his ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, Soares evoked the notion ofvoisinage (“neighborliness”) as the fundamental logic governing butinage. Derived from the French verb butiner, which refers to the foraging behavior of bees and other pollinizing insects, the term was employed by Droz and Soares metaphorically to refer to the “to-ing and fro-ing” of believers between religious institutions. Both found that the employment of this biological metaphor corresponded, more than any formal terminology associated with “conversion,” to the actual religious mobility of their Kenyan and Brazilian interviewees as manifest in their everyday practice. It is through these two case studies that a small research team began to form. In mid-2010, we launched a research project called “Structures anthropologiques du religieux: Butinage et voisinage,” or Project StAR for short, under the direction of Droz as the project’s principal investiga- tor.* The project, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation * The project, which was centered around three countries (Kenya, Brazil, and Switzerland), was financed from 2010 to 2013 (project no. 100013–130340) and was then prolonged until early 2015 (project no. 100013–146301). The integration of additional fieldwork in Ghana, conducted in 2014 in the context of Jeanne Rey’s postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, was made possible thanks to the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (project no. 2GEP1_148656). viii Acknowledgments (SNSF) and run from the Graduate Institute of International and Devel- opment Studies in Geneva (IHEID), first focused on Kenya and Brazil and, upon its prolongation, incorporated two additional case studies: Switzerland and Ghana. Throughout the grant, the research team expanded to include Yonatan N. Gez (who joined in 2010) and Jeanne Rey (who joined in 2012).* In executing the project, we remain indebted to a large number of people. First and foremost, we thank our many interlocutors in Brazil, Kenya, Ghana, and Switzerland, who have shared their stories with us. We also wish to thank the many colleagues and researchers who have followed this project and offered their advice. In particular, we wish to recognize Ari Pedro Oro of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre and Hervé Maupeu of the research center Les Afriques dans le Monde at the Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour. Additional thanks go to Samuel Owiwa and to Amir Atsmon. In terms of institutional support, we thank the SNSF and the IHIED for their endorsement of the project. In Kenya, we thank the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) and all its staff. Further thanks go to the Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace – both of them at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We also thank Michael Lambek and the Centre for Ethnography at the Univer- sity of Toronto. Lastly, we wish to thank Jodi Lewchuk, Robin Studniberg, and the edi- torial team at the University of Toronto Press for their support throughout the book’s production. We thank Carolyn Zapf for her thorough copy editing. Finally, we take the opportunity to appreciate the anony- mous reviewers for their excellent comments on our draft manuscript. * Due in part to this long timeframe, a portion of the material presented in this book is based on work already published elsewhere, albeit in earlier stages of analysis and less comprehensive than in the present volume. PART I • Rethinking Religious Normativity This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction: The Mobile Religious Practitioner James is an artist in his early forties. Originally from Kenya but well- traveled, he spends part of his time in East Africa and part of his time in Western Europe, where his wife is originally from. A Catholic by birth, James’s religiosity has been characterized by inquisitiveness and explora- tion. When we asked him, sitting in a café in downtown Nairobi in 2013, about his religious identification, he paused and then said: “I don’t know how you can tag me.” James’s religious journey started in the countryside in western Kenya, where he was born into a large polygamous family. His village, he says, was dominated by the Catholic Church, to which his family belonged. During his childhood, the only alternative was a small Anglican community, “but it was not very vibrant.” While his impressions of the Catholic Church were largely positive, James nonetheless had difficulties with what he perceived as the church’s preoccupation with financial contributions. Dissatisfied with the church, James “lost interest in going to churches, slowly by slowly.” He explained: “I went out … For quite a while I didn’t move to another church, I just didn’t go to church.” Around that time, in the late 1980s, the neo-Pentecostal wave began sweeping across East Africa, and many of James’s family members were converting. When he himself moved to Nairobi to pursue his artistic dreams, he too was drawn to the Pentecostal movement. Following a chance encounter at a bus stop with a group of youths from a growing Pentecostal denomination, James went to visit their Sunday service, which was held at a rented pub- lic hall. “When I visited the Pentecostal church, I found there is vibrant, young people your age, people are happy, there is dance, there is music, it is totally a different social setting, social religious setting, totally different, very very interesting. So without looking for the church I just found a church.” 4 Rethinking Religious Normativity James stayed in his adoptive Pentecostal church for five years, and even though the church changed venue several times, he remained a commit- ted worshiper and an active member of the youth ministry. Despite his individualistic tendencies, James enjoyed the sense of community and the youthful atmosphere, and for some time he felt that he fit right in. Gradually, however, he grew disillusioned and critical of the church. Of particular concern for him was the control that he felt the church had been exerting on its members in delimiting

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