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Continuities of Change: Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique Continuities of Change: Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Premawardhana, Devaka. 2014. Continuities of Change: Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064926 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Continuities of Change: Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique A dissertation presented by Devaka Premawardhana to The Ad Hoc Committee in Religion and Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Religion and Anthropology Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts September 2014 © 2014 Devaka Premawardhana All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Jacob Olupona Devaka Premawardhana Continuities of Change: Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique Abstract Recent scholarship on Africa gives the impression of a singular narrative regarding Pentecostalism, that of inexorable rise. Indisputably, Pentecostalism’s “explosion” throughout the global South is one of today’s more remarkable religious phenomena. Yet what can we learn by shifting attention from the places where Pentecostal churches succeed to where they fail? Attending to this question offers an opportunity to reassess a regnant theoretical paradigm within recent studies of Pentecostalism: that of discontinuity. This paradigm holds that Pentecostalism, by insisting that worshippers break with traditional practices and ancestral spirits, introduces a temporal rupture with the past. This is a salutary theoretical move, insofar as it challenges the social scientific tendency to see people as largely reproductive of the past, incapable of discontinuous change. The problem, however, is the implicit assumption that “traditional” cultures—Pentecostalism’s contrast class—are static by comparison. My research reveals that the Makhuwa-speaking people of northern Mozambique prove themselves extraordinarily capable of change, and not solely as the result of conversion to Pentecostalism, migration to cities, or other features of African “modernization.” This dissertation describes Makhuwa rituals, metaphors, and histories that inculcate dispositions toward mobility and experimentalism. What is significant about these types of change is their banality in everyday affairs. As such, they help mark the Makhuwa “traditional” framework as constitutionally pliable and malleable. Change, even radical change, is iii endogenous. The new churches’ ecstatic dances and spirit baptisms, their theologies of rebirth and renewal, are some of the features that most appeal to those who participate in them. Their appeal, however, is as extensions of, not alternatives to, indigenous ways of being. Yet if the convertibility of the Makhuwa self precedes entry into the churches, brings people into the churches, and finds reinforcement in the churches, it also facilitates exit from the churches. Change is not only incremental and regular, it is also reversible. The reason the churches fail to retain members is not, as their leaders often complain, that people are too rooted in their ancestral ways, but precisely the opposite: they are un-rooted, mobile by tradition. iv CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi Preface 1 Introduction 7 Part I OTHAMA—TO MOVE Chapter 1 A Fugitive People 42 Chapter 2 Between the River and the Road 66 Part II OHIYA NI OVOLOWA—TO LEAVE AND TO ENTER Chapter 3 Border Passages 88 Chapter 4 Engaged Pragmatism 115 Part III OKHALA-NO—TO BE WITH Chapter 5 ‘Makhuwa Women Have no Religion’ 139 Chapter 6 Being with the Holy Spirit 163 Conclusion 188 Bibliography 204 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Heartfelt thanks go first and foremost to the inhabitants of Maúa, Mozambique, who allowed my wife and me to share in their lives for over one year and who touched us at depths no scholarly treatise can reach. I am honored to count many of them not as informants but as friends. To preserve their anonymity I have changed most of their names. I do, however, wish to recognize and specially thank those who served as my primary collaborators: Fausto Mwiraseke, Paulino Amala, and Leonardo Quido Uisque. I also thank Father Giuseppe Frizzi for offering, beyond his hospitality, his expertise and endless resources at the Centro de Estudos Xirima (Xirima Study Center) in Maúa. Researchers at the center especially helpful in my fieldwork include Nicodemus Agostinho Amido and Adriano Saide. Outside of my field site but also in Mozambique, Father Elia Ciscato and Bishop Francisco Lerma Martinez shared valuable insights into Makhuwa lifeworlds and faculty members affiliated with the Centro de Estudos Africanos (African Studies Center) of the Eduardo Mondlane University offered crucial logistical support as well as scholarly feedback. Particularly important interlocutors there include Teresa Cruz e Silva, Miguel Moto, and Armindo Ngunga. Funding that made research in Mozambique possible came from numerous sources, namely: the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; Harvard University’s John L. Loeb Fellowship program, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Committee on African Studies; and Colorado College’s Humanities Executive Division. Many thanks for the financial backing. Most of this dissertation was written in the congenial environs of Colorado College. I am extraordinarily grateful to the college for inviting me to join its community and to do so in a way that enabled the timely completion of this project. vi Whatever the merits of this work, they owe largely to the critical interventions of numerous scholars. The members of my dissertation committee—Davíd Carrasco, Harvey Cox, Michael Jackson, and Jacob Olupona—deserve endless thanks for their years of guidance, direction, and inspiration. It is hard to imagine myself on a more satisfying intellectual path than the one on which these mentors individually and collectively set me. Significant scholarly support also came from Asad Ahmed, Ronaldo Almeida, David Amponsah, Raimundo Barreto, James Bielo, Annalisa Butticci, Francis X. Clooney, Simon Coleman, Tracy Coleman, Vagner Gonçalves da Silva, Bethlehem Hailu Dejene, Peter Fry, Sayaka Funada-Classen, George Gonzalez, Katherine Giuffre, Zack Kagan Guthrie, William Harcombe, Naomi Haynes, Sarah Hautzinger, Michael Herzfeld, Maria Cecilia Aguilar Holt, Ben Jones, Tamsin Jones, Anusha Kedhar, Smita Lahiri, Christina Leza, Marc Loustau, Ruth Marshall, Michael McClymond, Purvi Mehta, Birgit Meyer, Anne Monius, Eric Morier-Genoud, Adedamola Osinulu, Kimberley Patton, Lars Pharo, Michael Puett, Katrien Pype, Omar Ribeiro, Joel Robbins, Jonathan Schofer, Don Seeman, Jonathan Seitz, Sonia Silva, Linda van de Kamp, David Weddle, Harry West, Peter Wright, Richard Fox Young, and Tyler Zoanni. Each of these individuals I thank, and I look forward to continuing to learn from them all. Finally, and wholeheartedly, I thank the members of my immediate family for their unfailing support. My parents Shanta and Dhilanthi blessed me with boundless opportunities and taught me never to sever professional and intellectual pursuits from compassion for those less fortunate. I would not be who I am today had I not grown up witness to the artistry and humanity of my siblings Charith and Amali. And, of course, without Kalinka’s constant companionship, enthusiasm, and insight no phase of this project would have been possible; and not much in this life would be worthwhile. Te amo. vii PREFACE An Inauguration I arrived at Mutúali’s compound and ducked into the mud-plaster longhouse he had built soon after the rains ceased. It was dark except for light from the setting sun passing through the rear and side passageways; it was empty except for Mutúali and his friend Leonardo standing towards the front. Before them, on a specially constructed bamboo rack, sat the third television set to appear in Kaveya village. It was a 14-inch Sharp Multisystem TV, purchased 200 miles away in the capital of this northern Mozambican province. To help repay the loan that made the purchase possible, Mutúali told me he would charge an entrance fee of three meticais (around 10 US cents) per night. Of course, not every night would he be able to show a video and take in that revenue. “Depends on the gasoline,” he said. The fee would also serve to cover this: the cost of diesel to power his electric generator and the labor of biking, jerrycans affixed to the frame, to and from the fueling station 25 miles away. For this inaugural night Mutúali wanted me and the dozen or so others who worshipped at Kaveya village’s Pentecostal church to come early. I arrived with Jemusse, who held a low- level leadership position in the church and on whose compound my wife and I were living that year. We greeted Mutúali and Leonardo, then sat down in the first of 15 rows: wooden logs upheld by short pegs. Our legs fully extended before us, nearly parallel with the dirt floor, we silently and admiringly watched Mutúali and Leonardo continue working their way through a bevy of wires and devices. Other church members trickled in. When the deacon did too technical preparations ceased. Or, rather, they took a different
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