Contemporary Anthropology of Religion (CAR). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2024. US$170.00, cloth. ISBN 9783031596827.
This fascinating collection is not about Christian temporalities in the abstract but rather about how a variety of mostly Christian groups experience, understand, and apply versions of the past to their present situations in light of hoped-for futures. (Disclosure: I was one of the conveners of the conference session from which this volume emerged. I had no further involvement in the project.) Such exercises of “historiopraxy,” as defined by co-editor Simon Coleman, “performatively [make] the past more than memory and the future something we might proleptically declare now” (3). For the devout, temporal consciousness centres on Christian elements: biblical figures and stories, teachings about the End Times, and so forth. Yet tempered by the circumstances and pressures of the present, Christians also draw upon other histories available to them that may have little to do with Christianity per se. In exercising their faith in diverse circumstances, even Christian groups that share common theological orientations engage in distinctive historiopraxies leading to divergent outcomes.
This latter point is richly demonstrated in three case studies focused on Protestant churches that embrace radical individual change in light of a linear understanding of history punctuated by moments of decisive change culminating in the return of Christ and the final judgement. In a series of influential publications, Joel Robbins has suggested that “rupture” characterizes Christian temporality, most clearly in the case of Pentecostalism. In her study of the Harvest Ministry Church in Fiji, however, Karen Brison notes that the rhetoric of radical personal change is paradoxically bound to obedience to God, who has determined the course of history. In short, a deep continuity rooted in the past inspires the ruptures of the present. The rhetoric of rupture is further tempered by pastors’ rhetorical assertions of authority and order over their flock, drawing on exemplars of biblical figures as well as idealizations of Fijian chieftainship. William Green observes similar patterns amongst Baptists in Harare, Zimbabwe. Here, however, decades of violence and poverty intersect with a particularly robustly Calvinist assumption of predestination, as God working His will through history. Recollections of biblical figures and events provide guidance as people “read backwards” to find signs of the unfolding of God’s plan in the harsh circumstances of the present. In a third case study, Simon Coleman notes how in the Pentecostal churches he has studied in Sweden and Nigeria, memories of founders provide a type of identity historiopraxy. Mementos from the founder of the Nigerian Redeemed Church of God are retained in a gallery and library open to the public, not merely as a source of identity and inspiration for the present, but as a place where miracles occur.
In the three case studies above, acts of historiopraxy serve to both localize and vitalize core temporal assumptions of evangelical Christianity. Two further contributions to the book suggest a comparable pattern in Christian groups with non-linear understandings of spiritual temporality. Paula Pryce writes of a gathering of worshippers at a Midwestern American Benedictine monastery devoted to “Wisdom Christianity.” In celebration of Holy Week, participants reenacted events from Jesus’s life. As a historiopraxic action, the sacred drama “involved layers of historical consciousness, historical enactment, and socio-religious temporalities” (120) that served to collapse the sacred space between the past and present in a kind of “time weaving” (132), producing a sensation of commensality. Anna-Karina Hermkens suggests that pilgrimage has a similar temporal effect, sacralizing the present by enacting “God’s continual presence” (147). She writes of a visit to the province of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea of a statue of Fátima, the famed vision of Mary that inspired a major Catholic pilgrimage site in Portugal. Recovering from a terrible civil war and preparing for a referendum on independence, for the devout the presence of Fátima seemed to transcend the divisions of the recent past, allowing a moment of communitus, a shared sense of unity at a moment of historic transition.
The two remaining ethnographic studies explore situations in which historiopraxies adjacent to core Christian temporalities shape religious identities. The first concerns the flailing attempt by local Christians in the impoverished Western Province of Papua New Guinea to put on an atonement ceremony to lift the curse that they believed followed their ancestors’ killing of the famed missionary, James Chalmers, in 1901. Dario Di Rosa argues that the historic memory of this event forms a kind of “grammar” for making sense of the present of frustrated modernity and the possibility, through gaining God’s forgiveness, of material redemption. Jaap Timmer analyzes a similar set of circumstances facing the Asmat people on the remote southern coast of Indonesian Papua. For different if aligned reasons, the dominant Roman Catholic Church and Indonesian government draw a sharp division between the precolonial past marked by headhunting and the present. Frustrated by their economic and social marginalization, many Catholic Asmat seek to reconnect with the spiritual power of their ancestors while a smaller group has embraced Islam, rejecting their ancestry entirely by adopting the dominant religious identity of the Indonesian nation.
Along with the introduction, which situates the study of historiopraxy in the context of anthropological scholarship on temporality and Christianity, the book is rounded out by two general commentaries. Joyce Dalsheim draws a distinction between “Christian time,” which privileges human intervention and agency, and “Jewish time,” which emphasizes “repetition, continuity, and recurrence without regard for change as a specific virtue or goal” (164). While acknowledging that the binary is overdrawn, she suggests that these dominant temporalities lend themselves to different moral imperatives impacting the ways people interact with each other and the material world. In a lively epilogue, David Morgan extends the historiopraxy model to an analysis of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. “The crafting of time,” he notes, “is an art practiced in everything human beings do” (205).
In the recent past, anthropological approaches to Christian temporalities have tended to coalesce around questions of continuity and/or change. Christian Temporalities advocates for a more dynamic focus, centred on how Christians in different circumstances mine their perceptions of what has been “already fulfilled” to forge a present oriented towards the “not yet completed.” Where this new direction will take the sub-discipline, only time will tell.
John Barker
University of British Columbia, Vancouver