May 2024
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30 Reads
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Publications (15)
December 2022
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1 Read
January 2022
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1 Read
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1 Citation
kritisk etnografi Swedish Journal of Anthropology
February 2019
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4 Reads
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1 Citation
Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.
February 2019
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661 Reads
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18 Citations
January 2019
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20 Reads
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1 Citation
Debates do NER
Neste texto abordo a noção de “estética da persuasão” formulada por Birgit Meyer. Explorando a dimensão distributiva da estética presente na sua tese, argumento que o “lugar” da religião é um espaço de relacionalidades exteriorizações que deverá incluir tanto crentes como não crentes, os espaços de culto e as suas vizinhanças seculares, configurando um “público” que excede o religioso. Para tal, Utilizo como termo de comparação empírico o meu trabalho de campo sobre pluralismo religioso no bairro do Palanca, em Luanda (Angola).
June 2018
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2 Reads
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3 Citations
October 2017
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2,969 Reads
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16 Citations
In this introduction we give a comparative overview of the situation of Pentecostalism, witchcraft and spiritual politics in Africa and Melanesia. Our comparison between Africa and Melanesia starts off from the cultural specificity of witchcraft and sorcery, but simultaneously highlights how Christian evangelism “pentecostalizes” witchcraft and sorcery by making them universal concerns of life and death, good and evil.
October 2017
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7,941 Reads
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10 Citations
In this text I propose to discuss local conceptions of spiritual power in the city of Luanda, Angola. More specifically, I explore how the spiritual field in this city is configured through the markers of a plural ethnicity and Christian practice. In this framework, sorcery (ndoki) has become the practical element that connects Christian and traditional spirituality politics within the same discursive regime, addressing problems of urban life and social change. I suggest that both Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity and traditionalists engage in competing, correlated and mutually defined ideas of invisible agency, associated with the image of financial market activity—the prediction, explanation, and fabrication of causality in social life. From this perspective, ndoki appears as an index of religious activity in urban Angola, much in the same style as the Dow Jones does for global financial markets.
February 2017
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53 Reads
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7 Citations
What has become of secularism following the so-called postsecular turn? As a consequence of the demise of modern twentieth-century secularization theory (as per Peter Berger’s ‘sacred canopy’), we live in an interesting intellectual moment in which the so-called postsecular (understood descriptively rather than theoretically, see, e.g., Habermas 2008; Mavelli and Petito 2012; Wilson 2012; Rosati 2015) coexists with the secular, which in turn has become pluralized and historicized (see, e.g., Taylor 2007; Agrama 2012; Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013). On the other hand, if, as Habermas argues, the secularist paradigm has learned to cohabitate with the religious, we also witness the conflictual anti-religious stance of ‘new atheist’ movements, which claim a ‘scientific’ argument for the removal of the religious from the public sphere (see Oustinova-Stjepanovic and Blanes 2015). This cohabitation of the secular and the postsecular is revealed, as the new atheism example above shows, mainly through political dialectical processes (see also Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Sullivan et al. 2015). This in turn makes us, editors of this volume, feel that (1) those political statements overshadow the subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of secularity, making it difficult to pinpoint concrete sites, agents, and objects of expression; and (2) for that same reason, they tend to obscure rather than illuminate the pragmatics and empirical dimensions of secularism. We argue that one such move toward the concrete and the subjective will allow us to know more about the plural, heterogeneous, and processual character of the secular/religious conundrum, and thus move beyond the monolithic, immobilized configurations that often flourish in the public sphere.
Citations (9)
... Also in 2019, several national and international organisations denounced a social and environmental disaster taking place across southwestern Angola: a long-term drought cycle provoking a large-scale humanitarian disaster across the provinces of Namibe, Huíla and Cunene. As described elsewhere (Blanes et al. 2022a(Blanes et al. , 2022b, alongside other areas of Africa, this region has experienced a pattern of irregular rainfall since 2010, which has been recurrently 'explained' in the Angolan media in reference to El Niño. The drought resulted in millions affected by food insecurity, loss of livestock and crops, rural exodus and migration, and increasing conflicts over land and water resources. ...
- Citing Article
January 2022
kritisk etnografi Swedish Journal of Anthropology
... The strengthening of border policing, the increase in tension in social relations mediated by borders, the change in the paradigm of the concept of "work" and the competition for jobs and the contemporary global panorama, tends to conceive of immigrants as naturally illegal, thus incorporating them into societies, as a metaphor for non-citizenship. 26 In this framework of approaches to the daily life of exclusion by the inclusion of the illegal, we realize that the cohabitation between all these individuals, more than just a reference of nationality, essentially obeys religious indicators. We have seen Pakistanis living with Bengali Muslims because they share the same religion, just as we have seen Bengali Hindus living with Indians. ...
- Citing Chapter
January 2013
... Pentecostalism as a participant in spiritual warfare, imagined as competing with other forms of spirituality, has been explored in much detail in Africanist scholarship (Marshall 2009;Newell 2007;Obadare 2018;van de Kamp 2011) and in anthropology more generally (Rio et al. 2017). In football, as becomes clear in Njoh's narrative above, the Holy Spirit can provide a tangible competitive edge in matches. ...
- Citing Book
- Full-text available
January 2017
... Portugal joined the European Union (EU) in 1986 after a turbulent decade following the fall of a 50-year fascist dictatorship in 1974. The newly allocated EU funds facilitated an extensive modernisation project, fuelling nation-wide aspirations of transforming from a semi-peripheral country into a fully 'European', 'modern', and 'developed' country (Mapril and Blanes 2018). ...
- Citing Chapter
June 2018
... Th e Pentecostals, however, have chosen a diff erent path altogether. In many ways functioning as an internal critique (see Gershon 2006;Handman 2015) of other forms of Christian practice, Pentecostals in the Faroe Islands have elected to preach a 'Gospel of Life' rather than focusing on death (see Eriksen et al 2019) and what happens at that point. 2 During one of my conversations with the previous pastor of the church, he relayed a good example of these two forms of Evangelical understanding in the Faroe Islands: ...
- Citing Book
- Full-text available
February 2019
... A associação entre feitiçaria e política, assim como a cosmologia do invisível, não é exclusividade de Moçambique, sendo um tema que permeia a vida social africana, conforme vários estudos apresentam (Ashforth 2005, Blanes 2017, Comaroff e Comaroff 1999, Englund 1996, Geschiere 1995, 2013, Marshall 2009, Moore e Sanders 2001, West 2009). Esta distinção entre o reino visível e o reino invisível, produz uma política que é interpretada e traduzida por meio da mobilização de dois discursos: o discurso da visibilidade e o discurso do oculto. ...
- Citing Chapter
- Full-text available
October 2017
... They recommended repentance and prayer as the only means to obtain forgiveness and healing from God. Other studies have also reported that many pastors believe HIV is caused by witchcraft and that the demons responsible can only be cast out through faith-based rituals and not the use of ART (Roura et al., 2010;Rio et al., 2017;Baloyi, 2019). ...
- Citing Chapter
- Full-text available
October 2017
... Th is led Craig Calhoun (2010: 35) to observe that secular orientations may shape the sacred or transcendent. Th e subsequent debate around secularism has examined the diff erent ways in which secularism shapes religion and religion shapes secularism (Mapril et al. 2017). Hence, in the immanent frame of secularity, "the question becomes whether or not belief-in transcendence in particular-is any longer what it once was" (Rectenwald and Almeida 2017: 5). ...
- Citing Book
January 2017
... They relate to the virtual trajectories of the deceased and to the mourning of the survivors in speci c time-spaces (De Maaker 2016). In contemporary Western Europe, afterlife beliefs take shape against the background of declining institutional religion and religious observance (Davie 2000), increasingly secular norms (Mahmood 2015;Mapril et al. 2017), and a greater presence of varied minority religions. They are shaped by migration and globalization, and by religious, spiritual, and secular plurality. ...
- Citing Chapter
February 2017