Spirits and Letters

by Kirsch, Thomas G.

• ISBN13: 9781845454838
• ISBN10: 1845454839
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-05-25
• Publisher: Berghahn Books

Summary

This book challenges prevailing scholarly notions of the relationship between 'charisma' and 'institution' by analysing reading and writing practices in contemporary Christianity. Taking up the continuing anthropological interest in Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, and representing the first book-length treatment of literacy practices among African Christians, this volume explores how church leaders in Zambia refer to the Bible and other religious literature, and how they organise a church bureaucracy in the Pentecostal-charismatic mode. Thus, by examining social processes and conflicts that revolve around the conjunction of Pentecostal-charismatic and literacy practices in Africa, Spirits and Letters reconsiders influential conceptual dichotomies in the social sciences and the humanitites and is therefore of interest not only to anthropologists but also to scholars working in the fields of African studies, religious studies, and the sociology of religion.

Author Biography

Thomas G. Kirsch is Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Between 1993 and 2001, he conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia. He has published a book on African Christianity in Zambia and articles in some of the major refereed journals for anthropology and sociology in Germany. Other articles were published in the journals American Anthropologist (2004), Visual Anthropology (2006) and American Ethnologist (2007).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Notes on Language
Histories and Ethnographies
Colonial Literacies	p. 33
Passages, Configurations, Traces	p. 53
Schooled Literacy, Schooled Religion	p. 71
Literate Religion
Literate Cultures in a Material World	p. 85
Indices to the Scriptural	p. 95
The Fringes of Christianity	p. 105
Thoughts about 'Religions of the Book'	p. 117
Ways of Reading
Texts, Readers, Spirit	p. 125
Evanescence and the Necessity of Intermediation	p. 137
Setting Texts in Motion	p. 145
Missions in Writing	p. 155
Enablements to Literacy	p. 169
Bureaucracy in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Mode
Offices and the Dispersion of Charisma	p. 183
Positions of Writers, Positions in Writings	p. 201
Outlines for the Future, Documents of the Immediate	p. 213
Bureaucracy In-between	p. 227
Epilogue	p. 247
Bibliography
Index
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