Ontological (in)Security and African Pentecostalism in Ireland

ABSTRACT

The last number of years has seen the mushrooming of African Pentecostal churches, especially Prosperity Gospel churches, in the post-recession industrial landscapes of Ireland. This article aims to explore the growth of African Pentecostalism in Ireland from both the perspective of embodied and affective religious experience and the conditions for the possibility of those religious experiences. This article is based on several years of ethnographic research among African Pentecostals in Ireland. It attends especially to the sensorious forms of worship and the Jesus walks that Pentecostals organise to transform the Irish symbolic landscape. Drawing on recent anthropological theory, the article draws out the contradictions, doubts, boundaries and limitations perceived and lived in totalising Pentecostal discourses and practices. Here, we develop the concept of ontological (in)security in order to theorise these doubts and limitations as well as the power of contemporary Pentecostalism in late modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• African Pentecostalism
• ontological (in)security
• Ireland

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Irish Research Council for its support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Estimates suggest that a half billion persons globally can be categorised as Pentecostal worshipers – over 40% of whom reside in sub-Saharan Africa (see Pew Report 2011).

2. Several commentators (e.g. Coleman 2013; c.f. Marshall 2009) argue that Pentecostalism must not be treated as superficial mystifications of contemporary life. But it remains important to attend to the growth of ‘new’ religious practices coeval with structural transformations, and there is a long-standing body of scholarship on this topic (see Worsley 1968).

3. Although connections exist between Pentecostal churches across the island of Ireland, the history of Pentecostalism in the Republic and Northern Ireland is significantly different, and we cannot attest to spatial patterns in Northern Ireland (see Murphy 2002; Ugba 2009). Our focus is on the dominant pattern of locating churches in industrial warehouses. Recently, one Dublin local authority ‘discovered’ over 20 churches in a routine survey of industrial estates and courted controversy by threatening worshipers with eviction on the grounds of breaches of planning and health and safety regulations (see Colfer 2013).

4. We discuss the ‘late modern’ herein in ways that track the work of Comaroff and Comaroff (2012). They do not take the late modern to denote a Euro-American telos; rather, they aim to explore the Hydra-headed process of contemporary capitalism and the multi-focal points at which it may be perceived, conceived and lived and from which it may be written about. Their approach has its critics. Marshall (2009: 27–28), for example, questions the notion that Pentecostal practices respond to contemporary neoliberal confusions, or ‘a growing sense of radical insecurity’. Comaroff (2012b), of course, rebuts the accusation of a-historicism. However, Marshall's critique may also be read as a call for scholars to go beyond broad theories of the contemporary and instead show how particular Pentecostal practices emerge and are made meaningful.

5. The contemporary ‘affective turn’ is the subject of a great many disciplinary literatures. For many, affect denotes the embodied physiological and cognitive responses to the significance found in the world and the learning and recall potential of humans (see Neuman et al. 2007: 9; Brown & Seligman 2009). In the hands of philosopher Massumi (2002), it is open and pre-mediated, a way of exploring human physicality while remaining a metaphysical concept attuned to that which exceeds the human. However, anthropologists remain suspicious of pre-subjective or unmediated notions of culture and affect's resemblance to older concepts such as ‘passion’ (see Mazzarella 2009; Comaroff 2012).

6. This chimes with Michel Foucault's well-known observation that the processes that subsist behind neo-liberalism include the apotheosis of a concept of a competitive market capable of socialising individuals and enabling their continuous self-styling. The market, thus configured, becomes a ‘permanent economic tribunal confronting government’ (Foucault 2008: 247; see also Maguire & Murphy 2014).

7. There is a substantial body of scholarship on global Pentecostalism that attends to its flourishing in contexts of socio-economic and political precariousness (see Robbins 2004; 2009). However, it is not sufficient to propose that religious forms simply reply to ‘the precariousness of life’ (see Butler 2004: 25, 49, 134–135) as a general condition of the world. African refugees and asylum seekers certainly paint pictures of precariousness pre-migration, often speaking of structural violence tearing the fabric of everyday life or violence claiming loved ones or whole communities (see Maguire & Murphy 2012). But the flourishing of African Pentecostalism in Ireland is intimately tied to the asylum system and thus to specific, qualitative conditions. Ireland warehouses asylum seekers in direct provision often for up to seven or more years; it has one of the highest rejection rates for asylum claims in Europe and has been censured by the UN Committee against Torture. During 2014, residents in several direct provision centres went on hunger strike demanding decisions on their claims and an end to the system. The responsible agency, the Reception and Integration Agency (RIA), remains defiant and acknowledges the deterrent function of the system. Speaking at a recent conference in Dublin, a high-level RIA representative told the audience that the ‘I’ in RIA was in fact ‘silent’. Thus, pastors and worshipers described the importance of churches in and nearby direct provision centres in spiritual and qualitative sociological terms – the specific temporal, spatial and emotionally impactful dimensions of the system required churches precisely because of hopeful, involved and expansive world-making practices that addressed Being-in-the-world.

8. As Knott (2005) has observed, scholars draw from Lefebvre when addressing the social constitution of relational space as that which holds together and enfolds different dimensions of life (see Lefebvre 1991: 404). But one may also note the intriguing ontological questions he raises. In his celebrated discussion of monuments that enclose social relations in ‘texture’, he notes that they fail to ‘achieve a complete illusion’, because their ‘credibility is never total’ (1991: 221–223 passim). He notes that spatial (monumental) work offers a ‘horizon of meaning’ but proposes that the very openness of those horizons, the potentially indefinite meanings and shifting hierarchies are all suggestive of a ‘totality’ that exceeds the everyday – in Jamesian terms, a more that rings the limits of life (1991: 222).

9. Cao Đài ‘officially’ revealed Himself as Ngoc-Hoàng Thuong-De viet Cao-Dai giao-dao Nam-Phuong to séance-going Vietnamese bureaucrats who were inspired by the international wave of ‘table-turning’ efforts to commune with spirits during the 1920s. The groups séances were spiritually crowded affairs marked by the presences of such luminaries as Joan of Arc, Sun Yat-sen, Rene Descartes and Victor Hugo, the latter going on to become a saint in the Cao Đài Spiritual Pope's department of overseas affairs.

10. This pluralist coming together of Pentecostal churches for Jesus walks seemed at first glance to temporarily suspend tensions between different versions of faith and society. More properly, we later understood, the particular nature of the walks brought those very tensions into play, elevating these practices beyond any mundane, spatial and political enactments of belonging. Earlier in our work (Maguire & Murphy 2012) we recorded moments in which some African migrants called for symbolic walks to protest issues of race in Irish towns, but others demurred. Jesus walks were distinct cultural forms: they were open and pluralist, yet evangelising and claiming to directly speak to ‘the spirit’ of societal concerns, and all while avoiding the gaze of and confrontation with mainstream society. These tensions can be explored in terms of ontological (in)security.

11. Giddens displays a strikingly parochial sense of ontological security when he pushes towards issues such as performativity. ‘All human beings', he tells readers, ‘in all cultures, preserve a division between their self-identities and the “performances” they put on in specific social contexts’ (1991: 58). The list of anthropologists who would disagree is long indeed, and Clifford Geertz provides an eloquent summation of such theories of ‘Mr Natural’:

Whatever else modern anthropology asserts – and it seems to have asserted almost everything at one time or another – it is firm in the conviction that men modified by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist, have never existed, and most important, could not in the very nature of the case exist. There is, there can be, no backstage where we can go to catch a glimpse of Mascou's actors as ‘real persons’ lounging about in street clothes, disengaged from their profession, displaying with artless candour their spontaneous desires and unprompted passions. They may change their roles, their styles of acting, even the dramas in which they play; but – as Shakespeare himself of course remarked – they are always performing. (Geertz 1973: 35)

Additional information

Funding

This research was initially funded by a grant from the Irish Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) Research Development Initiative Strand, 2008–2010.