Golden Moments: The Role of Jewellery in South Indian Pentecostalism

Abstract

Among a number of organisational factors promoting growth of South Indian Pentecostalism, conversion stories and discussions on ‘worldliness’ and ‘holiness’ serve to emphasise a clear commitment and a distinctive Pentecostal experience. Despite Pentecostalism's Protestant rhetoric, the experiences and discussions surrounding golden jewellery offer a critical correction to the modern iconoclastic notion of separation between spirit and matter.1

Keywords:

• Pentecostalism
• South India
• iconoclasm
• materialism
• gold

Notes

This article began as a presentation at the interdisciplinary seminar ‘Foregrounds and backgrounds: ventures in the anthropology of Christianity’, arranged by Andreas Bandak and myself, and I want to thank the participants who met in Copenhagen in April 2009. I gratefully acknowledge the generous fellowship and critique from Andreas Bandak, the careful reading by the three anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Ethnos for publishing the article.

The geographic and cultural entity ‘South India’ consists of the Indian states Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala.

According to the GFMS Gold Survey 2001, the annual Indian demand for gold was between 24% and 30% of the annual global gold market between 1997 and 2001 (see details on www.gfms.co.uk/index.htm). The Indian political restrictions on the import of gold and the high domestic prices on gold in India – often twice the price of the global market – has caused a large smuggling of gold which is thriving especially in the commercial centres of western India such as Mumbai.

The fieldwork was carried out July–October 2004 and October 2008 in the ACA Church compound in the suburb Purasawalkam, Chennai, Tamil Nadu state, India, and was partly sponsored by a grant from the Danish National Council for Research in Humanities (SHF, now FKK). A brief note on my own background might be appropriate for the reader: as a doctoral student of Christian theology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, from 2003 to 2006, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the sole focus on historical and textual dimensions and virtual neglect of the phenomenal and contemporary dimensions of Christianity. Consequently, I wanted to study contemporary and globalised Christianity from a more phenomenological point of view. Although not being a Pentecostal myself, my scholarly interest was therefore drawn towards Pentecostalism. While attending courses on qualitative methods and interpretation of qualitative data at the Department for Anthropology at University of Copenhagen during the fall term 2003, I became acquainted with the current discussions on the anthropology of Christianity which caught my attention and which I feel frame my own research in a fruitful way.

Numbers from the homepage of the ACA Church, wwww.acaprayerhouse.org (accessed 19 October 2009).

Biblical passages which encourage believers to place unconditional trust in God are the most popular, for example, Exodus 33,14; 2. Chronicles 14,11; Ps 121,3; Ps 123,2.

The names of the informants are their real names as they during interviews have insisted that their names should be recognisable and published.

The interviews took place in English and the transcripts are verbatim without corrections as the order of words and the sometimes obscure grammar indicates. The transliteration of Tamil words into English is done without diacritical marks. Square brackets are used to notes and additions in the verbatim transcript.