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Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on religion in Zambia, this article engages critically with approaches that suggest that ecumenism necessarily occurs across socio-religious boundaries. I argue that the objective of ecumenism – namely, good-willed co-operation between religious practitioners who are otherwise separated from each other in terms of their institutional affiliations – can also be attained through boundary work and use of the meta-codes ‘non-Christian – Christian’ and ‘Christian –“real” Christian’. I contend that using these meta-codes in the logic of what has been called ‘fractal recursion’ allows people to stress situationally the existence of commonalities between religious practitioners and/or religious groupings that, at other points in time, are perceived to be different from each other. In this way, the shifting of categorical boundaries produces ecumenical reality effects.
Notes
1 Fieldwork in Zambia was conducted intermittently from 1993 to 2015. For detailed ethnographic descriptions of this religious field, see, for example, T.G. Kirsch, ‘Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief’, American Anthropologist, 106, 4 (2004), pp. 699–709; T.G. Kirsch, Spirits and Letters: Reading, Writing and Charisma in African Christianity (Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2008); T.G. Kirsch, ‘Spirit Idioms and the Politics of Context’, in B. Meier and A. Steinforth (eds), Spirits in Politics: Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies (Frankfurt am Main, Campus, 2013), pp. 91–113; T.G. Kirsch, ‘The Precarious Center: Religious Leadership among African Christians’, Religion and Society: Advances in Research, 5 (2014), pp. 47–64.
2 In the early 2000s, the following African-initiated churches were active in the area of my research: African Apostolic Faith Mission, African Apostles of John Maranke, Apostles of Jesus, African Church, Church Service of Christ, Full Gospel Church of Central Africa, Foundation Church of Jerusalem in Zambia, Zion Church, Spirit Apostolic Church, St Moses God’s Holy Spirit Church of Zambia, Spiritual Church of Kabwe and Pentecostal Word of God Ministry. The denominations that had organisational connections with headquarters in Europe or the United States were: Apostolic Faith Church, Baha’i Faith, Jehovah’s Witnesses, New Apostolic Church, Pilgrim Wesleyan Church, Roman Catholic Church, Seventh-Day Adventist Church and United Church of Zambia.
3 E. Colson, Tonga Religious Life in the Twentieth Century (Lusaka, Bookworld Publishers, 2006), p. 8.
4 Ibid., p. 235.
5 In using the phrase ‘ecumenical reality effects’, I am loosely adopting an idea by French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes who, writing about narratives, describes how certain elements of a text can make it feel real for the reader. Similarly, my analysis of ecumenism in this article is less concerned with the nuts and bolts of official and doctrinal ecumenism than with interactions between religious practitioners that make ecumenism an experienced reality for them. See R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989).
6 R. Rouse and S. Neil (eds), A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517–1948 (Geneva, World Council of Churches, 3rd edition, 1986).
7 For another use of this term in Africanist anthropology, see R. Rottenburg, Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2009).
8 S. Gal, ‘A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,13, 1 (2002), pp. 77–95; S. Gal, ‘Language Ideologies Compared: Metaphors of Public/Private’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15, 1 (2005), pp. 23–37.
9 F. Barth, ‘Introduction’, in F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Oslo, Universitetsforlaget, 1969), pp. 9–37; see also A. Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013).
10 See, for example, T.F. Gieryn, ‘Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists’, American Sociological Review, 48, 6 (1983), pp. 781–95; T.F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999).
11 Concerning the concept of ‘socio-spiritual communities’, see T.G. Kirsch, ‘Intangible Motion: Notes on the Morphology and Mobility of the Holy Spirit’, in R.L. Blanes and D.E. Santo (eds), The Social Life of Spirits (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 33–51.
12 J. Fabian, ‘Six Theses Regarding the Anthropology of African Religious Movements’, in J. Fabian, Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays, 1971–1991 (Chur, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 116.
13 Ibid., p. 117.
14 T. Ranger, ‘The Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History’, in R.W. Hefner (ed.), Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993), p. 74.
15 Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, pp. 9–37. For a post-Barthian position, see O. Zenker, Irish/ness Is All Around Us: Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in Northern Ireland (Oxford, Berghahn, 2013).
16 M. Strathern, Partial Connections (Oxford, AltaMira Press, 2004), p. xxi.
17 R. Wagner, ‘The Fractal Person’, in M. Godelier and M. Strathern (eds), Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 163, emphasis added.
18 Gal, ‘A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction’, pp. 80–81.
19 Gal, ‘Language Ideologies Compared’, p. 27.
20 Gal, ‘A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction’, p. 82.
21 It should be noted, however, that literally none of the criteria used to draw classificatory boundaries was applied universally or agreed upon by all religious practitioners. Instead, they were the object of situated and often conflictual social negotiations (see, for example, Kirsch, ‘Spirits and Letters’, pp. 130–31).
22 J. Fernandez, ‘Symbolic Consensus in a Fang Reformative Cult’, American Anthropologist, 67, 4 (1965), pp. 902–29; see also Kirsch, ‘Restaging the Will to Believe’.
23 E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 18.
24 E. Turner, ‘The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study’, Anthropology of Consciousness, 4, 1 (1993), p. 9; see also E. Turner, Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
25 Kirsch, ‘Intangible Motion’.
26 W. Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007), p. 196; see also T.G. Kirsch, ‘From the Spirit’s Point of View: Ethnography, Total Truth and Speakership’, in K. Kumoll and O. Zenker (eds), Beyond Writing Culture: Current Intersections of Epistemologies and Representational Practices (Oxford, Berghahn, 2010), pp. 89–112.
27 My use of the word ‘actant’ follows Bruno Latour’s definition of this term. For Latour, actants are anything that ‘modif[ies] other actors through a series of’ actions (italics in original). See B. Latour, Politics of Nature (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 75.
28 See also E. Colson, Tonga Religious Life.
29 A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1984), p. 377.
30 A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979), p. 69.
31 Ibid., p. 5.
32 A. Ashforth, ‘AIDS, Religious Enthusiasm and Spiritual Insecurity in Africa’, Global Public Health, 6, 2 (2011), pp. 132–47.
33 L. Nader, Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990); see also T.G. Kirsch, ‘Discordance through Consensus: Unintended Consequences of the Quest for Consensuality in Zambian Religious Life’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 5 (2014), pp. 1015–30.
34 E. Colson, Tradition and Contract: The Problem of Order (London, Aldine, 1974), p. 44.
35 Kirsch, ‘Discordance through Consensus’.
36 Writing about Òrìṣà spirits in West Africa, Karin Barber, in 1990, made a similar point concerning the classificatory ambiguity of spiritual entities: ‘[e]ach one is assigned a definite personality. They are differentiated in exuberant and lavish detail … But the other side of the coin is a pervasive indeterminacy about their identity. They appear to exist in multiple and reduplicated forms; to have numerous manifestations …’; K. Barber, ‘“Oríkì”, Women and the Proliferation and Merging of “òrìṣà”’, Africa, 60, 3 (1990), p. 313. For a more recent study of religious pluralism in this region, see J.D.Y. Peel, Christianity, Islam, and Oriṣa Religion: Three Traditions in Comparison and Interaction (Oakland, University of California Press, 2015).
37 See E. Colson, ‘Ancestral Spirits and Social Structure among the Plateau Tonga’, International Archives of Ethnography, 47, 1 (1954), pp. 21–68; E. Colson, The Social Organisation of the Gwembe Tonga (Manchester, Manchester University Press,1960), pp. 122–61.
38 See E. Colson, ‘Spirit Possession among the Tonga of Zambia’, in J. Beattie and J. Middleton (eds), Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 69–103; E. Colson, ‘A Continuing Dialogue: Prophets and Local Shrines among the Tonga of Zambia’, in R. Werbner (ed.), Regional Cults (London, Academic Press, 1977), pp. 119–39; Ute Luig, ‘Gender Relations and Commercialization in Tonga Possession Cults’, in M. Reh and G. Ludwar-Ene (eds), Gender and Identity in Africa (Münster, Lit-Verlag, 1995), pp. 33–49.
39 See Colson, ‘Spirit Possession’, p. 72.
40 Kirsch, ‘Intangible Motion’, pp. 45–7.
41 R. Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980).
42 Ibid., p. 9.
43 See also Kirsch, ‘Spirit Idioms’.