Full Description
This open access book presents fresh ethnographic work from the regions of Africa and Melanesia—where the popularity of charismatic Christianity can be linked to a revival and transformation of witchcraft. The volume demonstrates how the Holy Spirit has become an adversary to the reconfirmed presence of witches, demons, and sorcerers as manifestations of evil. We learn how this is articulated in spiritual warfare, in crusades, and in healing or witch-killing raids. The contributors highlight what happens to phenomena that people address as locally specific witchcraft or sorcery when re-molded within the universalist Pentecostal demonology, vocabulary, and confrontational methodology.
Contents
1. Introduction: Pentecostal Witchcraft: Governance and Universalism in Comparison.- 2. German Pentecostal Witches and Communists: The Violence of Purity and Sameness.- 3. Becoming Witches: Sight, Sin, and Sociality in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea.- 4. The Ndoki Index: Sorcery, Economy and Invisible Operations in the Angolan Urban Sphere.- 5. Branhamist Kindoki: Ethnographic Notes on Connectivity, Technology and Urban Witchcraft in Contemporary Kinshasa.- 6. Jesus Lives in Me: Pentecostal Conversions, Witchcraft Confessions, and Gendered Power in the Trobriand Islands.- 7. The Power of a Severed Arm: Life, Witchcraft, and Christianity in Kilimanjaro.- 8. Demons, Devils and Witches in Pentecostal Port Vila: On Changing Cosmologies of Evil in Melanesia.- 9. Turning the Tide: Visionary Children and Spiritual War on a Vanuatu Island.- 10. Learning to Believe in Papua New Guinea.- 11. Witchcraft Simplex: Experiences of Globalized Pentecostalism in Central and Northwestern Tanzania.
