Faith in Flux. Devaka Premawardhana

arrived to the sight of dozens holding vigil: members of the Kaveya congregation intermixed with members of my friends’ respective clans. The men were gathered together in and around the muttheko, the open-air shed used for receiving visitors. The women, seated on reed mats across the compound, were wrapped in capulanas (lengths of printed cloth), Fátima bare-breasted as is customary for mourners. I spotted Jemusse off to the side, cradling himself on the dirt ground. Dropping my helmet, I walked over, fell to my knees, and embraced him. He never looked up. “Papá,” is all his throat emitted. I held him close. And he cried.

      An onlooker with knowledge of Makhuwa cultural codes might have found this unusual. Makhuwa men are not supposed to cry (Macaire 1996: 284). If they do, they do so only on the inside. I often heard the same said of Pentecostals. A charge commonly leveled by villagers against their Pentecostal neighbors is that, when a family member dies, they do not cry (winla), a way of saying they callously neglect the proper funerary rites. It is true that pastors, no less than initiation masters, teach stoicism in the face of hardship, even in the face of death. It is possible, then, that in sobbing uninhibitedly for his daughter, Jemusse was violating norms of both the Makhuwa culture and the Pentecostal church to which he belonged. It is possible that I too was violating norms of my community—the social scientific community—failing to keep my research subjects properly at bay.⁷ But in the face of death, codes of conduct meant very little. Jemusse’s head buried in his knees and my head buried in his shoulder, I held him close. And we cried.

      Luisinha’s body had already been interred. What remained was the third-day visit in which we would carry to the burial plot a floral arrangement the women had put together and a small wooden cross the men were working on. On the crossbar, Luisinha’s name was tenderly inscribed with ink produced from charcoal dust and the sap of a banana flower. During this period, by Makhuwa tradition, immediate family members were also to shave their heads (okhweliwa), though this had not been done.

      The procession began at daybreak the third day. We walked silently in single file behind Pastor Simões, still in his maroon suit, who carried the cross in one hand and his Bible in the other. Turning off the main road onto a narrow footpath, we followed it deep into the bush until we reached a clearing studded with mounds of dirt. The men snapped off leafy branches from surrounding trees and used them to sweep around Luisinha’s plot. Cross planted and flowers set down, all of us then crouched low and turned to Pastor Simões.

      Figure 3. Preparing the cross for Luisinha, Kaveya village.

      He opened with a short prayer before launching into his homily. Rather than reminisce about the dearly departed, he used his time to excoriate Makhuwa conceptions of the afterlife. Luisinha’s munepa (spirit; pl. minepa) is now in heaven, he instructed, and she will not return. She will remain with God and with Jesus. It is only evil spirits (minepa sonanara) who return to the living, demanding food and drink. “But if you do the will of God, you will arrive in heaven and you will return no more.” Luisinha had done the will of God. She would not return; she had already forgotten all the troubles of the world, not least her terrible final hours: “Now she hears nothing, sees nothing, thinks nothing, eats nothing. Everything is forgotten. Therefore, we cannot do esataka. Many people, when somebody dies, they go and buy rice, buy a goat, to go and do esataka. They say it is to help the person who died. Why did they not help the person when he was alive? They say that we do this because our ancestors did it. But to follow the ancestors is a lie! Jesus abolished this.” Pastor Simões was painting an opposition to Makhuwa traditional beliefs about death, grounded as they are in the funerary rite known as esataka.⁸ This ceremony is understood to join the living to the dead in an act of accompaniment, accompaniment on the recently deceased’s journey to the ancestral abode. Yet just as there is a passage out, there is also a return. Minepa revisit the living, appearing in dreams and requesting to be fed, offering help to some and causing havoc to others.

      It is precisely such regressions that Pastor Simões labored to denounce. His message was that Jesus introduced a new conception of death: one without return, a permanent state of rest at God’s side. There was thus no need for esataka, nor, for similar reasons, for okhweliwa: “Even if you shave your head, the child has already gone.” Our responsibility is not to the dead but to the living, particularly at this time to the bereaved. There was a good deal of compassion in Pastor Simões’s message for my grief-stricken friends, consistent with his willingness to overlook that they permitted the use of traditional remedies on their daughter. He seemed to respect that in such dire straits, they simply could not refuse any of the few measures available to them. But he was going to make sure no more backsliding (voltando atrás) occurred. He knew, no doubt, that it is at times of death that the threat of backsliding looms largest.

       Mobility Beyond Modernity

      The insistence on rupture, on a total break with the past, is not unique to Pentecostal forms of Christianity. Historians trace it to the first-century apostle Paul. In his classic study on conversion, A. D. Nock (1933) describes Paul’s as the first Christian conversion insofar as it made the new a substitute for, rather than a supplement to, the old.⁹ Conversion as transference between mutually exclusive faiths was the evangelical ideal in colonial-era missions as well, and consequently became part of social scientific discourse (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 248–51). That discourse changed significantly beginning in the 1980s, with such terms as bricolage, hybridity, and syncretism soon permeating historical and anthropological studies of cross-cultural encounter (McGuire 2008: 185–213). Only in a more recent recalibration have anthropologists studying Christianity swung the pendulum back to the rituals and rhetoric of rupture, doing so largely in response to their prominence in the Pentecostal ministries flourishing today. These do, in fact, instantiate the Pauline ideal.

      The intensification of rupture—historically, through Pentecostalism, and theoretically, through the anthropology of Christianity—coincides with coterminous shifts marked by critical theorists and political economists: from modern to postmodern conditions, from Fordist to post-Fordist economies, and from centralized to neoliberal governance (Piot 2010: 12–13). Underwriting each of these are the “meta-narratives of modernity” that posit the modern as a break from the traditional (Englund and Leach 2000). Assumptions about irreversible time thus govern processes of both conversion and modernization. Anthropologists of Christianity have noted the consonance well: “Insofar as [modernity] implies an irreversible break with the past, after which the world is utterly transformed in mysterious ways, it is itself modeled on the Christian idea of conversion” (Cannell 2006: 39).¹⁰ With respect to Pentecostalism, in particular, while its enchanted supernaturalism gives it something of a nonmodern cast, its emphasis on discontinuity “maps neatly onto modernist ideas about the need for radical change and about transformation as progress” (Robbins 2010: 168). Conversion to various forms of Christianity, but particularly to Pentecostal forms, can thus be readily viewed as “conversion to modernities” (van der Veer 1996), both formations entailing or at least enjoining a break with what comes to be seen as a backward past.

      Pentecostal pastors in Maúa district, as elsewhere, see themselves as implementing this progressive agenda through their efforts to “mobilize” what they regard as a stagnant population stuck in its ancestral ways. Yet here a paradox emerges. While the kind of movement characterizing Pentecostal conversion may be a movement of rupture, the end of this movement is repose. It is a conversion to end all conversions, a move to end all moves. Pentecostals are not the only recent purveyors of such thinking in Mozambique. At the height of its program of socialist reform (1975–80), the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, or Frelimo)—the anticolonial guerilla force turned postindependence ruling party—conceived its work as the “mass mobilization” of the peasantry (see Bowen 2000: 53–57). Yet, simultaneously, it adopted from Karl Marx what Marx adopted from Hegel: the view that the successful revolution is less about movement than about the end of history, that the telos of radical change is perennial stasis. Political and religious reformers operating in postcolonial Mozambique share in common what modernization programs most basically assume: border