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6 Response In keeping with African American traditions of worship, this book was written as a response to several calls. The founding saints’ narratives, which form the heart of this work, are a direct response to Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’s call to replace “flat images” of African Americans with three-dimensional representations of their “nuanced humanity,” giving voice to those silenced by oppressive social processes and thereby “writing the culture and its members into existence” (Gilkes 2002: 176). The project also answers Melvin Williams’s call for “anthropological ethnography” that reveals “the beauty and the good that reside in the adaptive life styles of poor black people” which have too often been ignored or misrepresented (Williams 1974: 3). The chapters on social organization, “Family,” and on rituals and symbols, “Becoming Saints,” are responses to Anthea Butler’s call for scholars of African American religious history to assess the organization, beliefs, and practices of Black churches beyond the main independent denominations (Butler 2007: 6). Ira Harrison has called for more anthropological case studies of storefront churches because they provide invaluable insights into a classical concern in anthropology of religion: how legitimate authority is established and reproduced when informal groups routinize charisma and become enduring formal institutions (Harrison 1966: 164). At the same time, I have been inspired by Faye Harrison’s call to rethink, revision, and rework anthropology by defying disciplinary practices that have relegated ethnography about and by African Americans to “veiled” and peripheral intellectual spaces (Harrison 2008: 15–19, 69). Like her, I experience myself as an anthropologist whose sociocultural location as an African American woman not only marks my positioning in the academy and larger society but also influences how I approach anthropological research. This study responds to the call for intellectual honesty about how the researcher’s vantage point informs ethnography. I have resisted the temptation to “disappear ” the ethnographic self for the sake of social-scientific distance and 166 · Saved and Sanctified objectivity (Harrison 2008: 2–3, 67; Spickard 2002: 249–51; Harrison and Harrison 1999: 1–3; Okely and Callaway 1992: 5; Clifford 1986). This study responds to the call for new perspectives in the study of the Black religious experience in America by situating The Church in relation to the Black Church in general and the Sanctified tradition in particular. To examine how African Americans have reformulated Protestant Christianity , I have drawn on the work of scholars who have de-territorialized and re-territorialized African and African Diaspora studies beyond the boundaries of the nation-state by exploring diasporic flows and transnational dialogues across the Atlantic (Harrison 2008; Yelvington 2001; Matory 2005: 3, 268–69; Alpers and Roberts 2003; Gordon and Anderson 1999; Gilroy 1993). Thus, The Church has been treated as a case study in the historical sociology of independent church movements (ICMs) in Africa and its Diaspora , making it possible to compare the first wave of ICMs among Blacks in North America to the rise of independent African churches among the Yoruba of Nigeria. Moreover, the selective legitimating of African-derived slave religion in Sanctified churches can be considered in tandem with the institutionalization of selected features of Yoruba spirituality in Aladura Christianity. This book has nuanced the notion of Diaspora by addressing it through the prism of founding saints’ lives in both the South and the North. Their personal stories foster a subtler understanding of the Diaspora in terms of micro-migration, or migration within migration, fostered by unrelenting dislocations. My point here is that the Diaspora of people of African descent in America did not end with the involuntary and deadly Middle Passage. Black people’s history in the South included constant movement: the experience of being sold from one plantation to another, often far away from kin; searching for freedom and family through the Civil War and Emancipation; and changing from one White-owned plantation to another to try to eke out a living by sharecropping. In the urban North the journeying continued, as the search for home was hindered by factors such as job discrimination, health discrepancies, educational inequity, and White flight. With the collaboration of realtors, White citizens, and politicians, these factors created and reproduced segregated neighborhoods of Black people with lower incomes and less political capital, which are so important to making a community’s voice heard and ensuring that its needs are met. The Great Migration, then, entailed mass flight from a familiar land of oppression to an unknown one within the same nation-state...

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