Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt by Naomi Haynes (review)

Naomi Haynes’ Moving by the Spirit conjoins two major anthropological schools. First is the classic one, associated with the Rhodes-Livingston Institute in the Copperbelt region of central Africa, which focused on the dynamics of social transformation amid the mid-twentieth-century rise of African cities. Second is the contemporary one of the anthropology of Christianity, which focuses on the dynamics of cultural transformation amid the late-twentieth-century spread of Pentecostal Christianity. Because both schools theorize the interplay of continuity and change, it makes perfect sense that they be brought under a single frame. Haynes’ study of Copperbelt Christianity is the first significant study to do so.

While the central topic of this book is urban Zambians’ aspirations to socioeconomic mobility, Haynes’ original intervention is her critique of anthropological research that reduces cultural phenomena to metanarratives of neoliberal modernity. In the scholarship on Christianity, this has played out as an emphasis on its individualizing, and therefore modernizing, effects. The modernist construct of the autonomous subject stands at odds with a longstanding conception of African personhood. Haynes argues that even within Christianity, social relations are produced, sustained, and sustaining. It is misguided, therefore, to associate Christianity necessarily with the neo-liberal erosion of social ties.

Haynes lays out this argument in a well-structured series of eight relatively short chapters. These cover a range of topics, including the history of Copperbelt anthropology, local understandings of “moving,” Pentecostal forms of “moving by the Spirit,” tensions between vertical ties to pastors and lateral networks among members, rituals such as Pentecostal worship services and domestic parties, and Pentecostal gender relations.

As a contribution to African studies, Moving by the Spirit has much to offer. Haynes takes on James Ferguson’s well-known anthropological study of Copperbelt Zambia, in which Ferguson critiqued the teleological narrative of modernity—a story of progress and advancement that became normative for researchers and research subjects alike. Ferguson convincingly showed how this narrative fails to account for the region’s 1980s downturn, a period of deindustrialization that witnessed the loss not only of material prosperity but also of hope and self-respect. Haynes contests this analysis on two grounds. First, she argues that Ferguson’s account of decline adopts, albeit in inverted form, the same unilinear assumptions of the modernization narratives. Since the 1980s, but also well before, the Copperbelt has been characterized by volatility: an endless cycle of booms and busts, expansions and contractions. Second, Haynes emphasizes how Pentecostalism serves as a resource for helping people cope with economic despair, such that even during economic downturns, optimism and a propensity for movement remain. In showing the consequences of religion on people’s existential outlook, Moving by the Spirit makes its most significant contribution to the study of African modernity.

Pentecostal studies, in Africa and throughout the global South, have come to be dominated by tropes of rupture and discontinuity, and here Haynes makes a second significant intervention. Against strong claims for rupture, Haynes argues that conversion does not result simply in the substitution of new values for old ones. Rather, preexisting values and cultural models (Haynes focuses on those involving socioeconomic mobility) persist, albeit in novel (in this case, Pentecostal) forms. Haynes may be accused by founding anthropologist of Christianity Joel Robbins, whom Haynes credits as an inspiration for this study (xiv), of peddling anthropology’s “continuity bias.” But Haynes uncovers claims in Robbins’ own earlier scholarship that support her more moderate take on the kind of change Christianity introduces.

Moving by the Spirit is empirically rich and theoretically engaging, a major contribution to both African studies and the anthropology of Christianity. Yet it is not without limitations. Underpinning this book is an assumption of Pentecostal exceptionalism, an argument that, for example, Pentecostalism uniquely resonates with while simultaneously challenging local models. But is this not true of...