Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga
Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga
by David Maxwell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023 Cloth: 978-0-299-33750-6 | eISBN: 978-0-299-33753-7 | Paper: 978-0-299-33754-4 Library of Congress Classification BV3625.C6M39 2022 Dewey Decimal Classification 266.0230967518
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Under the leadership of William F. P. Burton and James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) grew from a simple faith movement founded in 1915 into one of the most successful classical Pentecostal missions in Africa, today boasting more than one million members in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Drawing on artifacts, images, documents, and interviews, David Maxwell examines the roles of missionaries and their African collaborators—the Luba-speaking peoples of southeast Katanga—in producing knowledge about Africa.
Through the careful reconstruction of knowledge pathways, Maxwell brings into focus the role of Africans in shaping texts, collections, and images as well as in challenging and adapting Western-imported presuppositions and prejudices. Ultimately, Maxwell illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of discourses of identity in colonial Africa and reveals not only how the Luba shaped missionary research but also how these coproducers of knowledge constructed and critiqued custom and convened new ethnic communities.
Making a significant intervention in the study of both the history of African Christianity and the cultural transformations effected by missionary encounters across the globe, Religious Entanglements excavates the subculture of African Pentecostalism, revealing its potentiality for radical sociocultural change.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
David Maxwell is the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge and a professorial fellow at Emmanuel College in Cambridge.
REVIEWS
“A seminal work that offers a unique and groundbreaking perspective. . . . A significant contribution to Pentecostal historiography in Africa.”
— Reading Religion
“Brilliantly illustrates the complexity of the relationships forged between the Luba Katanga and Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) leaders between roughly 1915 and 1960 in the Belgian Congo. . . . The construction of Luba Christianity as related by Maxwell was a dynamic, uneven process that merits wide reading.”
— Journal of Religion in Africa
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Primitivism and Pragmatism in the Making of the Congo Evangelistic Mission
2 Luba Transformations Prior to 1910
3 Continuity and Change in the Luba Christian Movement
4 Missions and the State: The Challenge of Pentecostalism
5 “Acquainting Oneself with the Enemy”: Making Knowledge about Africa
6 Pathways to Knowledge
7 The Creation of Lubaland: Missionary Science and Christian Literacy in the Making of the Luba Katanga
8 Finding God among the Luba: Missionary Conversions and Epiphanies
Postscript: Postcolonial Developments
Conclusion: Pentecostalism, Knowledge Creation, and Religious Change
Notes
Sources and Bibliography
Index
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