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Sensing the divine in a Dutch Pentecostal church

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CONTENTS

iv. Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

1.1 “I was moved” /1 1.2 Spirit of modernity /3

1.3 Pentecostalism in focus /6 1.4 Shifting the gaze /8

1.5 Chapter outline /10

2 Theoretical & methodological challenges

2.1 Negotiating the ‘other’ /14 2.2 Embodying ‘religion’ /17

2.3 Beyond words: sensuous methods /20 2.4 Ethical considerations /23

3 Accessing experience through time, place and space

3.1 De Open Deur /27

3.2 Figures of Pentecostal experience /30 3.2.1 Pastor Arie /31

3.2.2 Henny /33 3.2.3 Edgar /35 3.2.4 Hans /36

4. The Holy Spirit

4.1 A world divided /39 4.2 Body truths /41

4.3 The Spirit ‘moves’ /45 4.4 Sensuous divides /48

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5. The Spirit manifested

5.1 Glossolalia /52 5.2 Prophecy /54 5.3 Healing /59

6. Rituals of negotiation, transformation & confirmation / 64 6.1 Baptism Ceremony /65

6.2 Worship service /69

6.3 Wednesday Prayer night /72

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iii For Bethany

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Acknowledgments

The inspiration for this research project can be traced back to a skype conversation I had with my sister in Australia at the end of 2014. It was with flushed cheeks, shining eyes and waving hands that my younger sister expressed to me her first experience of being ‘taken over by the Spirit’ which resulted in an overwhelming flow of glossolalia. As a sign of her spiritual growth and the presence of God, this almost out of body experience had shaken her up, empowered her spirit and fanned the flames of her passion for God. As her eyes sparkled and she grappled with finding the right words to tell me about this experiences, it was the look in her eyes, the flailing hands, the flushed cheeks and the sighs that left her mouth that convinced me of the powerful reality of her experience. Rather than what my sister was telling me, it was how she was telling me that left the deepest impression. My sister’s experience left me with a myriad of questions and curiosity as to how to understand and translate such an experience into Anthropological terms and categories. Was it even possible? And to what extent could I understand without having experienced anything similar myself? And how to understand experiences of God from within a secular discipline? The puzzlement and fascination brought on by such questions were fueled by an empathetic desire to understand my younger sister who I was separated from by many years and many oceans. The following MA project ‘Moved by the Spirit’, became my medium in looking at the relationships between religion and secularism, between what and how something is experienced and how such experiences are perceived and conveyed through language and writing. On a personal level, it became a means to symbolically cross those years and oceans between us and attempt to ‘look at the world through her eyes’.

It’s been a long road from that first skype conversation, to this end product and still I have the feeling that I’ve only just begun. Juggling a full time Master’s degree, 30 hour work weeks, sickness, housing relocations and my partner’s asylum process, wouldn’t be possible without a supervisor that as supporting as he is critical. My first words of gratitude go out to my supervisor Erik de Maaker — for his enthusiasm for this research, all the red lines throughout my drafts and his willingness to let me take longer in order to probe deeper. Going from an

incomplete high-school course in Australia to a Master’s degree in the Netherlands wouldn’t be possible without the belief and support from friends and loved ones. I therefore thank all those that have encouraged me and supported me intellectually and emotionally as well as practically with housing, food, chats, money, work-space and company. My gratitude goes out to my love Mohsen Masoumi, my family overseas, the family Holvast, as well as Lotte van de Horst for her photographic contribution during the Baptism ceremony.

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Introduction

1.1 “I was moved”

‘…much of our ethnographic research is carried out best when we are ‘out of our minds’, that is, while we relax inner controls, forget our purposes, let ourselves go. In short, there is an ecstatic side to fieldwork which should be counted among the conditions of knowledge production, hence objectivity

(Fabian in Van de Port 2011:21)’.

Every Wednesday evening, a small group of congregants from De Open Deur Pentecostal church, met together for prayer. Seated in a circle around cups of filter coffee and Pickwick tea, congregants studied their bibles and discussed together the relation of the words to their everyday lives. The night began, as most Pentecostal events do, with hearty singing

accompanied by the strumming of a guitar. After a short bible reflection and confessional segment where pain, anxieties and longing were shared, the night flowed into a more improvisational part where believers sought the Holy Spirit in prayer, song and glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues). It was here that I found myself at the end of my fieldwork; seated within an intimate group of six congregants singing along to worship songs, clapping hands and rocking my body in tune with the music. And just as all the congregants in the room, I was anticipating the manifestations of the Holy Spirit. After all, I was told by congregants on a regular basis “if you genuinely desire to know the Holy Spirit, He will reveal Himself to you”. Considering the nature of my research question, I was confident my desire to know stood high.

As the evening climaxed, the unintelligible sounds of glossolalia fluctuated along with the group dynamics: “ravani allim bagani moga… oh Lord…hallelujah!...liga ravani mekani alom .mesuja satorium rabat yelom”. Each congregant had a distinct repertoire of vocal sounds, rhythms, movements and gestures. Inner states found their expression within an ensemble of whispers, shouts, rocking, crying, closed eyes, clenched foreheads, clasped hands and tapping feet. While each congregant had their own distinct style, the group responded empathetically to the prayers and anticipated needs of one another. If one voice rose to a shout, others responded with mirroring outbursts of “hallelujah!” and “praise the Lord!”. If tears were heard breaking up a congregant’s voice, fellow congregants responded with outstretched arms and hands laid on the arms, legs and shoulders of their emotionally moved neighbors. The voices of the group fed off each other and stimulated each other in

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2 return – the volume and intensity constantly shifting.

In narrative style, the prayer night could be sensed building up toward a climax. The volume increased, emotions began to flow and bodies started to connect — and through the ever intensifying sounds of glossolalia could be heard the plea “come Holy Spirit, come”. The climax was reached when suddenly the attention turned towards myself. Henny (Elder) was praying for me, asking God to let me experience the Holy Spirit and feel his love — that I would feel the love from the community and that I would be able to make a good translation of my research back at Leiden University. Henny’s husband Ruby (Elder) then rose and continued to pray for me. It quickly became very personal. He asked God to touch me — to reveal my deepest longings and sadness and to go to work in me. Ruby prayed loudly: “Lord, she is lonely here in the Netherlands without family and it’s often difficult for her”. The reactions of the group became increasingly more intense – the sounds of glossolalia sounding louder as they affirmed Ruby with the phrases: “Yes father, help her father, stand by her, hold her with your love Lord”.

I find it difficult to describe in words what happened next. I was overwhelmed. I felt tears run down my cheeks. I experienced the feeling as a pressure in the bottom of my stomach that slowly rose up inside me and eventually erupted in tears. I can’t really say they were tears of sadness, because I didn’t feel sad — but I did feel something strong that my whole body responded to. The warmth in my cheeks and sweat under my arms betrayed this. When I cried, my whole body shook with my tears and I had difficulty finding enough air to breathe in. The emotional tension was fueled even further when Henny came and prayed over me — one arm around my shoulders and the other on my forehead. On all sides of me

congregants’ hands were laid on my arms, legs and head — enclosing me physically within the group. I could hear their support and responses as they spoke in tongues and sang fragments of songs about divine love and wholeness. The group atmosphere was large and I felt small at that moment — like a child crying on her mother’s lap. I had the feeling of losing myself to the group and experienced the lines that divided us momentarily fall away. I was no longer a student researcher, foreigner, ‘unbeliever’ or even woman — at that moment I experienced myself as just the same breathing, hurting, moving, longing, searching human being as all other congregants in the room.

“That was the Holy Spirit working in you”, Ruby said kindly afterwards. “The eyes are the window to the soul and when the Holy Spirit is at work in someone, it will be visible in the eyes — in tears — because tears wash the soul and make it clean. All the hidden away pain and longings have to come out. That’s the Holy Spirit at work, making more room for

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God. That was the Holy Spirit —that’s what you experience. It’s good — it’s good that you are crying”, he continued, “because when you are weak, then God is strong”.

Overwhelmed, confused and embarrassed by my ‘lack of control’ as researcher, I left the group and took a somewhat surreal train ride home trying to get my head around that night’s happenings. In the familiar surroundings of the Dutch night train, Ruby’s words continued to echo in my head — “that was the Holy Spirit; that is what you experienced”. Back in my own home, I had difficulty writing up my field notes. The scattered words and half sentences scrawled in my field work diary betrayed my difficulty in translating my experience into words. I knew that I had opened myself up that night to experience something — anything — letting the group take me along in their flow. It seemed that instead of

watching a story unfold, I had become part of the story myself. Swept along, I was able to sense to some extent what congregants meant when they told me “I was filled with the Holy Spirit”, “His love washed over me” and “I felt him touch me deep in my soul”. In the atmosphere of the beginning quote — such a moment of insight became possible only by putting my body, senses and emotions into play and allowing myself to go with the flow, lose “control” and be out of the mind I was used to.

1.2 Spirit of Modernity

Sensuous embodied experiences such as the one described above, are one of the modern success stories of a global religious phenomenon called Pentecostalism. It is within a

particular repertoire of bodily-emotional sensations that individuals experience tangible signs of what Pentecostalism calls the ‘manifestations of the Holy Spirit’. With the promise of a direct and unmediated relationship with God, such sensuous encounters have continued to revolutionize the relationship between man and God within Protestant Christianity since the first ‘outpouring of the spirit’ at the beginning of the twentieth century (Robbins 2004:1117). Going against the formalism of nineteenth century Protestantism in the West, a deep yearning within the western Holiness movement for a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit and a closer relationship with God, induced an outpouring of ‘gifts of the spirit’ such as glossolalia, healing and prophecy (Jennings 2015:69). Such experiences were in opposition to the intellectualist model of the Protestant church — emphasizing the direct, embodied and sensuous over the more abstract biblical doctrines conveyed through sermons (Meyer 2004:452; Robbins 2004:117). Emerging out of the various Euro-American Holiness movements, Pentecostalism emphasized ‘born-again’ conversion and was responsible for

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introducing the element of ‘spirit baptism’ or what is often called the ‘second blessing’ (Robbins 2004:119). It was only through evoking this ‘second blessing’ during baptisms that congregants could be ‘filled and fulfilled with the Holy Spirit’ and receive direct signs of their salvation and sanctification through ecstatic phenomena such as glossolalia, prophetic visions and divine healing (Robbins 2004:120,177). Such ecstatic experiences crossed former barriers of language, education, gender, class and culture – consequently changing the course of Christianity along the way (Meyer 2004:461; Robbins 2004:117). Sweeping the globe with ever increasing intensity, the Pentecostal movement incited notions of belonging and

community that resonated with a new kind of believer; namely, the modern individual emerging against the backdrop of an ever changing society due to industrial capitalism, liberalism and intensifying global flows of people, things and ideas. As traditional family structures shifted, secular liberal ideals dominated the public spheres and the emergence of a middle-class changed the social and economic fabric — individuals found a foothold in Pentecostal notions of individual belief, ‘born again’ conversion, ecstatic religious

experiences and a sense of belonging to a greater ‘spiritual family’ (Marshall 1999:3, Meyer 2004:461).

Such new charismatic religious forms like Pentecostal Christianity have seen a steady rise since the 1950’s and have peaked as a global religious phenomenon from the 1970’s onwards. Not surprisingly, over the last decades Pentecostalism has become an increasing focus of anthropological interest (Robbins 2004:118). This interest is due to the fact that, just as Pentecostal movements were sweeping the globe with ever increasing scope and intensity, so too were theories of religious decline emerging parallel within western academic discourse (Cannell 2010:86). The increased visibility of the Pentecostal movement however resulted in destabilizing these secularization theses — in the sense that, the more research was being done into Pentecostalism, the more modern secular distinctions between religion and secularism, belief and knowledge, modern and traditional and empirical and non-empirical seemed to get entangled and contested (Marshall 1999:4). The idea that secularization would inevitably result in the decline of religion was until recently still a dominant sociological theory within western academic discourse (ibid). The classical secularization and

modernization theories that emerged during the 60s’, argued that religion would necessarily decline within processes of modernization (Cannell 2010:87; Gorski & Altinordu 2008:56). Modernity, as a model of and for the future, was understood as a force promising liberation from traditional ways of knowing the world and propelling the world forward towards a brighter, more rational and scientific future (Cannell 2010; Ferguson 2009:1-36; Gorski &

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Altinordu 2008; Lambek 2001; Fabian 1983). As a result, secular modernity subjugated religion in temporal space as the guilty ‘other’ to progress — accusing it of irrationality, backwardness and tradition (ibid). The teleological lens through which secular modernity divided the world into a ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’, consequently followed lines of global capitalist inequality — designating certain regions of the world as more traditional, religious, irrational and backwards (Asad in Cannell 2010:90; Fabian 2002:144; Ferguson 1999:245).

During the last decades, the grand theory of secularization has since been empirically criticized as being more a myth of religious decline rather than reality – a myth based on post-WWII survey research with limited geographical and historical scope (Cannell 2010:61; Gorski & Altinordu 2008:60). The statistical data initially collected in such surveys was retrospectively understood to be empirically thin and difficult to validate.Categories of measurement such as ‘membership’ and ‘attendance levels’ for example, excluded other non-institutionalized categories such as ‘spirituality’, ‘morality’, ‘belief’ and ‘experience’ in determining levels of religiosity (Gorski & Altinordu 2008:60). It became clear that levels of ‘church attendance’ did not necessarily correlate with levels of ‘belief’ or ‘spirituality’. Furthermore, data collected at a particular time in the west was problematically extended to include all non-western regions of the world. Shifts in traditional church attendance in European countries did not necessarily mean that all regions of the world were also

undergoing similar ‘secularizing’ shifts. Furthermore, waning church attendance could say more about state regulation and ‘religious supply’ then declining ‘religious demand’. It was through disregarding a wide range of such variables in time and space, that a global

measuring stick called ‘secularization theory’ could emerge — dividing the world falsely into a ‘modern’ west and ‘pre-modern’ rest (Cannell 2010:91; Gorski & Altinordu 2008:61).

While the grand narrative of secular modernity has since been debunked by many as being the product of scientific hubris, it continues to leave its ideological trace within academia as well as emerging within popular perceptions of western democratic societies (Cannell 2010:97; Gorski & Altinordu 2008:69; Marshall 1999:4). Even just telling fellow students and co-workers about my research into Pentecostalism in the Netherlands often elicited the surprised reaction “I didn’t know we had that kind of thing here?!”. As a notion of ‘progress’, secularization theory has morphed into the current political project called

‘secularism’. This ideological project, propagated by enlightenment thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, is bent on enlightening the world through science and reason (Gorski & Altinordu 2008:76). Within this project, there is no place for religious fervour, mysticism, passionate agency or belief. Such notions exceed a scientific framework and are therefore outlawed

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within scientific rationalism as being non-empirical and a danger to ‘progress’. In scientific and popular western imaginings, the modern world continues to be envisioned as a secular one – freed from the traditional and irrational binds of religion (ibid).

In reality however, ‘modernity’ was never able to consume religion. Far from disappearing as once predicted, new religious forms such as Pentecostalism were seen to increase (Cannell 2010:97; Marshall 199:4; Meyer 2004:452).Such charismatic religious forms, with their emphasis on an individual relationship with God as well as sensuous and embodied religious experiences, have moved easily across the globe and found sure footing in the broader socio-historical context of late Capitalism, post-modern individualism and intensified global flows of people, technology and ideas (Robbins 2004: 117-119; Knibbe & Versteeg 2011:12-14). But maybe as an unconscious by-product of modernity’s topoi, most anthropological research on this growing religious phenomenon still manages to confine itself to those parts of the world still considered less ‘developed’ and less ‘rational’(Cannell

2010:10; Ferguson 2009:24; Gorski & Altinordu 2008:68). It is not simply a matter of chance that religion is often associated with the exotic rituals of more ‘traditional’ societies – or that the Pentecostal movement is often academically associated with black America and black Africa (Robbins 2008:118-119, Meyer 2004:452). Such associations, or topoi, are the

discursive heirs of a western modernity discourse that has conditioned ideas on what it means to be ‘modern’. The study of Pentecostalism is therefore still being locked within a discourse that defines it in terms of a wild exotic ‘other’ — located in a temporal space with links to a history of colonial control (Cannell 2010:95; Fabian 2002:155; Marshall 1999:6-2014:s350; Robbins in Csordas 2009:69).

1.3 Pentecostalism in focus

As a direct result of tuning-in on the global south during the 1990’s, ethnographic research on Pentecostalism has gained momentum over the last couple of decades as the global impact of the movement became increasingly visible (Robbins 2004). Reviewing the literature to date, Joel Robbins notes how Pentecostalism’s global success is due to the fact that it globalizes in a way that involves both elements of western homogenization and indigenous differentiation (ibid). This inherent paradox is important for understanding how Pentecostalism, as a religion of transformation, both maintains a distinct global (western) form while engaging directly with the local. Its global form can be found within the framework of a number of key doctrines – the most important being that of ‘born again’ conversion. By inducing a radical

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break with the past, conversion instigates a number of binary oppositions such as before and after, good and evil and modern and traditional. Within this binary scheme, the past and all that pertains to a ‘before conversion’ is now associated with evil. Breaking with the past can involve anything from specific character traits, to family and social ties, cultural traditions and even ones job. When a person converts, he or she undergoes a radical moral

re-orientation — one wherein the world now becomes a stage for the struggle between good and evil, divine and demonic. In this case ‘evil’ is an abstract universal referent with unending definitional possibilities that has proven highly adaptable to local concerns. In the context of Africa and Latin America, ‘evil’ often has come to mean local spirits, traditions, poverty and disease (Marshall 1999:6; Robbins 2004:127). One of the major success stories of Pentecostal Christianity is therefore its portable character and flexibility to engage with the local in all its varying forms (Csordas 2009:5). Furthermore, while the Pentecostal message is a global one, its expansion depends on the charismatic power of local pastors to be able to teach their congregations a new way of interpreting reality and (re)imagining their communities. It is the charismatic pastor that animates the word of God and facilitates the transformation of the ‘word’ into intense emotional experiences (Campos 2014:280). Pentecostal charisma however is not limited to charismatic leaders but circulates as an emotional flow between pastors and members of the congregation. Congregants ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’ claim charismatic power that has the ability to by-pass, negotiate and protest those in positions of authority (Ibid). Flows of charisma therefore hold emancipatory potential as they cross through lines of class, age, gender, ethnicity and education — in this way offering ‘born-again’ congregants social, economic and political upward mobility (Campos 2014:281 Meyer 2004:460, 467).

Recent ethnographic research into African Pentecostalism has negotiated and criticized the religious/secular divide by analysing how conversion can be understood as a political spirituality within the post-colonial context (Marshall 2009; Meyer 2004, 2009). Within this line of thought, Pentecostalism paves the way for the creation of modern subjects wherein identity and community are re-imagined and re-configured along spiritual lines instead of nation-state, kinship, gender, age or class. Such spiritual lines begin with the local church setting and spread out along transnational networks – inciting notions of belonging to a greater ‘spiritual family’. In the context of the fragile post-colonial state, these Pentecostal networks of people, goods and ideas are able to bind people together where the state has failed to do so. Alternative notions of community are furthermore facilitated by the

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not only the social world and religions visibility within public spheres, but also the mediation between the divine and the human world (Meyer 2004:466). African Pentecostal mega churches, with their elaborate technology and live radio/TV streaming, facilitate ecstatic experiences that reach beyond the church building into the public sphere and consequently present themselves as the ultimate embodiment of modernity (Meyer 2004:459,466). Being ‘born-again’ is to be ‘blessed’, which often translates into social and economic upward mobility (Meyer 2004:457). For those feeling they’re not getting their lot in life, or locked in sub-altern regions where ‘modernity’ presents itself as an unfulfilled dream viewed from a distance — Pentecostalism promises access to a ‘modern’ and ‘global’ otherwise out of reach for many (Ferguson 1999: 252; Meyer 2004:459, 2009). By deconstructing boundaries between the religious and the political, Marshall and Meyer both reject simplistic oppositions between the religious and secular, faith and reason, belief and knowledge that appear as the hallmark of modernity (Marshall 2014:S353, 2009:4; Meyer 2004:464; Robbins 2004:123). As Pentecostalism proves itself to be a meaningful and effective political spirituality within the post-colonial context, such dualisms collapse and it becomes possible to imagine such notions as ‘modern religiosity’ and ‘religious modernities’ (Cannell 2010:87; Meyer 1999).

1.4 Shifting the gaze

Problematizing the research so far, it seems to me that Pentecostalism is still being locked within a modernity discourse that views the global south as ‘less developed’ and more ‘religious’. Consequently, as the bulk of recent research implicitly and explicitly positions Africa and Latin America as ‘religious’ regions, the religious/secular divide is still being upheld at a meta-level.Through shifting both the where and how of research into

Pentecostalism, my research agenda attempts to challenge the modernist gaze by turning my eye from the context of the global south and the sub-altern ‘other’ to the context of a

secularized Netherlands. By secular, I am not referring to the grand narrative discussed earlier, but to specific processes of differentiation and privatization that have led to the separation of church and state in the Netherlands and a general decline of institutionalized church affiliation (unchurching) (Cannell 2010:89; Gorski & Altinordu 2008:58). According to the Dutch research project God in Nederland (2016) which is (re)conducted every decade, statistical data shows that while traditional church attendance in the Netherlands is generally on the decrease, Pentecostalism on the other hand is rapidly growing. The question that then arises is: in a country such as the Netherlands with a strong welfare state and a people

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popularly known for their sober pragmatism, what does the Pentecostal experience have to offer in this context? If the where and the how of the study of Pentecostal Christianity were to be shifted, how could Pentecostalism then reveal itself? By shifting the gaze, I seek to

criticize a broader anthropological trend wherein research on religion tends to mirror the inherent binaries of modernity – that is, studying religion in those places with those people considered more prone to being religious (i.e. more traditional, non-western, irrational and less developed).

Following this criticism, I take the religious/secularism debate one step further by claiming that modernity’s teleological model also envelopes a distinction between the

non-empirical domain of ‘belief’ and the non-empirical domain of ‘experience’ — a distinction which

corresponds with the broader distinctions between the religious and secular. Extending the ideological reach of secular modernity another step further, I propose that modernity’s topoi also involves a hierarchizing of the senses and the dominance of the realm of perception over

experience. A lasting trace from an historical split between mind and body, enlightenment

philosophy summed up with the phrase ‘I think therefore I am’ saw modern man as one defined by reason and freed from the irrational urges of the body (Guinon 2004:81; van de Port 2011:19). Consequently, modernity’s teleological model positioned the ‘developed’ west as more ‘enlightened’ and consequently holding the monopoly on ‘truth’ (Marshall

2014:S348, Lambek 2012:4). From an academic point of view, hierarchizing ontologies problematically inhibits academic analysis and only serves to reinforce, if not widen the gap between anthropology and the ‘other’ as well as uphold false binaries between the religious and secular.When the ‘other’ happens to be the ‘religious other’, an asymmetric relationship evolves wherein religious ontologies are translated (and distorted) into secular

anthropological categories — which necessarily results in religion being rationalized, secularized and de-mystified (Marshall 1999:3-5; Lambek 2012:3; Lampe 2010:68). As Michael Lambek rightly points out: ‘we can only understand religion insofar as we take it seriously’ (Lambek 2012:8). My research agenda therefore attempts to destabilize the secular analytical gaze by de-exoticizing religion and taking Pentecostalism seriously by using

experiences as my starting point of analysis. By foregrounding the sensorial and embodied

nature of religious experience I hope to move away from the modern notion of religion as a non-empirical phenomenon characterized by ‘inner belief’.

It is from this position that I pose my main research question ‘how are the

manifestations of the Holy Spirit experienced within one of the rapidly growing Pentecostal churches of the Netherlands? What are the politics of inclusion and exclusion surrounding

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who experiences, and more importantly who experiences more?’ And how do such

experiences of the divine matter to people in their everyday lives? The search for answers to these questions brought me to a small Pentecostal community called De Open Deur in Alphen

aan den Rijn in the Netherlands, where I spent three months participating in the daily life of

the community. With the pastor as my gate-keeper, my participant observation spanned everything from grocery shopping to healing rituals, both within the community as well as the broader national network. With my own sensuously engaged body and a film camera, I immersed myself in the experiential world of De Open Deur and attempted to access the sensorial realm of experiences of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in a number of ways. Staying close to the skin with my camera became a way for me to let the body ‘speak’ in regards to experience. With soundscapes I attempted to bring the film images alive and re-create a sense of being ‘swept up in the spirit’. Audio therefore plays an important role in capturing the sensorial dimension of experience. My film ‘Moved by the Spirit’, which accompanies this thesis, therefore became a crucial element in foregrounding the sensorial dimension of congregant’s ritual experiences of the Divine and moving ‘beyond words’ in my translation thereof.

1.5 Chapter Outline

Following the question ‘how are the manifestations of the Holy Spirit experienced within one of the rapidly growing Pentecostal churches in the Netherlands’, chapter 2 begins with problematizing the where and the how of the study of Pentecostalism as well as critically engaging with the concepts at stake. In this chapter I look at how the concepts of religion,

modernity, ritual and experience — rather than being things-in-themselves, are concepts

emerging in particular times and places. How we view the religious ‘other’ is still conditioned by a modernity discourse whose inherent binary distinctions and belief in evolutionary progress has subjugated religion to the realm of less-developed, irrational, alternative and ‘exotic’. In this way, definitions of concepts like religion, modernity, ritual and experience are in themselves political acts which can refuse to let the ‘other’ share the same time. As a criticism thereof, I draw on a paradigm of embodiment and take a sensorial approach that answers to the need to meet the ‘other’ in a new way. As the existential starting point of culture, it is the body that mediates between self and the world at large, between subject and object, mind and body and between pre-reflexive realm of experiences and perceptions thereof. Starting from the notion of embodiment, allows me to theoretically and

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methodologically approach Pentecostalism in the Netherlands as a lived and embodied reality with its own sensuous logic. Audio-visual methods and my resulting film ‘Moved by the Spirit’ became an important medium in accessing and communicating such experiences.

Chapter 3 situates this research within Pentecostal community De Open Deur in

Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands. Here I give a sense of the sociological make-up of the community: the neighborhood, the church, the congregants and activities that give form to community life in De Open Deur. Breaking away from the traditional notion of ‘church’, I show how De Open Deur is constituted by a vast network of people, things and ideas through time, place and space. From the post WWII Indonesian diaspora, to preacher exchange networks and WhatsApp prayer groups — De Open Deur is connected both over time, within local and trans-national networks and through new media technologies. Intersecting time, place and space, I borrow from Barker & Lindquist (1998) the idea of ‘figures’ to introduce a selection of the people who will appear throughout this thesis and film. By focusing on their conversion stories I attempt to go beyond the personal and individual by positioning

particular congregants as ‘figures’ of Pentecostal experience within the Netherlands. What these congregants are personally trying to break away from through conversion provides a magnifying glass for thinking about how their stories are representative of aspects of Pentecostalism on a global level.

Following the leading question ‘how are the manifestations of the Holy Spirit experienced within one of the rapidly growing Pentecostal churches of the Netherlands?’,

chapter 4 first introduces the reader to a world defined by ‘spiritual warfare’. Against the

backdrop of a broken and divided world, the Holy Spirit emerges as a particular kind of experience which embodies the biblical ideals of divine love and wholeness. Drawing on personal accounts (including my own), film fragments, anecdotes, text messages, sermons and interviews, this chapter explores how the Holy Spirit is sensed within the emotional-corporeal realm of tears, sweat, warmth, pressure, goosebumps, touch and movement — producing ecstatic religious experiences that work to produce and confirm belief as well as negotiate spiritual and social boundaries. Such experiences provide tangible signs of God’s presence and congregants salvation and bind congregants together within intimate

communities of ‘brothers and sisters in Christ’. However, the same experiences that bind congregants together, also hold the capacity to divide them. Herein, emotional-corporeal experiences not only become markers of spiritual difference, but also of social difference. As this chapter reveals, perceptions of experiences resonate with the language of modernity as congregants declare “some people move more than others” and “some cultures are more

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susceptible to evil than others”. In the dialogue that emerges, congregants engage with such notions and each other within their emotionally resonating bodies. As truths are accessed through the body and senses, the notion of belief resists being subjected to the realm of the non-empirical by presenting itself as a tangible and empirical phenomenon

Expanding on the previous chapter, chapter 5 explores how the manifestations of the Holy Spirit such as glossolalia, healing and prophecy become important mechanisms for accessing the divine, negotiating evil and (re)defining group boundaries. Through the manifestations of the Holy Spirit, congregants come into direct contact with God, claim protection from evil forces and are given tangible signs that they are “chosen”. As ritual expressions of the Divine, glossolalia, prophecy and healing become markers of spiritual and social inclusion and provide congregants with confirmation that they really are saved.

Chapter 6 is devoted to exploring how particular ritualized activities such as

baptisms, worship services and prayer nights become important spaces of negotiation, transformation and confirmation. Within ritualized processes, ‘worldly’ ideals are

symbolically inverted, allowing ‘moving’ experiences to be converted into spiritual capital. Ritual life continuously transforms individual and group, negotiates with evil and confirms again and again through ritual affect that God is real and can be proven. Furthermore, it is within ritualized spaces that emotional-corporeal sensations are given their meaning as

congregants learn to “tune” in to the Holy Spirit – how to feel and act, what to say and how to perceive the Holy Spirit within their emotionally resonating bodies.

Chapter 7 concludes by emphasizing how the Holy Spirit is made known to

congregants within a repertoire of emotional-corporeal sensations. Belief is therefore not a non-empirical phenomenon as secular modernity would declare, but is rather a highly empirical phenomenon emerging from concrete embodied experiences which are perceived within a particular cultural framework. For congregants, belief is sustained through an ongoing pursuit of ‘gifts of the Spirit’ such as glossolalia, prophecy and healing. In a world defined by ‘spiritual warfare’, the manifestations of the Holy Spirit become congregants means to ritually negotiate with evil and each other. These negotiations resonate with the language of modernity as experiences are perceived within a cultural idiom — designating some people and some places as having more access to evil and the Holy Spirit. Herein, the forces of modernity are both reproduced and contested within the realm of emotional-corporeal experiences. As moving experiences are converted into socio-spiritual capital, charismatic communities are forged that have the ability to transcend barriers of age, gender, class, education and ethnicity.

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Just as congregants have shown that belief starts with embodied experiences, so too have I used experiences as my starting point of analysis. In negotiating the asymmetric

relationship between experience and perception, religiosity and secularism and researcher and subject, I have taken a sensorial approach that has made use of audio-visual methods. My film ‘Moved by the Spirit’ played an important part in these negotiations by communicating experiences through image and sound and attempting to move ‘beyond words’ and beyond secular academic language in my translations thereof.

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2.

Theoretical and methodological challenges

2.1 Negotiating the ‘other’

Acknowledging the problematic where and how of the study of religion asks for a theoretical and methodological re-framing of the concepts at stake. How religion is defined, determines what will be seen. As Talal Asad points out, religion as a category and concept has specific dates attached to it and its definition often says more about those doing the defining than the realities of those being defined (Asad in Marshall 2015:s345).Currently, religion is understood as an inherently Christian category that emerged within the West’s colonial confrontation with the ‘other’ (Marshall 2014:S350, Asad in Lambek 2008:110-123). In the face of difference, a thing called ‘religion’ emerged as a conceptual tool for understanding the Christian and non-western ‘other’(ibid). As scholars like Asad and Lambek explain, religion as a category in itself must be called into question as belonging to a larger discourse of western modernity (Asad in Lambek 2008:110-123). The fact that we view praying for one’s recovery and seeing a doctor as incompatible with one another, is specific to modern western thought and not a universal given. The historical separation of church and state in the west (secularization), gave rise to a notion of religion as a specific domain separate from other spheres of life (Cannell 2010:89). Conceptually such divisions are possible. In reality however, such a division of labour doesn’t resonate with the complexities of reality at hand — realities that defy being bounded by such contours as ‘religious’ or ‘secular’. Michael Lambek even goes so far as to say that the opposing distinction between religion and secularism are in themselves ‘category mistakes’ (Lambek 2012). Rather than being mutually exclusive binary oppositions or phases of evolutionary development, Lambek sees ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ as incommensurable and therefore co-present systems of human thought and disciplinary practise (ibid). In other words, religion and secularism are different models of the world in its essence, as well as a model for existing in it and reasoning about it in a meaningful and ethical fashion (ibid).

While a range of theories and concepts allow for different points of access in studying how religion plays out in the world, no consensus is formed on what the essence of religion exactly is (de Vries 2008). This is because religion, as a saturated phenomenon and existential force in motion, seems to transcend all attempts to theorize it (de Vries 2008: 9,15). In the words of van de Port, the essence of Religion is the excess or the-rest-of-what-is to all reality

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definitions. It is the complexity of life that cannot be fully grasped through symbols and language, for grasping it necessarily strips reality of its wholeness and complexity (van de Port 2011:25). Following this train of thought, the essence of religion shifts from being a religious issue to a universally human one — the differences being only in how people and societies deal with this existential lack by creating meaningful stories to live by. In the words of Michael Jackson:

Van de Port conceptualizes the endless (re)production of meaningful stories as ‘cultural

productions of the real’ (van de Port 2011:255). With this understanding of reality as always in

excess of and ‘more than’ our individual and collective attempts to imagine, think about and talk about it, Lambek and van de Port both attempt to relocate ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ onto ontologically equal (equally unstable) ground. Such an understanding of reality is an important and even necessary starting point for allowing the (religious) ‘other’ to share the same time. As Johannes Fabian (2002) lays out, ‘time’ is anything but a neutral concept. Just as modernity places religion ‘behind’ secularism and the Global South ‘behind’ the ‘developed’ West, so too does anthropology often place its subject (the ‘other’) ‘behind’ anthropological analysis. The consequences of such a teleological model is that religion becomes rationalized and secularized. In this way, the ‘other’ continues to take the form of the ‘primitive’ — the less-developed and more irrational ‘other’ that doesn’t hold the rational tools to rise above their immediate circumstances. Relocating ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’, researcher and subject onto equally unstable ground creates a space for dialogue and entanglement between the two — a necessary point of departure for taking the (religious) ‘other’ seriously.

As a concept, religion has its own particular story — a story that is constantly being re-narrated as new movements like Pentecostalism emerge to disturb previous theories and

conceptualizations. Historically, the anthropological study of religion has its roots in the colonial missionary endeavour. It was in the historical confrontation with the colonial ‘other’ that a need to negotiate and neutralize cultural differences arose (Bell 2009(1997):259, Marshall

2014:S350). This led to a search for a common underlying structure, or in other words, the ‘My own assumption is that societies differ not in their essences but in the

ways in which they manage universally identical issues — keeping body and soul alive, bringing new life into the world, coping with separation and loss, creating ontological security. (Jackson 2009:12)’

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‘Ritual activity is tangible evidence that there is more to religion than a simple assent to belief: there are practises, institutions, changing customs and explanative systems (Bell 2009(1997):22).’

essence of religion. With anthropology’s withdrawal from missionary Christianity and its

establishment as a secular academic discipline, this problem was addressed with the emergence of ritual as a conceptual tool of analysis (Lambek 2012:1, Bell 2009:21). Understood to be the universal building block of religion (what unites all religions), ritual promised to be the key to understanding religion as a social and cultural formation (Bell 2009:259). Through elaborate theoretical models, the dynamics of religion could now be examined apart from questions concerning the truth or falsity of doctrinal beliefs.

Ritual theory is an attempt to give order and form to that otherwise elusive and mysterious force called ‘religion’. It sets apart certain combinations of actions, speech, moods, situations, places, people and objects, and imposes a logic that facilitates a secular understanding of the religious ‘other’. However, this is not without consequences. Western modernity’s political

self-conception ensures religion and ritual are opposed with secular reason on an evolutionary scale of progress (Bell 2009:200). Just as with the notion of religion, it was thought that the more rational societies became, the less ritualized they would become. On the opposite side of the coin, this implied that the more ritualized a society was, the less modern it was. Ritual became another means to view the ‘other’ as less developed, more ‘exotic’ and irrational (Fabian 2002(1983), Bell 2009:198). As Talal Asad points out, while ritual emerged as a category to neutralize cultural difference, it effectively only relocated difference (Asad in Bell 2009:265). Difference now came to be situated between the anthropologists that studied religion and the practitioners of religion who were being studied. Power was now situated between ‘those’ that believe and the anthropologist who shows what that belief is all about. While ‘they’ have a ‘sacred’, it is the anthropologist who shows how that sacred comes into being (van de Port 2011:26). As with many concepts discussed until now such as modernity, secularism, religion and ritual, what once evolved as conceptual tools of understanding then began to feed back into that very reality — shaping local perceptions along the way. Some churches for example — influenced by decennia of missionary writings and sociological analysis — began drawing on such research as guides in the formulation and implementation of rituals within their own churches and beyond (ibid:267). Ritual theory began to transform from being a theoretical

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While ritual, modernity, and religion are not ‘things’ as such, their conceptualizations have changed the way people (including anthropologists and clergymen) interpret and give form to their realities – all the while defining the conceptual limits to the anthropological study of the (religious) ‘other’ (Ferguson 2009:14; Bell 2009:265; Fabian 2002(1983):111). What I am trying to point out here is that the inherent binaries of western modernity run deep. Its teleological model and political self-conception produces many hierarchies that are often taken for granted as being natural. The fact that after my own ecstatic experience I was overwhelmed and

embarrassed by my ‘lack of control’ as a researcher, only goes to show how deeply imbedded are the modern assumptions that such ‘irrational’, emotional and sensuous behaviour is fitting for religious practitioners but unfitting for the anthropologist. Within the logic of such a modernity discourse, the student anthropologist should be ‘above’ such ‘primitive’ expressions and ‘outdated’ worldviews. These are some of the many facets at play, sustaining the binaries of western modernity and keeping religion as the subjugated ‘other’. Through critically

deconstructing the concepts at stake, I hope to meet the ‘other’ in a new way and negotiate the gaps between.

2.2 Embodying ‘Religion’

Recognizing the illusive character of that existential force called ‘religion’, Hent De Vries (2008) pleas for a change in the kind of academic questions we ask and the methods we employ. Instead of asking the universal and abstract question of what is religion, I agree with De Vries that it is more useful to begin by questioning and thinking about how religion is articulated within the domain of words, gestures, powers, sounds, silences, smells, sensations, shapes, colours, objects, affects and effects (de Vries et al.2008:14). It is in this local and concrete domain that religion as a universal concept can be traced (but not captured) as it continuously unfolds and transforms within social life. This approach, termed by de Vries as deep pragmatism, ideally sees the study of religion beginning in the most concrete of matters — wherein religion as an ever changing phenomenon and transcendent notion can be traced. Accessing religion and in particular Pentecostalism through a focus on experience, is an attempt to understand this global phenomenon by turning an anthropological eye to the singular — that is, the sensations,

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the Holy Spirit’. It is by asking questions of how instead of what and approaching Pentecostalism as a lived reality — as a way of meaningfully experiencing the world and one’s place within it. However, just as with the concept religion, the notion of experience is also an ambiguous and debated one within Anthropology. Here, I draw on a range of thinkers that all in various ways theorize experience as thinking about the relationship between two elements. These elements I sum up as generally as: 1) what people do and 2) how people perceive and talk about it (Throop 2003). This division corresponds with distinctions made by other thinkers such as: experience and perception (Clifford Geertz 1973), pre-phenomenal and phenomenal (Alfred Schutz 1967), flow and structure (Victor Turner 1986), disjunction and coherence (Desjarlais 1994,1997), reality and the Real (Jaques Lacan 1996; Throop 2003, Desjarlais & Throop 2001). While some emphasize the role of cultural perception, others in turn emphasize the role of pre-reflexive streams of consciousness. As Michael Jackson explains:

While distinctions between pre-reflexive and reflexive ways of knowing can be useful analytical tools for highlighting different aspects of being — in reality these aspects form rather an

interdependent blur. In a critique of such mind/body dualisms Thomas Csordas (1990) turns to the body as the existential starting point of culture. In his paradigmatic theory of embodiment, it is the body that is the most ambiguous and yet most concrete boundary between subject and object, self and world and where dualisms between structured consciousness, perception, talking and imagining and the sub-conscious, pre-reflexive flow of experience and practise conflate. In a similar vein with De Vries, Csordas pleas for a return to pre-objective and pre-abstract bodily beginnings as the starting point of analysis — that is, where the body meets the world and perception begins (Csordas:1990). Prior to talking and reflecting, we are first and foremost a moving, sensing ‘body in the world’ (ibid:1990). By linking the theory of embodiment with the western modernity discourse, a space of friction and critique arises. Modernity’s teleological model has imposed the idea that certain ways of ‘knowing’ are more modern and civilized than others (Fabian 2002(1983):160, van Ede 2009:71, Marshall 2014:S348). This has led to a hierarchizing of the senses which has deemed the analytical gaze as the most rational,

‘there are significant differences between the way the world appears to our consciousness when we are fully engaged in activity and the way it appears to us when we subject it to reflection and retrospective analysis’(Jackson in Throop 2003: 235).

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progressive and ‘noblest’ of the senses (van Ede 2009:62, Jackson 2009:13) . This ideological construction has influenced how the religious ‘other’ is approached and understood. Modernity’s binary oppositions can even be traced back to anthropology’s primary method of participant

observation, which traditionally has placed the analytical gaze above other forms of sensuous

engagement (ibid:70). By placing the body and senses central (including my own body and senses), I attempt to explore how other ways of ‘knowing’ are produced by touch, sound, movement and affect, and how this can inform new perceptions surrounding truth and

knowledge. I hold to the fact that perception necessarily involves a ‘politics of perception’ – as power is always imbedded in the process of ‘meaning-making’(Lambek 2012:9). The fact that religion in anthropology is studied from the ‘outside’, from within a secular academic

framework, means that religion is being subjugated to a perceptual level that is alien to itself and imposed with a secular rational logic.

For the purpose of my research I therefore pursue an analytical distinction between

experience and perception and see the relationship between the two as one of disjuncture, rather

than coherency. The fact that ‘there is more to life than can be put into words’ or that ‘our explanations do not always do justice to our experience’ disturbs all attempts to bridge experience with perception completely. Expressed frequently in verbal reactions such as “it’s difficult to describe”, “God starts where words end” or “you can’t understand it with your mind”, there appeared to be a gap for both myself and my informants between what was experienced and how it was talked about. In a similar vein to De Vries, Mattijs van de Port locates this disjuncture in the fact that the realm of perception is structured by and accessed through languageand is therefore of a different experiential order (Van de Port 2011:20). This gap between experience and perception also extends to my own experiences in the field and the challenge of writing-up such knowledge when back at the university. The problem of an asymmetrical translation of experience into language and religious experience into secular anthropological concepts, was and still is an issue for understanding experiences of the ‘manifestations of the Holy Spirit’.As van de Port and de Vries both agree on, rather than attempting to produce coherent accounts of what people believe, anthropology would be better off looking at how world-views (most importantly our own) come to be experienced as really real (ibid). For the congregants I encountered in the field, the body, senses and incontestable

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logic — making God be experienced as undoubtedly real (ibid).

The gaps between experience and perception serve to destabilize all notions of ‘truth’, be it ‘religious’ or ‘scientific’ by referring to an external and illusive truth agent, or what van der Port calls the-rest-of-what-is to our reality definitions (ibid:18). Following van de Port’s notion of the cultural production of the Real, such gaps between experience and perception ensure that religion and secularism, belief and reason as well as researcher and subject are placed on the same shaky ontological ground — allowing them to share the same ‘time’ and therefore enter into conversation (Fabian 2002 (1983):160,van de Port 2011:29). This is again an important historical corrective for both allowing the (religious) ‘other to be met on more equal terms and elevating ‘religion’ from its current status as non-empirical, alternative and pre-modern. This humbleness in the face of an external truth agent, call it the Real, the-rest-of-what-is, God or the Holy Spirit, points to an excess to all religious and scientific world making (including

anthropology). My research therefore negotiates such gaps in world-making by focussing on experiences of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit: that blurry boundary and ungraspable space between the pre-reflexive flow of consciousness and the reflexive act of perception that

entangles, destabilizes and transgresses boundaries between individual and collective,

empiricism and belief, religious and secular ways of ‘knowing’ as well as researcher and subject.

2.3 Beyond words: sensuous methods

By starting with a questions of how in relation to experience, I attempt to draw the reader into the experiential dimension of Pentecostalism and highlight the sensuous and embodied logic behind ‘belief’. Fore-grounding the realm of experience asked for a sensorial approach to methods of data collection, analysis and representation. Just as experience is of a different order than

perception, so is image and sound to some extent of a different order than language and text. The choice to use audio-visual methods was a way for me to further negotiate the gaps between experience and perception and creatively engage with the material and sensorial realm of experiences. Furthermore, it became a vital medium in the communicative output — translating religious experiences without completely rationalizing them. The fact that anthropology is a ‘discipline of words’ is reflected in the fact that the specialized track ‘visual ethnography’ is only offered by very few universities in the Netherlands. This doesn’t surprise me. In my experience,

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the rise of visual anthropology over the last decades seems to have induced a necessary classification crisis within anthropology — with the discipline left uncertain whether they are closer to science, art or literature. More importantly, technological innovations in audio-visual equipment as well as sophisticated editing programs, have allowed anthropology to empirically ground its analysis in new ways. These ongoing innovations have opened anthropology up to new excesses that both precede and exceed textual representations. This is because text allows for cumulative abstractions and facilitates for example using experience as a way to talk about other things — such as the

more abstract relationship between experience and perception or religion and secularism (MacDougall 2006:38). In the process of translation and interpretation however, academic text replaces a messy experiential reality with textual order and runs the danger of silencing the

voice of the other by translating local experiences into concepts alien to itself. The use of audio-visual methods not only attempts to give a face and voice to the ‘other’, but allows for excesses of sounds, gestures, utterances, colors, objects, practices and so on to ‘speak’. When trying to understand the realm of experiences, the most one can get is an approximation. Linking film with text is therefore a highly productive endeavor as it gives an extra dimension to the study of experience.

In my resulting film ‘Moved by the Spirit’, I ask the viewer to encounter the other sensuously and engage with the emotional and sensuous logic behind experiences of the Holy Spirit. The film was the result of two weeks filming at the end of my fieldwork period. I

emphasize here that my audio-visual piece is not intended to stand on its own as an ethnographic film. Both film and text serve to support, compliment and criticize the other in turn.Taken together, the project ‘Moved by the Spirit’ negotiates the gaps between the pre-reflexive realm of experience and the reflexive realm of perception, by bringing the excesses of image and sound

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into play. Juxtaposing audio-visual with text, negotiates the gap between experience and perception, material and abstract, researcher and subject as well as between the phases of field-work and ‘writing up’. This thesis therefore continuously makes links with the audio-visual through the use of descriptive narrative text, photos and references to film fragments. The Film focusses on three ritualized events that divide up time within Pentecostal community De Open

Deur — as spaces where the Holy Spirit is sought after and experienced on a regular basis. As it

is impossible to simultaneously read this thesis and watch the film, a choice has to be made about in which order to proceed. I am aware that whether one first reads the thesis or watches the film, will necessarily influence how the following film/thesis is interpreted. In order to promote critical reflection on the receiving end, I therefore encourage the audience to first watch the film, then read the thesis and finally going back and re-watch the film. If anything, it is my hope that the viewer will then reflect on how deeply imbedded western modernity discourses are. How the film is first perceived could say a lot about the viewers own framework for negotiating the ‘other’. It is my hope that the process of viewing the film, reading the thesis and re-viewing the film may trigger this reflexive process that in the end attempts to say just as much about

ourselves as the ‘other’.

My fieldwork was based primarily on experiencing participation. I emphasize experience here in the sense that, in my attempt to grasp congregants experiences, I felt I needed to go through similar motions and engage with a similar repertoire of movements, utterances, sounds, feelings and so on that were presented to me as the ‘manifestations of the Holy Spirit’. My three month research period saw me sliding messily back and forth on an immersive scale between observation and ‘going native’ — with the climax of my immersion process recounted at the beginning of this chapter, resembling the latter. Allowing for moments of immersion, deep knowledge, cultural intimacy or ‘going native’, was also the result of an intentional positioning in the field. Rather than going into my research with the idea that I, as an anthropologist, was in a better position to understand the ‘other’, I went in with the intention that congregants would necessarily broaden my horizons of experience and understanding — which might (and did) disrupt any pre-conceptions I had. I experienced field-work as a liminal space where I consciously ‘bracketed’ reality in my attempt to understand congregants and my own

experiences as they appeared to me through the body and senses (Knibbe & Versteeg 2008:56, van Ede 2009:70). This implied a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and temporarily refraining

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from any statement on truth or reality (Knibbe & Versteeg 2008:49). It was allowing myself to be ‘written by the world’ instead of ‘writing the world’, which is so characteristic of the western academic approach (van de Port 2011:16). Without the usual cognitive anchors to hold onto I often felt ‘lost’ as a researcher — a state similar to the one every believer claims to have experienced before conversion. A state that was maybe just as necessary for myself to be in to experience the ‘manifestations of the Holy Spirit’, as for the congregants I encountered in the field. It was through being ‘lost’ that one could be ‘found’ again – it was through an embracing of the unknown, or a ‘bracketing of reality’, that I could experience moments of revelation, insight and connection.

Experiencing participation was used to understand the sensuous pre-reflexive nature of experiences of the Holy Spirit as well as shed light on the ordering ‘politics of perception surrounding such experiences (Bryman 2008:499-512, Throop 2003:235). This brought me naturally to discourse analysis as another method of inquiry — for it is ‘through discourse that social interaction can be understood and from which social reality is produced’(Bryman

2008:508). Audio-visual and transcribed recordings of sermons, semi-structured interviews and conversations together with Pentecostal literature and music explicitly given to me by

congregants, all became building blocks for understanding how experiences were interpreted within a specific cultural framework. The fact that perceptions continuously diverged in relation to experiences revealed important gaps pointing to larger structuring discourses of ‘religion’ and ‘secular reason’. Gaps that I seek to highlight rather than rationalize away – as dynamic spaces where the boundaries of the religious and secular are (re)negotiated within experiences of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit. .

2.4 Ethical Reflections

My motivation for de-exoticizing religion within anthropology, stems from a personal biography that has allowed me over the years to weave between religious and academic worlds and dance all-encompassing with many differing notions of ‘truth’. Growing up in a non-denominational Christian community in Australia, I have experienced first-hand how completely ‘normal’, ‘logical’ and ‘modern’ it can be to believe that the world will end imminently, that I am the chosen one, and that spirits and demons are the driving force behind daily life. It is from this personal history that I inherited an affinity with certain behavior, perceptions, utterances, signs

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and symbols that have no doubt helped me negotiate boundaries between academic and religious life-worlds and between researcher and subject. What seemed so coherent and meaningful during my childhood however, developed cracks during my teenage years and eventually had to be discarded. What never left me though, was the memory of how utterly real and true it had all been. In the course of my study, the residue of this personal history has left me curious, skeptical and critical at viewing religion as a traditional and irrational ‘relic from the past’. This ‘othering’ seems to me to create differences where maybe there are more similarities and particulars where maybe there are more universals. Furthermore, such analysis’ posit religion within a modernity discourse that gives science the monopoly on truth. My research was, and still is, an attempt to question and reveal where spaces are shared and boundaries permeable: modern and traditional, religiosity and secularism, researcher and subject and ultimately past and present.

My personal biography indirectly facilitated a phenomenological approach to field work that emphasized the participating side of participant observation. During my childhood years, I had inherited a repertoire of signs and symbols, utterances and behavior that intersected that of my research community. This shared domain meant that my immersion was often experienced by both myself and congregants as natural. Remarks in trend of; “you have really become a part of the community”, “it feels like we’ve known you for years” and ”it just comes naturally” seemed to confirm this fact. A phenomenological approach meant understanding was gained by doing, and knowledge was formed in interaction with my research community. Singing, praying,

shopping, cooking, baby-sitting, playing piano, attending meetings and making coffee all became important elements of field work. These often mundane tasks were the spaces where trust and respect were forged and the level of ‘cultural intimacy’ negotiated (Pinto 2010:472). Such activities provided important windows for situating congregants’ experiences of the Holy Spirit within the context of their daily lives.

Leading up to fieldwork, I had anticipated that gaining access to my research community would be my main difficulty (this was due to the vast amount of rejections I had received while trying to find a Pentecostal community willing to take a ‘researcher’ on board). The

consequences however of my personal history, character and taking a phenomenological

approach ended up at moments being an overdose rather than lack of access. I regularly straddled the line of ‘going native’ (converting), of being emotionally drained as a result of the level of immersion as well as dealing with unexpected and sometimes unwanted kinds of relationships.

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Rather than struggling to get closer to congregants, I often found myself thinking about ways to keep the right amount of distance. This resulted in a change of tactics in the second month of my research. Instead of being full time with Pentecostal community De Open Deur, I opted for staying weekends with various congregants in Alphen aan den Rijn and making day trips during the week. Such a move helped keep my main informants at slightly more of a distance without having to confront them personally. I was convinced that a confrontation would have radically changed my position in the community and jeopardized my research project at that stage. The result of this change of tactics was that it actually increased my level of immersion rather than decrease it. This was because the feeling of having to emotionally protect myself decreased with more distance — which then increased my level of engagement when I was there. It also

increased my integrity status within the group and consequently the general level of acceptance and access.

Pursuing physical distance allowed me to establish other valuable kinds of contacts with my research population through phone calls, email and WhatsApp. Such virtual contact opened up new channels of communication and a level of vulnerability by congregants that would not have so easily happened face to face. Doubts, dilemmas and complaints seemed easier for informants to share through WhatsApp messages than in person. On the flip side though, I also experienced this virtual contact as a form of social control. Telephone calls as late as 2 am and WhatsApp messages on a 24 hour basis meant that there was no space anymore that I could claim as ‘private’. Not picking up or reacting on time also meant justifying my choices to the community which I often experienced as controlling. Virtual communication, which escaped the eyes of the community, also opened up a space for informants to attempt to come closer on an intimate level. While I experienced it often in a negative light, it also showed me how such virtual links could help forge a positive sense of community for those caught on the margins of society or looking for ‘connectedness’ in a world that many congregants described as

‘disconnected’ and ‘alienating’.

It was exactly because of the kind of research topic I was exploring that I felt the ethical need at times to emotionally protect both my subjects and myself. At the request of De Open

Deur community and as a pre-requisite for field-work access, a contract between myself and my

informants was made that guaranteed De Open Deur consensual use of all information and film footage. The contract only granted me permission to circulate the thesis and film within the walls

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