Pentecostalism

==Assessment from the social sciences==

===Zora Neale Hurston===
[[File:Peoples Church Dublin.jpg|thumb|This Pentecostalist centre of worship has incorporated a populist label into its name, the Peoples Church Dublin City]] 
[[Zora Neale Hurston]] performed anthropological and sociological studies examining the spread of Pentecostalism, published posthumously in a collection of essays called ''The Sanctified Church''.<ref name="Hurston">Hurston, Zora Neale. ''The Sanctified Church'' (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1983).</ref> According to scholar of religion Ashon Crawley, Hurston's analysis is important because she understood the class struggle that this seemingly new religiocultural movement articulated: "The Sanctified Church is a protest against the high-brow tendency in Negro Protestant congregations as the Negroes gain more education and wealth."<ref name="Hurston" /> She stated that this sect was "a revitalizing element in Negro music and religion" and that this collection of groups was "putting back into Negro religion those elements which were brought over from Africa and grafted onto Christianity." Crawley would go on to argue that the shouting that Hurston documented was evidence of what Martinique psychoanalyst [[Frantz Fanon]] called the refusal of positionality wherein "no strategic position is given preference" as the creation of, the grounds for, social form.<ref>Crawley, Ashon T. 2017. ''Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility''. New York: Fordham University Press. Page 106</ref>

===Rural Pentecostalism===

Pentecostalism is a religious phenomenon more visible in the cities. However, it has attracted significant rural populations in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Sociologist David Martin<ref>Martin, David. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 221–29</ref> has called attention on an overview on the rural Protestantism in Latin America, focusing on the indigenous and peasant conversion to Pentecostalism. The cultural change resulting from the countryside modernization has reflected on the peasant way of life. Consequently, many peasants – especially in Latin America – have experienced collective conversion to different forms of Pentecostalism and interpreted as a response to [[modernization]] in the countryside<ref name="auto">Annis, Sheldon (2000) "Production of Christians Catholics and Protestants in a Guatemalan Town." In On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Religion in Modern Latin America, edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett. Wilmington, DE: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 189–218.</ref><ref name="diva-portal.org">{{cite web| url = http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1222013/FULLTEXT01.pdf| title = Alves, Leonardo Marcondes (2018). Give us this day our daily bread: The moral order of Pentecostal peasants in South Brazil. Master's thesis in Cultural Anthropology. Uppsala universitet.| access-date = 2018-12-26| archive-date = 2018-12-23| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20181223233708/http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1222013/FULLTEXT01.pdf| url-status = live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|last1=Alves|first1=Leonardo Marcondes|title=Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions|year=2018|isbn=978-3-319-08956-0|pages=1–5|chapter=Pentecostalism in Latin America, Rural Versus Urban|doi=10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_502-1}}</ref><ref>Chaves, Alexandre da Silva (2011) Presença Pentecostal Numa Sociedade de Transição Rural-Urbana: A Igreja Pentecostal Chegada de Cristo E Curas Divinas: Estudo de Caso. Master's thesis for Sciences of Religion. Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie.</ref>

Rather than a mere religious shift from folk Catholicism to Pentecostalism, Peasant Pentecostals have dealt with agency to employ many of their cultural resources to respond development projects in a modernization framework<ref name="doi.org">{{Cite journal|last1=Chandler|first1=Paul|year=2007|title=The Moral Hazards of Christian Obligations in Brazil's Rural ''Zona'' da Mata|journal=Culture and Religion|volume=8|pages=33–50|doi=10.1080/14755610601157104|s2cid=144671783}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Freeman|first1=Dena|year=2013|title=Pentecostalism in a Rural Context: Dynamics of Religion and Development in Southwest Ethiopia|url=http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/67830/1/Freeman_Pentecostalism%20in%20a%20rural%20context.pdf|journal=PentecoStudies|volume=12|issue=2|pages=231–249|doi=10.1558/ptcs.v12i2.231|access-date=2019-04-02|archive-date=2019-04-12|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190412074527/http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/67830/1/Freeman_Pentecostalism%20in%20a%20rural%20context.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>FERREIRA, Fabio Alves; ALMEIDA, Milene. A mulher pentecostal na luta por terra: uma análise do assentamento Luiza Ferreira. ACENO-Revista de Antropologia do Centro-Oeste, v. 3, n. 5, p. 125-140, 2016.</ref>

Researching Guatemalan peasants and indigenous communities, Sheldon Annis<ref name="auto"/> argued that conversion to Pentecostalism was a way to quit the burdensome obligations of the cargo-system. Mayan folk Catholicism has many fiestas with a rotation leadership who must pay the costs and organize the yearly patron-saint festivities. One of the socially-accepted ways to opt out those obligations was to convert to Pentecostalism. By doing so, the Pentecostal Peasant engage in a "[[penny capitalism]]". In the same lines of moral obligations but with different mechanism economic self-help, Paul Chandler<ref name="doi.org" /> has compared the differences between Catholic and Pentecostal peasants, and has found a web of reciprocity among Catholics [[compadrazgo|compadres]], which the Pentecostals lacked. However, Alves<ref name="diva-portal.org"/> has found that the different Pentecostal congregations replaces the compadrazgo system and still provide channels to exercise the reciprocal obligations that the peasant moral economy demands.

Conversion to Pentecostalism provides a rupture with a socially disrupted past while allowing to maintain elements of the peasant ethos. Brazil has provided many cases to evaluate this thesis. Hoekstra<ref>Hoekstra, Angela (1991) "Pentecostalismo rural en Pernambuco (Brasil): algo más que una protesta simbólica." In Algo más que opio: una lectura antropológica del Pentecostalismo Latinoamericano y Caribeño, edited by Barbara Boudewijnse, André Droogers, and Frans Kamsteeg. San José, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones. pp. 43–56.</ref> has found out that rural Pentecostalism more as a continuity of the traditional past though with some ruptures. Anthropologist Brandão<ref>Brandão, Carlos Rodrigues. 2007. Os Deuses Do Povo. 2nd ed. Uberlândia: EDUFU.</ref> sees the small town and rural Pentecostalism as another face for folk religiosity instead of a path to modernization. With similar finding, Abumanssur<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Abumanssur|first1=Edin Sued|year=2011|title= A conversão ao pentecostalismo em comunidades tradicionais |trans-title=The conversion to Pentecostalism in traditional communities|journal= Horizonte|volume=9|issue=22|doi=10.5752/P.2175-5841.2011v9n22p396|doi-access=free}}</ref> regards Pentecostalism as an attempt to conciliate traditional worldviews of folk religion with modernity.

Identity shift has been noticed among rural converts to Pentecostalism. Indigenous and peasant communities have found in the Pentecostal religion a new identity that helps them navigate the challenges posed by modernity.<ref>Alvarsson, Jan-Åke, and Rita Laura Segato, eds (2003) Religions in Transition: Mobility, Merging and Globalization in the Emergence of Contemporary Religious Adhesion. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis – Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology No 37. Uppsala: Uppsala universitet.</ref><ref>Althoff, Andrea. 2014. Divided by Faith and Ethnicity: Religious Pluralism and the Problem of Race in Guatemala. Vol. 62. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter.</ref><ref>Barros, Valéria Esteves Nascimento (2003) Da Casa de Rezas à Congregação Cristã no Brasil: O Pentecostalismo Guarani na Terra Indígena Laranjinha/PR. Master's thesis in Social Anthropology. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.</ref><ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:130447/FULLTEXT01.pdf| title = Kristek, Gabriela (2005) 'We Are New People Now' Pentecostalism as a Means of Ethnic Continuity and Social Acceptance among the Wichí of Argentina. Master's thesis in Cultural Anthropology. Uppsala universitet.| access-date = 2018-12-26| archive-date = 2019-04-12| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20190412074528/http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:130447/FULLTEXT01.pdf| url-status = live}}</ref> This identity shift corroborates the thesis that the peasant Pentecostals pave their own ways when facing modernization.