Going to Pentecost: An Experimental Approach to Studies in Pentecostalism

Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.

Annelin Eriksen is Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. She is the author of Gender, Christianity and Change in Vanuatu (Routledge, 2008), and her research mainly focuses on gender, social and cultural change, future, cosmology, and Christianity.

Ruy Llera Blanes is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. He is the author of A Prophetic Trajectory (2014, Berghahn), and is editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research.

Michelle MacCarthy is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada). She is the author of Making the Modern Primitive: Cultural Tourism in the Trobriand Islands (University of Hawaii Press, 2016).