Devaka Premawardhana
Biographic Data
| ID | 185173 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Devaka Premawardhana |
| GIVEN NAMES | Devaka |
| FAMILY NAME | Premawardhana |
| SIGNATURE | PREMAWARDHANA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7469-0660 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Too Much Christianity in the Anthropology of Christianity? Making Space for Ambiguous, Ambivalent, and Multiply Religious Christians
The framework of the anthropology of Christianity has, since its inception in the early 2000s, opened new and vital domains of ethnographic inquiry. However, while researchers working with or within the anthropology of Christianity have often admirably reflected self-critically on it, there persists in the framework itself a methodological risk, namely the risk of limiting the object of inquiry so much that it fails to do justice to the multiplex…
Religious Plurality in Africa: Coexistence, Conviviality, Conflict
Between Life and Thought: Existential Anthropology and the Study of Religion
Bringing together major scholars, Between Life and Thought explores the burgeoning subfield of existential anthropology as a truly humanistic social science, a space of convergence for anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies.
Beyond the One: Toward a Multireligious Framework for the Study of World Christianity
In recent decades, numerous analytical and conceptual discourses have arisen in support of a shift toward comparative and multireligious frameworks for the study of religion. These include critiques of conventional mono-religious approaches to the anthropology of religion, vibrant discussions around comparative theology and multiple religious belonging, and the emergence of interreligious studies as a field. This article explores these and simila…
Covenantal Pluralism in Multi-Religious Mozambique: Precedents, Problems, and Potentials
This article explores possibilities for implementing the project of covenantal pluralism in Mozambique. It starts by analyzing the history of the construction of the modern state in Mozambique and the contradictions of colonial and post-colonial interventions regarding the ideas and practices of secularism. The chapter argues that Mozambican society is modeled on a culturally, religiously, and linguistically diverse milieu that represents a poten…
Chapter 1. Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique
Expecting the Unexpected: Pentecostal Miracles as Performance, Production, and Placeholder
Mobility, Relationality, and the Decolonizing of Religious Studies: A Response to the Special Issue
This response to the special issue synthesizes its contributions into an argument for disaggregating mobility and modernity. Indigenous modes of physical and religious mobility put the lie to conventional constructions of indigenous peoples, including academic constructions of indigenous religions, as stuck in place and stuck in time. This special issue offers a profound critique of religious studies and of all hegemonic paradigms that associate …
Faith in African Lived Christianity: Bridging Anthropological and Theological Perspectives, written by Lauterbach, Karen, and Mika Vähäkangas
Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith
Relocating World Christianity makes one of the most robust theoretical interventions into scholarship on World Christianity since the field first took shape through the efforts of missiologists and theologians. Without denying the value of existing approaches, this volume makes the case for a wider interdisciplinarity that encompasses history, anthropology, and political science, and draws on recent shifts within these disciplines to overcome wha…
In Praise of Ambiguity: Everyday Christianity through the Lens of Existential Anthropology
A recent theoretical move among ethnographers of religion challenges the social scientific tendency to reduce people’s beliefs and practices to one or another religious tradition, to a religious affiliation assumed to operate as a master identity. Some scholars advancing this move draw on the insights of existential anthropology to emphasize the ambiguities and indeterminacies of religious life. The aim of this article is to argue for the relevan…
Reconversion and Retrieval: Nonlinear Change in African Catholic Practice
Against models of conversion that presume a trajectory or a progression from one religion to another, this article proposes a less linear, more complex, and ultimately more empirical understanding of religious change in Africa. It does so by foregrounding the particularities of Roman Catholicism-its privileging of materiality and practice, and of community and tradition. In the course of so doing, this article explores the overlaps between modern…
Introduction: Orienting Africana Religious Studies—East African and Indian Ocean Perspectives
Presuming that such themes as diaspora and migration pertain to Africana peoples of the Indian Ocean world no less than they do to those of the better-known Atlantic, this special issue opens the study of Africana religions to an expanded geographic range and the insights that come with such an expansion. This introductory essay clarifies the special issue's rationale, sketches the relevant historical and geographic contexts, and proposes three a…
When Pentecostalism Fails: Religious Deconversion in Northern Mozambique
The often termed “explosion” of Pentecostal Christianity is one of today's astonishing religious phenomena. Yet what might be gained by shifting attention from the amply documented places where Pentecostal churches flourish to the relatively unknown places where they fail? In this paper, I report on the ambivalence with which Pentecostalism has been received by the Makhuwa-speaking people of northern Mozambique. The Makhuwa are not averse to the …
Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique
Anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana arrived in Africa to study the much reported "explosion" of Pentecostalism, the spread of which has indeed been massive. It is the continent's fastest growing form of Christianity and one of the world's fastest growing religious movements. Yet Premawardhana found no evidence for this in the province of Mozambique where he worked. His research suggests that much can be gained by including such places in the stor…
Egress and Regress: Pentecostal Precursors and Parallels in Northern Mozambique
Based on fieldwork among the Makhuwa of northern Mozambique, this essay explores how non-Pentecostal models of transformation shape a people's manner of relating to Pentecostalism. Radical change has long been constitutive of Makhuwa history and subjectivity. Yet Makhuwa patterns of change, commonly conceived in terms of movement, entail regress as much as egress - circular mobilities that disrupt linear teleologies. State administrators and Pent…
Transformational Tithing
This article examines a controversy surrounding the theology of prosperity associated with neo-Pentecostalism: the aggressive soliciting of tithes from largely underclass worshippers, and the eagerness of those worshippers to respond beyond what seems financially sound. Drawing on ethnographic research among Cape Verdean immigrants in a Boston branch of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, I argue that a sense of empowerment often accompan…
Between Logocentrism and Loco centrism: Alambrista Challenges to Traditional Theology
“ Olhe, um terrorista !” yelled the construction worker as I passed. I was living in Salvador, Brazil, where eighty percent of the population identifies as something other than white. Though not sharing the same ancestry as my neighbors, I never, as a moreno (brown-skinned person), stood out to them as different. Yet to the man who pointed me out that day, I did. He apparently had been watching the news: another round of Arab men arrested on susp…
Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique
Anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana arrived in Africa to study the much reported "explosion" of Pentecostalism, the spread of which has indeed been massive. It is the continent's fastest growing form of Christianity and one of the world's fastest growing religious movements. Yet Premawardhana found no evidence for this in the province of Mozambique where he worked. His research suggests that much can be gained by including such places in the stor…
Transformational Tithing
This article examines a controversy surrounding the theology of prosperity associated with neo-Pentecostalism: the aggressive soliciting of tithes from largely underclass worshippers, and the eagerness of those worshippers to respond beyond what seems financially sound. Drawing on ethnographic research among Cape Verdean immigrants in a Boston branch of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, I argue that a sense of empowerment often accompan…
Reconversion and Retrieval: Nonlinear Change in African Catholic Practice
Against models of conversion that presume a trajectory or a progression from one religion to another, this article proposes a less linear, more complex, and ultimately more empirical understanding of religious change in Africa. It does so by foregrounding the particularities of Roman Catholicism-its privileging of materiality and practice, and of community and tradition. In the course of so doing, this article explores the overlaps between modern…
Egress and Regress: Pentecostal Precursors and Parallels in Northern Mozambique
Based on fieldwork among the Makhuwa of northern Mozambique, this essay explores how non-Pentecostal models of transformation shape a people's manner of relating to Pentecostalism. Radical change has long been constitutive of Makhuwa history and subjectivity. Yet Makhuwa patterns of change, commonly conceived in terms of movement, entail regress as much as egress - circular mobilities that disrupt linear teleologies. State administrators and Pent…
Covenantal Pluralism in Multi-Religious Mozambique: Precedents, Problems, and Potentials
This article explores possibilities for implementing the project of covenantal pluralism in Mozambique. It starts by analyzing the history of the construction of the modern state in Mozambique and the contradictions of colonial and post-colonial interventions regarding the ideas and practices of secularism. The chapter argues that Mozambican society is modeled on a culturally, religiously, and linguistically diverse milieu that represents a poten…
Between Logocentrism and Loco centrism: Alambrista Challenges to Traditional Theology
“ Olhe, um terrorista !” yelled the construction worker as I passed. I was living in Salvador, Brazil, where eighty percent of the population identifies as something other than white. Though not sharing the same ancestry as my neighbors, I never, as a moreno (brown-skinned person), stood out to them as different. Yet to the man who pointed me out that day, I did. He apparently had been watching the news: another round of Arab men arrested on susp…
Transformational Tithing
This article examines a controversy surrounding the theology of prosperity associated with neo-Pentecostalism: the aggressive soliciting of tithes from largely underclass worshippers, and the eagerness of those worshippers to respond beyond what seems financially sound. Drawing on ethnographic research among Cape Verdean immigrants in a Boston branch of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, I argue that a sense of empowerment often accompan…
When Pentecostalism Fails: Religious Deconversion in Northern Mozambique
The often termed “explosion” of Pentecostal Christianity is one of today's astonishing religious phenomena. Yet what might be gained by shifting attention from the amply documented places where Pentecostal churches flourish to the relatively unknown places where they fail? In this paper, I report on the ambivalence with which Pentecostalism has been received by the Makhuwa-speaking people of northern Mozambique. The Makhuwa are not averse to the …
Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique
Anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana arrived in Africa to study the much reported "explosion" of Pentecostalism, the spread of which has indeed been massive. It is the continent's fastest growing form of Christianity and one of the world's fastest growing religious movements. Yet Premawardhana found no evidence for this in the province of Mozambique where he worked. His research suggests that much can be gained by including such places in the stor…
Egress and Regress: Pentecostal Precursors and Parallels in Northern Mozambique
Based on fieldwork among the Makhuwa of northern Mozambique, this essay explores how non-Pentecostal models of transformation shape a people's manner of relating to Pentecostalism. Radical change has long been constitutive of Makhuwa history and subjectivity. Yet Makhuwa patterns of change, commonly conceived in terms of movement, entail regress as much as egress - circular mobilities that disrupt linear teleologies. State administrators and Pent…
Introduction: Orienting Africana Religious Studies—East African and Indian Ocean Perspectives
Presuming that such themes as diaspora and migration pertain to Africana peoples of the Indian Ocean world no less than they do to those of the better-known Atlantic, this special issue opens the study of Africana religions to an expanded geographic range and the insights that come with such an expansion. This introductory essay clarifies the special issue's rationale, sketches the relevant historical and geographic contexts, and proposes three a…
In Praise of Ambiguity: Everyday Christianity through the Lens of Existential Anthropology
A recent theoretical move among ethnographers of religion challenges the social scientific tendency to reduce people’s beliefs and practices to one or another religious tradition, to a religious affiliation assumed to operate as a master identity. Some scholars advancing this move draw on the insights of existential anthropology to emphasize the ambiguities and indeterminacies of religious life. The aim of this article is to argue for the relevan…
Reconversion and Retrieval: Nonlinear Change in African Catholic Practice
Against models of conversion that presume a trajectory or a progression from one religion to another, this article proposes a less linear, more complex, and ultimately more empirical understanding of religious change in Africa. It does so by foregrounding the particularities of Roman Catholicism-its privileging of materiality and practice, and of community and tradition. In the course of so doing, this article explores the overlaps between modern…
Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith
Relocating World Christianity makes one of the most robust theoretical interventions into scholarship on World Christianity since the field first took shape through the efforts of missiologists and theologians. Without denying the value of existing approaches, this volume makes the case for a wider interdisciplinarity that encompasses history, anthropology, and political science, and draws on recent shifts within these disciplines to overcome wha…
Chapter 1. Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique
Expecting the Unexpected: Pentecostal Miracles as Performance, Production, and Placeholder
Mobility, Relationality, and the Decolonizing of Religious Studies: A Response to the Special Issue
This response to the special issue synthesizes its contributions into an argument for disaggregating mobility and modernity. Indigenous modes of physical and religious mobility put the lie to conventional constructions of indigenous peoples, including academic constructions of indigenous religions, as stuck in place and stuck in time. This special issue offers a profound critique of religious studies and of all hegemonic paradigms that associate …
Faith in African Lived Christianity: Bridging Anthropological and Theological Perspectives, written by Lauterbach, Karen, and Mika Vähäkangas
Religious Plurality in Africa: Coexistence, Conviviality, Conflict
Between Life and Thought: Existential Anthropology and the Study of Religion
Bringing together major scholars, Between Life and Thought explores the burgeoning subfield of existential anthropology as a truly humanistic social science, a space of convergence for anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies.
Beyond the One: Toward a Multireligious Framework for the Study of World Christianity
In recent decades, numerous analytical and conceptual discourses have arisen in support of a shift toward comparative and multireligious frameworks for the study of religion. These include critiques of conventional mono-religious approaches to the anthropology of religion, vibrant discussions around comparative theology and multiple religious belonging, and the emergence of interreligious studies as a field. This article explores these and simila…
Covenantal Pluralism in Multi-Religious Mozambique: Precedents, Problems, and Potentials
This article explores possibilities for implementing the project of covenantal pluralism in Mozambique. It starts by analyzing the history of the construction of the modern state in Mozambique and the contradictions of colonial and post-colonial interventions regarding the ideas and practices of secularism. The chapter argues that Mozambican society is modeled on a culturally, religiously, and linguistically diverse milieu that represents a poten…
Too Much Christianity in the Anthropology of Christianity? Making Space for Ambiguous, Ambivalent, and Multiply Religious Christians
The framework of the anthropology of Christianity has, since its inception in the early 2000s, opened new and vital domains of ethnographic inquiry. However, while researchers working with or within the anthropology of Christianity have often admirably reflected self-critically on it, there persists in the framework itself a methodological risk, namely the risk of limiting the object of inquiry so much that it fails to do justice to the multiplex…
Sociology (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 works) · Christianity (9 works) · Religious studies (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Christian Theology and Mission (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Political science (7 works)