Naomi Haynes
Biographic Data
| ID | 72334 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Naomi Haynes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Naomi |
| FAMILY NAME | Haynes |
| SIGNATURE | HAYNES N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6909-7574 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 472 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
A Divine Season: Christian Nationalist Activism in Zambia
Claiming what is theirs by right: The elective affinity between the prosperity Gospel and Christian nationalism
This article traces the elective affinity between the prosperity gospel and Christian nationalism. This elective affinity is the result of a shared theological framework through which Pentecostal Christians make legal claims on wealth and territory. Through an analysis of the theological homologies between the prosperity gospel and Christian nationalism, this article shows how each of these movements reaffirms and reinvigorates the influence of t…
The Anthropologist in the Evangelical Cinematic Gaze
Presidents, priests, and prophets: Covenantal Christian nationalism and the challenge of biblical analogy
This article explores the elaboration and application of the Old Testament idea of 'covenant' among Zambian church leaders who are Christian nationalist activists. In this framework, Zambia serves as an analogue of biblical Israel, while contemporary government and church leaders are the analogues of Old Testament kings, priests, and prophets. This covenantal approach presents challenges. On the one hand, government support for Christian national…
Book forum on Joel Robbins’ Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life
Dialogues: Anthropology and Theology
The past five years have witnessed an increased interest in a dialogue between anthropology and theology, evidenced in part by a suite of edited volumes (e.g. Lauterbach & Vähäkangas 2020; Lemons 2018; Tomlinson & Mathews 2018). Analyses informed by this interdisciplinary nexus have demonstrated the utility of theological concepts for anthropological inquiry (e.g. Robbins 2020; Tomlinson 2020; Williams Green 2021). The following series of dialogu…
Taking Dominion in a Christian Nation: North American Political Theology in an African Context
This article traces some of the North American theological influences on contemporary Christian nationalism in Zambia. Beginning with an overview of key tenets of Christian Reconstruction and the New Apostolic Reformation, I show how these movements have influenced the writing of some key players in Zambia’s Christian nationalist project. I also demonstrate how these authors have modified the Western ideas that have shaped their thought. This ana…
Concretizing the Christian Nation
In October 2015 the Zambian president broke ground on a new National House of Prayer, a building project meant to reaffirm the country's status as Africa's only self-proclaimed “Christian nation.” Over the next four years architects produced three separate sets of plans for the House of Prayer, images of which were circulated among Zambian Christians, primarily church leaders. Each set of plans has provoked conversations about what the House of P…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
The Subversive Power of Ethnography: Lessons from Anthropology
This article explores the theoretical and political potential of ethnographic research for World Christianity by focusing on the “subversive power” of this methodology. Through a discussion of four aspects of ethnographic research: the use of the term “informants,” a commitment to holism, the political power of participant-observation, and the “double location” of ethnographic practice, I argue that the primary objective of ethnography is to dece…
The Expansive Present: A New Model of Christian Time
One of the most productive lines of inquiry in the anthropology of Christianity has explored how Christian adherence structures time. The organizing idea here has been rupture, whether the break with the pagan past at conversion or the expected break of the apocalyptic future. In contrast to this "punctuated" view of time, this article examines a Christian temporality focused not on a past or future break, but rather on an expansive present. For …
The Benefit of the Doubt: On the Relationship Between Doubt and Power
Anthropological studies of doubt have typically highlighted its productivity, pointing to the space that doubt opens to question established frameworks. This article builds on these observations by exploring an instance of doubt that I argue is unproductive. For Pentecostals on the Zambian Copperbelt, the fact that they do not receive the extravagant riches promised by the prosperity gospel—a Christian movement that is central to their faith—is n…
Hierarchy and Value: Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order
Hierarchy and Value: Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order
Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency. But in some places globalization has spurred the emergence of new forms of hierarchy—or the reemergence of old forms—as people try to reconstitute an imagined past of stable moral order. This is evident from the Islamic revival in the Middl…
Why Can't a Pastor Be President of a "Christian Nation"? Pentecostal Politics as Religious Mediation
Why has Nevers Mumba, one of Zambia's most famous Pentecostal leaders, been so unsuccessful in his two presidential bids? Previous analyses have blamed Mumba's political woes on a presumed Pentecostal belief that politics is a lesser vocation than the pastorate. In contrast to these interpretations, I argue that Pentecostals in Zambia are very committed to the notion that, at least ideally, their leaders should be pastors, and more specifically t…
Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt
Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, this book explores Pentecostal Christianity in the kind of community where it often flourishes: a densely populated neighborhood in the heart of an extraction economy. On the Zambian Copperbelt, Pentecostal adherence embeds believers in relationships that help them to “move” and progress in life. These efforts give Copperbelt Pentecostalism its particular local character, shaping ritual practice, gen…
Learning to pray the Pentecostal way: Language and personhood on the Zambian Copperbelt
This article examines the role of prayer in the production of the Pentecostal person on the Zambian Copperbelt. While Pentecostal prayer is partly focused on private concerns, and therefore reinforces a classic Protestant notion of bounded, individualised personhood, success in this practice depends on a believer’s ability to incorporate the language of the Pentecostal community. Prayer is also therefore dependent on a model of personhood in whic…
Contemporary Africa Through the Theory of Louis Dumont
This article responds to a trend in recent anthropological scholarship in Africa that has overemphasized a lack of social organization following the advancement of neoliberal reforms across the continent. Using a theoretical framework informed by the theory of Louis Dumont, I show that social organization remains an important analytical topic in times of crisis, and that this is best apprehended through an analysis of values. The ethnographic foc…
Conversion beyond “Rice Christians”
Comment on Roberts, Nathaniel. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in a Chennai Slum. Oakland: University of California Press
Hierarchy, Value, and the Value of Hierarchy
Many of the communities in which anthropologists work are hierarchically organized, and the people who live in them often describe this arrangement in positive terms. Nevertheless, anthropologists rarely paint hierarchy in a favorable light. This special issue aims to question this tendency with ethnographic insights into social contexts where hierarchy is regarded as a desirable social good. By way of an introduction to the research articles, we…
“Zambia Shall be Saved!”
This article explores the increasingly common argument that Pentecostal Christianity, far from being apolitical, is very politically engaged. I make two contributions to this discussion. First, my analysis provides a detailed account of how Pentecostal religious life serves as political engagement in an especially significant ethnographic context: Zambia, the only African country to make a constitutional declaration that it is a “Christian nation…
Egalitarianism and hierarchy in Copperbelt religious practice: On the social work of Pentecostal ritual
This article offers an analysis of Pentecostal ritual life focused on a core tension in this religion, namely that between the egalitarianism associated with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all believers and the hierarchy that follows from the charismatic authority of church leaders. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Zambian Copperbelt, the author traces out the egalitarian and hierarchical aspects of Pentecostal ritual in order to d…
Change andChisunguin Zambia's Time of Aids
Through an examination of amafunde - a Bemba word meaning 'instruction', which refers to the training given to a young woman before her marriage - this article explores the social changes that have followed widespread HIV infection on the Zambian Copperbelt. Amafunde today are marked by openness between senior women and those they train for marriage, an openness that they encourage their charges to adopt in married life. This emphasis on direct o…
Affordances and Audiences: Finding the Difference Christianity Makes
The wide-ranging contributions to this special issue point to the extraordinary variety of Christian adherence around the world. In the light of this multiplicity, it has become increasingly important to develop frameworks that will allow us to conceptualize Christianity as a multifaceted, labile, but nevertheless identifiable object. Drawing together the concept of affordances, as used by Webb Keane in his contribution to this issue, as well as …
On the Potential and Problems of Pentecostal Exchange
In this article, I draw on ethnography from the Zambian Copperbelt to examine the social productivity of the Pentecostal prosperity gospel, a Christian movement centered on the idea that it is God's will for believers to be wealthy. In the light of the challenges that recent economic history has posed to Copperbelt relational life, Pentecostalism has become an important source of hierarchy-and, therefore, of social organization. This social produ…
The Anthropology of Christianity
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical "repressed" of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself…
The Anthropology of Christianity
This article surveys the literature that constitutes the newly emergent anthropology of Christianity. Arguing that the development of this sub-discipline was impeded until recently by anthropology's theoretical framing and empirical interests, this article explains that demographic and world-historical forces have made it such that anthropology has had to recently come to terms with Christianity as an ethnographic object. In doing so, anthropolog…
Pentecostalism and the morality of money: Prosperity, inequality, and religious sociality on the Zambian Copperbelt
As part of a growing body of work focused on the social implications of Pentecostal Christianity, this article explores one of the ways that this religion is shaping relational life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Through a discussion of the changing nature of the prosperity gospel, I show how Pentecostalism embeds believers in social relationships that often extend beyond their religious cohort. In the absence of the lavish wealth promised by prosper…
On the Potential and Problems of Pentecostal Exchange
In this article, I draw on ethnography from the Zambian Copperbelt to examine the social productivity of the Pentecostal prosperity gospel, a Christian movement centered on the idea that it is God's will for believers to be wealthy. In the light of the challenges that recent economic history has posed to Copperbelt relational life, Pentecostalism has become an important source of hierarchy-and, therefore, of social organization. This social produ…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
The Expansive Present: A New Model of Christian Time
One of the most productive lines of inquiry in the anthropology of Christianity has explored how Christian adherence structures time. The organizing idea here has been rupture, whether the break with the pagan past at conversion or the expected break of the apocalyptic future. In contrast to this "punctuated" view of time, this article examines a Christian temporality focused not on a past or future break, but rather on an expansive present. For …
Hierarchy, Value, and the Value of Hierarchy
Many of the communities in which anthropologists work are hierarchically organized, and the people who live in them often describe this arrangement in positive terms. Nevertheless, anthropologists rarely paint hierarchy in a favorable light. This special issue aims to question this tendency with ethnographic insights into social contexts where hierarchy is regarded as a desirable social good. By way of an introduction to the research articles, we…
Affordances and Audiences: Finding the Difference Christianity Makes
The wide-ranging contributions to this special issue point to the extraordinary variety of Christian adherence around the world. In the light of this multiplicity, it has become increasingly important to develop frameworks that will allow us to conceptualize Christianity as a multifaceted, labile, but nevertheless identifiable object. Drawing together the concept of affordances, as used by Webb Keane in his contribution to this issue, as well as …
Learning to pray the Pentecostal way: Language and personhood on the Zambian Copperbelt
This article examines the role of prayer in the production of the Pentecostal person on the Zambian Copperbelt. While Pentecostal prayer is partly focused on private concerns, and therefore reinforces a classic Protestant notion of bounded, individualised personhood, success in this practice depends on a believer’s ability to incorporate the language of the Pentecostal community. Prayer is also therefore dependent on a model of personhood in whic…
Egalitarianism and hierarchy in Copperbelt religious practice: On the social work of Pentecostal ritual
This article offers an analysis of Pentecostal ritual life focused on a core tension in this religion, namely that between the egalitarianism associated with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all believers and the hierarchy that follows from the charismatic authority of church leaders. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Zambian Copperbelt, the author traces out the egalitarian and hierarchical aspects of Pentecostal ritual in order to d…
Dialogues: Anthropology and Theology
The past five years have witnessed an increased interest in a dialogue between anthropology and theology, evidenced in part by a suite of edited volumes (e.g. Lauterbach & Vähäkangas 2020; Lemons 2018; Tomlinson & Mathews 2018). Analyses informed by this interdisciplinary nexus have demonstrated the utility of theological concepts for anthropological inquiry (e.g. Robbins 2020; Tomlinson 2020; Williams Green 2021). The following series of dialogu…
Why Can't a Pastor Be President of a "Christian Nation"? Pentecostal Politics as Religious Mediation
Why has Nevers Mumba, one of Zambia's most famous Pentecostal leaders, been so unsuccessful in his two presidential bids? Previous analyses have blamed Mumba's political woes on a presumed Pentecostal belief that politics is a lesser vocation than the pastorate. In contrast to these interpretations, I argue that Pentecostals in Zambia are very committed to the notion that, at least ideally, their leaders should be pastors, and more specifically t…
Concretizing the Christian Nation
In October 2015 the Zambian president broke ground on a new National House of Prayer, a building project meant to reaffirm the country's status as Africa's only self-proclaimed “Christian nation.” Over the next four years architects produced three separate sets of plans for the House of Prayer, images of which were circulated among Zambian Christians, primarily church leaders. Each set of plans has provoked conversations about what the House of P…
Change andChisunguin Zambia's Time of Aids
Through an examination of amafunde - a Bemba word meaning 'instruction', which refers to the training given to a young woman before her marriage - this article explores the social changes that have followed widespread HIV infection on the Zambian Copperbelt. Amafunde today are marked by openness between senior women and those they train for marriage, an openness that they encourage their charges to adopt in married life. This emphasis on direct o…
Presidents, priests, and prophets: Covenantal Christian nationalism and the challenge of biblical analogy
This article explores the elaboration and application of the Old Testament idea of 'covenant' among Zambian church leaders who are Christian nationalist activists. In this framework, Zambia serves as an analogue of biblical Israel, while contemporary government and church leaders are the analogues of Old Testament kings, priests, and prophets. This covenantal approach presents challenges. On the one hand, government support for Christian national…
The Benefit of the Doubt: On the Relationship Between Doubt and Power
Anthropological studies of doubt have typically highlighted its productivity, pointing to the space that doubt opens to question established frameworks. This article builds on these observations by exploring an instance of doubt that I argue is unproductive. For Pentecostals on the Zambian Copperbelt, the fact that they do not receive the extravagant riches promised by the prosperity gospel—a Christian movement that is central to their faith—is n…
Desirable dependence, or what we learn from Pentecostalism
Contemporary Africa Through the Theory of Louis Dumont
This article responds to a trend in recent anthropological scholarship in Africa that has overemphasized a lack of social organization following the advancement of neoliberal reforms across the continent. Using a theoretical framework informed by the theory of Louis Dumont, I show that social organization remains an important analytical topic in times of crisis, and that this is best apprehended through an analysis of values. The ethnographic foc…
The Anthropology of Christianity
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical "repressed" of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself…
The Anthropology of Christianity
This article surveys the literature that constitutes the newly emergent anthropology of Christianity. Arguing that the development of this sub-discipline was impeded until recently by anthropology's theoretical framing and empirical interests, this article explains that demographic and world-historical forces have made it such that anthropology has had to recently come to terms with Christianity as an ethnographic object. In doing so, anthropolog…
Ethnographic Sorcery by Harry G. West
Pentecostalism and the morality of money: Prosperity, inequality, and religious sociality on the Zambian Copperbelt
As part of a growing body of work focused on the social implications of Pentecostal Christianity, this article explores one of the ways that this religion is shaping relational life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Through a discussion of the changing nature of the prosperity gospel, I show how Pentecostalism embeds believers in social relationships that often extend beyond their religious cohort. In the absence of the lavish wealth promised by prosper…
On the Potential and Problems of Pentecostal Exchange
In this article, I draw on ethnography from the Zambian Copperbelt to examine the social productivity of the Pentecostal prosperity gospel, a Christian movement centered on the idea that it is God's will for believers to be wealthy. In the light of the challenges that recent economic history has posed to Copperbelt relational life, Pentecostalism has become an important source of hierarchy-and, therefore, of social organization. This social produ…
Desirable dependence, or what we learn from Pentecostalism
Affordances and Audiences: Finding the Difference Christianity Makes
The wide-ranging contributions to this special issue point to the extraordinary variety of Christian adherence around the world. In the light of this multiplicity, it has become increasingly important to develop frameworks that will allow us to conceptualize Christianity as a multifaceted, labile, but nevertheless identifiable object. Drawing together the concept of affordances, as used by Webb Keane in his contribution to this issue, as well as …
“Zambia Shall be Saved!”
This article explores the increasingly common argument that Pentecostal Christianity, far from being apolitical, is very politically engaged. I make two contributions to this discussion. First, my analysis provides a detailed account of how Pentecostal religious life serves as political engagement in an especially significant ethnographic context: Zambia, the only African country to make a constitutional declaration that it is a “Christian nation…
Egalitarianism and hierarchy in Copperbelt religious practice: On the social work of Pentecostal ritual
This article offers an analysis of Pentecostal ritual life focused on a core tension in this religion, namely that between the egalitarianism associated with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all believers and the hierarchy that follows from the charismatic authority of church leaders. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Zambian Copperbelt, the author traces out the egalitarian and hierarchical aspects of Pentecostal ritual in order to d…
Change andChisunguin Zambia's Time of Aids
Through an examination of amafunde - a Bemba word meaning 'instruction', which refers to the training given to a young woman before her marriage - this article explores the social changes that have followed widespread HIV infection on the Zambian Copperbelt. Amafunde today are marked by openness between senior women and those they train for marriage, an openness that they encourage their charges to adopt in married life. This emphasis on direct o…
Conversion beyond “Rice Christians”
Comment on Roberts, Nathaniel. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in a Chennai Slum. Oakland: University of California Press
Hierarchy, Value, and the Value of Hierarchy
Many of the communities in which anthropologists work are hierarchically organized, and the people who live in them often describe this arrangement in positive terms. Nevertheless, anthropologists rarely paint hierarchy in a favorable light. This special issue aims to question this tendency with ethnographic insights into social contexts where hierarchy is regarded as a desirable social good. By way of an introduction to the research articles, we…
Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt
Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, this book explores Pentecostal Christianity in the kind of community where it often flourishes: a densely populated neighborhood in the heart of an extraction economy. On the Zambian Copperbelt, Pentecostal adherence embeds believers in relationships that help them to “move” and progress in life. These efforts give Copperbelt Pentecostalism its particular local character, shaping ritual practice, gen…
Learning to pray the Pentecostal way: Language and personhood on the Zambian Copperbelt
This article examines the role of prayer in the production of the Pentecostal person on the Zambian Copperbelt. While Pentecostal prayer is partly focused on private concerns, and therefore reinforces a classic Protestant notion of bounded, individualised personhood, success in this practice depends on a believer’s ability to incorporate the language of the Pentecostal community. Prayer is also therefore dependent on a model of personhood in whic…
Contemporary Africa Through the Theory of Louis Dumont
This article responds to a trend in recent anthropological scholarship in Africa that has overemphasized a lack of social organization following the advancement of neoliberal reforms across the continent. Using a theoretical framework informed by the theory of Louis Dumont, I show that social organization remains an important analytical topic in times of crisis, and that this is best apprehended through an analysis of values. The ethnographic foc…
Hierarchy and Value: Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order
Hierarchy and Value: Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order
Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency. But in some places globalization has spurred the emergence of new forms of hierarchy—or the reemergence of old forms—as people try to reconstitute an imagined past of stable moral order. This is evident from the Islamic revival in the Middl…
Why Can't a Pastor Be President of a "Christian Nation"? Pentecostal Politics as Religious Mediation
Why has Nevers Mumba, one of Zambia's most famous Pentecostal leaders, been so unsuccessful in his two presidential bids? Previous analyses have blamed Mumba's political woes on a presumed Pentecostal belief that politics is a lesser vocation than the pastorate. In contrast to these interpretations, I argue that Pentecostals in Zambia are very committed to the notion that, at least ideally, their leaders should be pastors, and more specifically t…
The Benefit of the Doubt: On the Relationship Between Doubt and Power
Anthropological studies of doubt have typically highlighted its productivity, pointing to the space that doubt opens to question established frameworks. This article builds on these observations by exploring an instance of doubt that I argue is unproductive. For Pentecostals on the Zambian Copperbelt, the fact that they do not receive the extravagant riches promised by the prosperity gospel—a Christian movement that is central to their faith—is n…
The Subversive Power of Ethnography: Lessons from Anthropology
This article explores the theoretical and political potential of ethnographic research for World Christianity by focusing on the “subversive power” of this methodology. Through a discussion of four aspects of ethnographic research: the use of the term “informants,” a commitment to holism, the political power of participant-observation, and the “double location” of ethnographic practice, I argue that the primary objective of ethnography is to dece…
The Expansive Present: A New Model of Christian Time
One of the most productive lines of inquiry in the anthropology of Christianity has explored how Christian adherence structures time. The organizing idea here has been rupture, whether the break with the pagan past at conversion or the expected break of the apocalyptic future. In contrast to this "punctuated" view of time, this article examines a Christian temporality focused not on a past or future break, but rather on an expansive present. For …
Taking Dominion in a Christian Nation: North American Political Theology in an African Context
This article traces some of the North American theological influences on contemporary Christian nationalism in Zambia. Beginning with an overview of key tenets of Christian Reconstruction and the New Apostolic Reformation, I show how these movements have influenced the writing of some key players in Zambia’s Christian nationalist project. I also demonstrate how these authors have modified the Western ideas that have shaped their thought. This ana…
Concretizing the Christian Nation
In October 2015 the Zambian president broke ground on a new National House of Prayer, a building project meant to reaffirm the country's status as Africa's only self-proclaimed “Christian nation.” Over the next four years architects produced three separate sets of plans for the House of Prayer, images of which were circulated among Zambian Christians, primarily church leaders. Each set of plans has provoked conversations about what the House of P…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Book forum on Joel Robbins’ Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life
Sociology (25 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (17 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Religious studies (13 works) · Law (12 works)