Enchanted Calvinism: Labor Migration, Afflicting Spirits, and Christian Therapy in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora) - Hardcover

Mohr, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1580464629 ISBN 13: 9781580464628

Publisher: University of Rochester Press, 2013

Synopsis

Enchanted Calvinism's central proposition is that Ghanaian Presbyterian communities, both past and present, have become more enchanted -- more attuned to spiritual explanations of and remedies for suffering -- as they have become integrated into capitalist modes of production. The author draws on a Weberian concept of religious enchantment to analyze the phenomena of spiritual affliction and spiritual healing within the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, particularly under the conditions of labor migration: first, in the early twentieth century during the cocoa boom in Ghana and, second, at the turn of the twenty-first century in their migration from Ghana to North America.
Relying on extensive archival research, oral interviews, and participant-observation conducted in North America, Europe, and West Africa, this study demonstrates that the more these Ghanaian Calvinists became dependent on capitalist modes of production, the more enchanted their lives and, subsequently, their church became, although in different ways within these two migrations. One striking pattern that has emerged among Ghanaian Presbyterian labor migrants in North America, for example, is a radical shift in gendered healing practices, where women have become prominent healers while a significant number of men have become spirit-possessed.

Adam Mohr is Senior Writing Fellow in Anthropology in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

About this title

Review:

Adam Mohr has through Enchanted Calvinism drawn attention to some of the important themes in Christianity that is authentically African and some of the tensions that emerged as western missionaries tried virtually to duplicate their forms of rational and cerebral Christianity within African contexts like Ghana. JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

[A] powerful contribution to Africanist scholarship. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST

Adam Mohr is without doubt one of the most fascinating new scholars of historical anthropology working in West Africa and the United States today, and his work -- which resides at the dynamic intersection of medical anthropology, colonial and postcolonial diaspora studies, and the global history of religion -- is truly original and Atlantic in scope. As I read Dr. Mohr's book, I am myself enchanted by his attention to detail, his nuance and subtlety, and the brilliance with which he pulls together lives and histories almost one hundred and fifty years apart. --Benjamin N. Lawrance, the Hon. Barber B. Conable Jr. Endowed Chair in International Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology

About the Author:

Adam Mohr is Senior Writing Fellow in Anthropology in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Rochester Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1580464629
• ISBN 13: 9781580464628
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248