Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders

by Diane J. Austin-Broos

Overview

How has Pentecostalism, a decidedly American form of Christian revivalism, managed to achieve such phenomenal religious ascendancy in a former British colony among people of predominately African descent? According to Diane J. Austin-Broos, Pentecostalism has flourished because it successfully mediates between two historically central yet often oppositional themes in Jamaican religious life—the characteristically African striving for personal freedom and happiness, and the Protestant struggle for atonement and salvation through rigorous ethical piety. With its emphasis on the individual experience of grace and on the ritual efficacy of spiritual healing, and with its vibrantly expressive worship, Jamaican Pentecostalism has become a powerful and compelling vehicle for the negotiation of such fundamental issues as gender, sexuality, race, and class. Jamaica Genesis is a work of signal importance to all those concerned not simply with Caribbean studies but with the ongoing transformation of religion andculture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226032849
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	08/18/1997
Series:	Bush School Series in the Economics of Public Policy Ser.
Edition description:	1
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Diane Austin-Broos is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Sydney and the author of Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Order, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword
Raymond T. Smith
Preface
Introduction
1: Cast into a Tumultuous World
2: A Certain Moral Inheritance
3: Revival and the Healing of Sin
4: Hierarchy and Revival Culture: Precursors to Pentecostalism
5: Preachers and Pentecostalism
6: A Modern Pentecostalism: Ritual Resolutions and Gender Divides
7: Pentecostal Experience and Embodied Rite
8: Exhorting the Saints
9: Hierarchy, Healing, and the Birth of Brides
Conclusion
App. I: Table 1. Population by Religious Affiliation, by Sex, All Jamaica
App: Table 2. Adherents for Selected Faiths
App. II: The Pauline Injunctions to Feminine Submission
Notes
Bibliography
Index