The Anthropology of Christianity and the Dividual Self: Spiritual Flow, Physical Mobility, and Embodied Callings

Abstract

In Quebec (Canada), the plural religious landscape has strengthened a rhetoric that structures time, space, and morality dichotomously. In local Pentecostal congregations, identity narratives echo this national discourse as they frame religious trajectories within a paradigm of discontinuity that distinguish before and after being Christian, sin and grace, perdition and salvation. By examining Pentecostal migrants’ narratives that have been collected in ethnographic fieldworks among churches located in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), I question the construction of such a binary view in local migratory landscape and propose that we think of the various mobilities of Christian believers and ideology in terms of continuity, fluidity, and dividuality. Drawing on the concept of gendered dividuality, I understand Pentecostals’ charismatic experiences with the Holy Spirit as exchanges that constitute their personhood at the intersection with Quebecois collective debates focused on gender and migration issues. I argue that Pentecostalism’s ontological fluidity is part of a hermeneutics of the dividual self that features religious actors in a postmodern setting.