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In Kenya's vibrant urban religious landscape, where Pentecostal and traditional churches of various orientations live side by side, religious identity tends to overflow a single institutional affiliation. While Kenya's Christianity may offer modes of coping with the fragilities of urban life, it is subject to repeated crises and schisms, often fueled by rumors and accusations of hypocrisy. In order to understand the unfolding of Kenyans' dynamic religious identities, and inspired by the omnipresent distinction between 'religious membership' and 'church visits,' Yonatan N. Gez considers the complementary relations between a center of religious affiliation and expansion towards secondary practices. Building on this basic distinction, the book develops a theoretical innovation in the form of the 'religious repertoire' model, which maps individuals' religious identities in terms of three intertwined degrees of practice.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Theoretical approaches to religious mobility.- 3. The Kenyan religious landscape.- 4. The unfolding of religious repertoires in Kenya: negotiating territory and questions of trust.- 5. The unfolding of religious repertoires in Kenya: Balancing repertoire arrangements.- 6. Religious identity as a system in action.- 7. Example interviewees.- 8. Conclusion.
About the author
Yonatan N. Gez is a fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences and a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Summary
In Kenya's vibrant urban religious landscape, where Pentecostal and traditional churches of various orientations live side by side, religious identity tends to overflow a single institutional affiliation. While Kenya’s Christianity may offer modes of coping with the fragilities of urban life, it is subject to repeated crises and schisms, often fueled by rumors and accusations of hypocrisy. In order to understand the unfolding of Kenyans’ dynamic religious identities, and inspired by the omnipresent distinction between ‘religious membership’ and ‘church visits,’ Yonatan N. Gez considers the complementary relations between a center of religious affiliation and expansion towards secondary practices. Building on this basic distinction, the book develops a theoretical innovation in the form of the ‘religious repertoire’ model, which maps individuals’ religious identities in terms of three intertwined degrees of practice.
Report
"This tour de force in anthropology of religion is based on the author's fieldwork. ... Thorough, copiously documented, and well- written, Gez's work has implications for descriptive and constructive theologies that try to attend to grassroots beliefs, especially phenomenologies of African theology and global pentecostalism." (Christopher A. Stephenson, Religious Studies Review, Vol. 47 (4), December, 2021)
