Pentecostalism as Cultural Resistance
Music and Tongue-speaking as Collective Response in a Brooklyn Church
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/ptcs.32822Keywords:
Pentecostalism, culture, spiritual capital, power, tonguespeaking, Afro-Caribbean religionAbstract
Based on ethnographic research in an Afro-Caribbean Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, this article focuses on Pentecostal music and tongue-speaking as a form of cultural resistance. At least in urban settings, Pentecostalism is a creative cultural response to collectively experienced structural problems. Scholars have demonstrated the institutional challenges for Pentecostalism including its moderating effect on tongue-speaking. This article explores how one congregation maintains vitality through the practice of speaking in tongues, music, and prayer, as a type of spiritual capital. Spiritual capital explains how Pentecostalism provides a unique form of power for members to show their own agency and resistance to institutionalization as well as structural subordination. This analysis provides a framework for understanding music, charisma, and religious vitality in a Pentecostal congregation and its relationship with the larger cultural context.
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Bourdieu, P. “The Forms of Capital”. In J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood, 1986: 241–58.
Butler, M. L. “The Weapons of our Warfare: Music, Positionality, and Transcendence Among Haitian Pentecostals”. Caribbean Studies 36.2 (2008): 23–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/crb.0.0093
Cartledge, M. J. (ed.). Speaking in Tongues: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives. London: Paternoster Press, 2006.
Cox, H. “Jazz and Pentecostalism”. Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 84 (1993): 181–8. https://doi.org/10.3406/assr.1993.1497
Emerson, R., R. I. Fretz and L. L. Shaw. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226206868.001.0001
Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959.
Hochschild, A. R. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure”. The American Journal of Sociology 85.3 (1979): 551–75. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049
Ingalls, M. M. and A. Yong (eds). The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015.
Johansson, C. “Music in the Pentecostal Movement”. In E. Paterson and E. Rybarczyk (eds), The Future of Pentecostalism in the United States. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007: 49–70.
Lincoln, C. E. and L. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African-American Experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381648
Macchiaroloa, F. J. W. Barrett, M. Boyle, J. Goodale, R. A. Stack and J. P. Gifford. Urban Renewal in Brownsville: The Management of Urban Renewal in Brownsville Area 15, 1960–1973. New York: State Study Commission for New York City, 1973.
Marina, P. Chasing Religion in the Caribbean: Ethnographic Journeys from Antigua to Trinidad. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56100-8
Marina, P. Getting the Holy Ghost: Urban Ethnography in a Pentecostal Tongue-Speaking Church. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014.
Marx, K. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1522/030145289
Massey, D. S. and N. A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
McRoberts, O. M. Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
O’Dea, T. “Five Dilemmas of Institutionalization”. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1.1 (October 1961): 30–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385174
Paris, A. E. Black Pentecostalism: Southern Religion in an Urban World. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
Poloma, M. M. Main Street Mystics: The Toronto Blessing and Reviving Pentecostalism. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003.
Poloma, M. M. The Assemblies of God at the Crossroads: Charisma and Institutional Dilemmas. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.
Pritchett, W. E. Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Thornton, S. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996.
Weber, M. “The Social Psychology of World Religions”. In H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds, trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946: 267–301.
Wilkinson, M. “The Institutionalization of Religion: Impediment or Impetus for Godly Love?”. in A. Yong and M. Lee (eds), Godly Love: Impediments and Possibilities. New York: Lexington Books, 2012): 153–70.
Wilkinson, M. and P. Althouse (eds). Pentecostals and the Body. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
Wilson, W. J. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996.
Wuthnow, R. “How Religious Groups Promote Forgiving: A National Study”. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39.2 (2000): 125–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/0021-8294.00011
Published
2017-12-12
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Marina, P., & Wilkinson, M. (2017). Pentecostalism as Cultural Resistance: Music and Tongue-speaking as Collective Response in a Brooklyn Church. PentecoStudies, 16(2), 216-242. https://doi.org/10.1558/ptcs.32822
