Spirit Wives and Church Mothers

Marriage, Survival, and Healing in Central Mozambique

Christy Schuetze

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780299343804
• eBook ISBN: 9780299343835
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Geschichte

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Pentecostal churches have proliferated around the world. Expanding at astonishing rates in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, Pentecostalism has shifted Christianity's global center of gravity from the West to the global South. In Spirit Wives andChurch Mothers, Christy Schuetze explores how the growth of Pentecostal churches in central Mozambique occurred alongside a striking increase in so-called traditional religious practices such as spirit mediumship and spiritual healing. She follows women—who comprise the majority both of participants in Pentecostal churches and of initiates to new forms of mediumship—through two emergent, rival healing networks.

Drawing on years of field research, Schuetze offers a richly drawn ethnographic analysis of these important religious transformations in the lives of female participants. Illustrating how economic and social context shapes the possibilities for—and forms of—women's empowerment, Spirit Wives andChurch Mothers intervenes in scholarly debates about the nature of agency and challenges universalist Western feminist assumptions about the form of women's liberation.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “The World Is Upside Down”: The Search for Healing in a World Out of Balance
• Part I. Suffering in Historical and Contemporary Contexts
• Part II. Searching for Stability
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index