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Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Mozambique, this paper explores how religions have come to be perceived as bounded, and yet how despite that boundedness individuals engage multiple traditions. Those engagements are best described in terms of mobility, specifically border-crossing or polyontological mobility.

Paper long abstract:

In northern Mozambique, Islam, Roman Catholicism, and (more recently) Pentecostalism have taken turns attracting local Makhuwa-speaking converts. Yet in none of these cases was that which came to be termed "the religion of the ancestors" displaced. It was preserved and brought into interaction with the world religions. The precise nature of that interaction is the topic of this paper. I attend particularly to the multiple religious practices of self-identified Makhuwa Christians. In broad strokes, one might see the phenomenon of Christians consulting with diviners, imbibing traditional medicines, and making offerings to ancestors as evidence for the fusion of religious worlds. But the broad strokes miss what is evident up close: that ancestors are rarely brought into the churches and that Christian saints never appear at ancestral shrines. Among the Makhuwa, rather than fusion, one sees an acceptance of disparate zones, though not without a willingness to tack back and forth between them. Makhuwa religiosity is less a matter of hybridity than of what anthropologist Janet McIntosh calls "polyontologism." Building on McIntosh, this paper argues for the idea of border-crossing (or polyontological) mobility, a kind of mobility predicated on rupture, but rupture understood paradoxically as reversible and repeatable.