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Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnography of Pentecostalism in southern Benin, this paper questions women’ efforts to submit to their husbands. An anthropology of the future leads us to a theoretical shift and to situate the moral ‘mastery of self’ within a larger set of women aspirations and quests for dignity.

Paper long abstract:

In Pentecostal churches, women learn how to submit to their husbands. The importance of women’s submission has polarized the academic literature around the ‘Pentecostal gender paradox’: while some authors denounce the patriarchal structure of these Churches, others identify women’s agency towards their husbands through and within religious rules, following Mahmood (2005) critics of the occidental link between self-realization with individual autonomy. However, much like the interlocutors of Schielke (2015), the women with whom I worked, who live in villages of Southern Benin, do not quite fit Mahmood’s pious religious subjects. Furthermore, the assumption that mastery of self exercises power on the partner’s behaviors, does not apply to my field-site: despite the efforts of submissive women, husbands do not change.

Pentecostal moral education cannot be isolated from other religious activities (prayers of ‘ropes’ breaking’; church’s economic initiatives, etc.). More importantly, I will show that moral education must be understood as being part of a broader set of aspirations and difficulties that women encounter as they attempt to realize their ordinary future. In other words, an anthropology of the future allows us to ensure a critical ‘displacement’ necessary to understand Pentecostal women’s quest for dignity. The future they aspire to can be spatialized and incorporated into specific relationships, especially linked to the household. The idea of a ‘government of the house’ (Foucault 1984; de l’Estoile 2014) will help us to understand how Christian duty is situated within a larger set of duties, that is, what is right and worthy for my interlocutors.