Papers by Frederick Klaits
Anthropological Forum, Jan 18, 2024
This article explores how two African American Pentecostal pastors in Buffalo, New York (USA) pro... more This article explores how two African American Pentecostal pastors in Buffalo, New York (USA) promote a phenomenology of respect as they link imperatives to labour for the good of others to the need to discern God’s purposes. In African American communities, church leadership has long elicited respect because pastoring is hard work, important elements of which consist of encouraging other members to labour for the church and seeking insights from God about believers’ lived situations. Respect is likewise key to believers’ relationships with God, in that pastors promote techniques that encourage them not only to recognise spiritual beings but to respect and obey God and their leaders. As a result, acts of respect shape bodily knowledge about relationships with powerful human and spiritual others. Such enactments of respect counter suspicions of exploitation that accompany relations of dependence among the urban poor, so that believers’ idioms of intercorporeal connection provide means for them to reflect on who has worked on behalf or taken advantage of others.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
New Directions in Spiritual Kinship, 2017
I was on my way out the door for coffee with Kathy, a young woman who is a member of Eternal Hope... more I was on my way out the door for coffee with Kathy, a young woman who is a member of Eternal Hope, a Pentecostal church in suburban Buffalo, New York, where I conducted fieldwork for over one year during 2013-14, when my wife Laura called to tell me that our 15-year-old son Adam was in the emergency room. I phoned Kathy to cancel our appointment. Hearing the anxiety in my voice, Kathy asked if everything was all right. I told her that Adam had had a sudden headache while playing basketball at school and had lost peripheral vision in one eye and sensation in parts of his right side. Kathy exclaimed, "Oh my gosh! Do you want us to pray for him? I can send out an emergency text to our women's group, and we'll all pray." "Um, okay," I replied, half-hesitant for an instant. "Yes, thank you very much. I'll let you know what's going on."
American Ethnologist, 2018
Anthropological Quarterly, 2016
ABSTRACT: Within many North American evangelical Christian communities, discernment denotes atten... more ABSTRACT: Within many North American evangelical Christian communities, discernment denotes attentiveness to an interior voice that believers learn to identify as God’s. This article adopts a comparative perspective on everyday domains of perception and feeling that practices of discernment implicitly distinguish as unmarked by God’s activity, and as characterized by specific forms of anxiety from which believers desire to be redeemed. In a majority White Pentecostal congregation in suburban Buffalo, New York, believers cast emotional insecurity as a condition demanding redemption, while members of African American churches in the inner city hope to be redeemed from sensitivity to insults. While practices of discernment counter such anxieties by fostering forms of intimacy and trust, they also reinforce anxiety by focusing believers’ attention on how familiar relations may be distorted in uncanny ways.
The Request and the Gift in Religious and Humanitarian Endeavors, 2017
The Journal of African History, 2017
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016
Comment on Werbner, Richard. 2015. Divination’s grasp: African encounters with the almost said. B... more Comment on Werbner, Richard. 2015. Divination’s grasp: African encounters with the almost said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
American Ethnologist, 2015
A common trope in recent Black popular literature compares pastors and pimps on the grounds that ... more A common trope in recent Black popular literature compares pastors and pimps on the grounds that both collect money from their dependents. We frame this comparison in terms of regimes of value operating in U.S. inner cities, where the commercial economy and legal system commonly fail to affirm the personhood of the racialized poor. Drawing on fieldwork in Buffalo, New York, we show that in eliciting tithes and protection money, pastors and pimps combine care and exploitation in ways that assert the value of their own and others’ lives against heavy odds. We extend the concept of “human economy” developed by David Graeber to these transactions, arguing that pimps and pastors construe the money they gather in terms of its power to recognize the value of the lives of givers, askers, and receivers.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2014
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2010
... Much of what took place in the Auckland Islands concerned Enderby Island and Port Ross, at th... more ... Much of what took place in the Auckland Islands concerned Enderby Island and Port Ross, at the northern end of the chain. ... Rebecca Empson, in her chapter, attends to the display and storage of family mementos in Mongolia; she uses the word 'suggest' to make ...
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2012
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2005
... Richard Werbner (Ed.), Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa (London and New York: Zed Books,... more ... Richard Werbner (Ed.), Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa (London and New York: Zed Books, 2002), x + 244 pp., ?18.95 paperback, ISBN 1 85649 955 3. ... to give rise to a state of blood pollution {nueer) that would persist among the kinsfolk of the slain and the slayer for as long ...
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2002
... We would like to thank the participants at the conference on minorities in Botswana, especial... more ... We would like to thank the participants at the conference on minorities in Botswana, especially Richard Werbner, Francis Nyamnjoh, Adam Kuper and Jacqueline Solway, and two anonymous reviewers, for their many helpful comments and suggestions. ...
Journal of Religion in Africa, 2011
The Journal of African History, 2013
The book is a useful addition to the existing literature on will particularly value references to... more The book is a useful addition to the existing literature on will particularly value references to Arabic-language con Readers looking for more general perspectives will find usefu forms of narrative among the Shawabna of Shaybun.
The image of a violated social contract has long held a distinctive place in African American Chr... more The image of a violated social contract has long held a distinctive place in African American Christian thought about injustice. This essay discusses the efforts made by members of Pentecostal churches in Buffalo, New York, to enter into forms of contract with God that supersede the broken social contracts they see as devaluing their lives. These believers listen to God's words as expressed in prophetic utterances for " confirmation " of the significance of events. In their view, " catching the word " through faithful listening enables them to create social commitments on their own terms, whereas their creative capacities are liable to be alienated from them if they listen improperly. Applying David Graeber's revisionist treatment of " fetishism " as a form of social creativity, this essay explores how believers create their blessings within a dialogic space involving themselves, God, the devil, and pastor-prophets with exceptional abilities to listen to and convey the terms of the divine contract.
This introductory essay highlights the importance of asking as well as giving within both humanit... more This introductory essay highlights the importance of asking as well as giving within both humanitarian and religious frameworks. Humanitarian workers share with religious believers a profound appreciation of the moral force inherent in forms of giving, such as charity, philanthropy, and development assistance, as well as in styles of asking that include prayer, protest, fund-raising, and begging. Within anthropology, the foundational text on giving as a source of morality is Marcel Mauss’s study, The Gift. While Mauss depicts the gift as the moral basis of legal and religious justice, he does not view the request as compelling a return. The question, then, is how to conceptualize the sorts of obligations that activities of asking may confer, and how these might be related to the obligations attendant on giving. The approach taken here extends David Graeber’s discussion in Debt: The First 5,000 Years of how different kinds of economic transactions shape the ways relationships between their participants develop over time. In parallel fashion, forms of asking help to create and sustain the temporal frameworks in religious and humanitarian endeavors are carried out.
This chapter adopts a comparative perspective on how spiritual kinship ties are mediated by forms... more This chapter adopts a comparative perspective on how spiritual kinship ties are mediated by forms of asking in a Pentecostal Christian congregation in suburban Buffalo, New York, and an Apostolic congregation in Gaborone, Botswana. The chapter explores how practices of asking for God's help play important roles in the generation of persons in Christian communities. In focusing on asking, I argue that speech about spiritual kinship is apt to reflect concerns both about the affective and ontological bases of relatedness and about securing means of social reproduction.
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Papers by Frederick Klaits