Global religion and the re-enchantment of the world

Abstract

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement is a paradigm case for an examination of the globalization of religion. Centred in Rome, but spread throughout the world, it invites reconsideration of centre-periphery and local-global dynamics in the contemporary world system. Working through a small but intriguing body of literature on the movement by ethnographers working independently of one another who have encountered the phenomenon in the field, I trace the international expansion of the movement and compare its local instantiations in India, Brazil and Nigeria. The movement simultaneously invokes contrasting images of universal culture and cultural fragmentation, and raises a series of questions about religion and social class, bodily experience and re-enchantment of the world in a global perspective.