Protestant Practice Research Articles

The Political Subject of Self-immolation

This article examines the political practice of protest by self-burning. Focussing on Mohammed Bouazizi's self-burning in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in 2010, I explore the intellectual background for, and implications of, conceptualising such acts as ‘self-sacrifices’ or ‘self-immolations’. I argue that the use of the concept of sacrifice to define the politics of the act, given the difficulties in determining intentionality, is to focus only on its retrospective interpretation or semiotic capture. The result is that the self-annihilating subject is bypassed altogether, and his or her distinctively suicidal politicality is ignored. I argue that these subjects do not occupy political space due to a myth-making appeal to transcendence, heroic urge to sovereignty or assumed desire for community. Rather, drawing on Walter Benjamin, I argue that in such acts we bear witness to the shattering of sovereign order by a reminder to a politically constitutive excess.

Beautiful Babies

Baby shows and baby contests in the late nineteenth century United States, beginning as a form of entertainment at agricultural fairs, were co-opted in the early twentieth century as a public relations vehicle for the eugenics movement. This article connects this history of display of the infant body with white Protestant practices of bodily display in infant baptism as represented etiquette manuals, women's magazines, and works of art. The author argues that infants became unwitting participants in practices of display that marked them as members of affluent white society.

Ain’t Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement by Zoe A. Colley (review)

Reviewed by: Ain’t Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement by Zoe A. Colley Beth Fowler (bio) Ain’t Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement. By Zoe A. Colley. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012. Pp. 160. $69.95 cloth) Brutal treatment and criminal records awaited black activists who protested segregation laws in the Jim Crow South. Thousands of protesters, however, answered the call to “fill the jails” during the heyday of the black freedom movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Even though civil rights organizations encouraged activists to serve their sentences as a form of civil disobedience, and Freedom Riders have long asserted that their famed 1961 campaign was carried over into the infamous Parchman Farm, where hundreds of participants were sent after violating the transportation codes of Mississippi, this particular aspect of movement activity is usually given scant attention in other assessments of the civil rights movement. Zoe A. Colley’s fascinating Ain’t Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement helps explain this link by arguing that going to jail was an integral part of putting one’s body on the line in protests across the South, and that this experience helped build community among activists and intensify the impact of their use of nonviolence. Colley’s extensive use of interviews with activists, as well as papers and letters from many private collections, allows her to construct a convincing account of how civil rights campaigns extended into jail cells across the South. She effectively traces the origins of the push to accept “jail-no-bail” through the sit-in movements of 1960, the Freedom Ride campaign and Albany movement of 1961, the Freedom Summer project of 1964, and the Black Power organizations of the late 1960s. Throughout, she effectively shows how activists considered serving jail time as a crucial part of their contributions [End Page 158] to the movement, as well as how these sentences rejuvenated their flagging spirits, thus allowing campaigns to continue. Colley does not ignore the brutalities of imprisonment—each chapter is, in fact, brimming with detail about the violence, sexual harassment, lack of shelter and amenities, poor food quality, and exposure to the elements that prisoners faced. But for the Freedom Riders, who were sent to Parchman Prison in droves once the campaign extended to Mississippi, turning the jails into sites of activism was crucial. Colley quotes C. T. Vivian as noting that “the feeling of people coming out of the jail was one that they had triumphed, that they had achieved” (p. 57). Jail sentences also helped Northern and white activists show their dedication to the fight, as displayed by Peter Milenburg’s assertion that “before I ever went to jail I longed for the experience out of curiosity and to put the official stamp on my involvement in the movement” (p. 88). Colley readily admits that jail-ins did not ultimately help dismantle Jim Crow laws. She attributes this lack of success to the relatively small number of activists willing to go to jail, and to changing tactics which focused more on spadework that required activists to actually be present in local communities rather than sitting in cells. She does not, however, explain that, since jail-ins took place outside the public eye and the gaze of the media, they were unable to provoke the anger and support among outsiders on which nonviolent direct protest generally relies. This lack of attention to the contributions of mass media is odd, given that Colley herself details cases in which activists were forced to languish in cells until photographers surreptitiously captured and published their images, forcing local authorities to release them. Civil rights activists’ experiences in jail cells may not have prompted the nationwide support and federal intervention that more public acts elicited, but Colley succeeds in showing how going to jail remained integral to the practice of nonviolent protest and in helping to reinforce ideals of community and moral righteousness among activists. Her book is a revealing portrait of activism that [End Page 159] almost always took place beyond the scope of the camera lens, and is all the...

Assembling the Multitude: Material Geographies of Social Movements from Oaxaca to Occupy

In light of the abstract theorizations of scholars of transnational social movement networks—as exemplified by Hardt and Negri's Multitude—in this paper I argue for the power of grounded, material engagements with the practices of protest of social movements to transform not just political spaces, but our theoretical landscapes. I compare the practice of setting up and maintaining encampments in the Oaxaca and Occupy movements to argue that the spatial dynamics of occupation in a tent city fuels the distinctive style of participatory politics of the assembly, providing a creative means to transform confrontation into cooperation. A point of departure for this comparison is my assertion that the political difference made by these social movements lies not just in whether or not they achieved their political goals, but in the kind of intervention that the physical fact of occupying a public space entails in normative understandings of politics and public spaces.

Protest Diffusion and Cultural Resonance in the 2011 Protest Wave

The 2011 protest wave, encompassing the Arab Spring revolutions, the Indignados movement in Spain and Greece, and the Occupy Wall Street movement has often been described as a new global protest cycle. However, the dynamics of diffusion suggest a more complex picture. Transmission of protest frames and repertoires from one country and cultural region to another was quite slow and tortuous. Moreover, adoption of the new ideas and practices of protest spawned by the protest wave of 2011 involved laborious dynamics of cultural translation and domestication. This situation points to the continuing importance of local protest cultures and cultural contexts, in addition to channels of transmission, even in an era of instantaneous communication technologies.

Popular protest in Switzerland during the 1830s: Opposing models of political participation and citation of traditional ritual

The article examines specific forms of popular protest and their political background in Switzerland during the liberal era after the French Revolution of 1830. In this era one finds two distinctive models of political participation: the older model of the so-called Landsgemeinde and the new liberal model. The Swiss protesters combined ideas, forms and symbols of both models. However the relation between the two models proved to be ambivalent and conflict-prone. This is demonstrated with a focus on several specific cases of popular protest. While the liberal leaders of the early 1830s mostly referred to the age-old Landsgemeinde to use it as a vehicle for their new aims, the protest action of the late 1830s against liberal governments encompassed a variety of forms and mixed symbolic references. We can observe a virtuoso mode of citation of protest rituals from different contexts and time periods. The primary function of the citation of old ritual was to provide the protestors' action with social acceptance. Thus, new and very different claims could also be made. Despite striking similarities, under the auspices of the post-revolution period one must avoid the assumption of a simple linear continuity of protest practice from the Ancien Régime.

Diasporic religion: The Irish and Northern Irish in England

The current research assesses the religious orientations of Irish and Northern Irish Catholic and Protestant migrants in England related to the suggestion that immigration to a comparatively irreligious society increases religious awareness. Participants were 391 opportunity- and snowball-sampled individuals, where 171 were members of the Northern Irish Diaspora, 54 were members of the Republic of Ireland Diaspora and 166 were members of the English Control Group. Findings suggest that the Irish and Northern Irish migrant groups showed significantly higher levels of religious commitment than their English counterparts, although these diasporic groups did not differ from each other in terms of their levels of commitment. Findings are discussed with reference to the impact of religion on migration, Catholic and Protestant religious practices, and the impact of church activities on religious commitment.

Virtual Uprisings: On the Interaction of New Social Media, Traditional Media Coverage and Urban Space during the ‘Arab Spring’

This article analyses the geography of urban uprising during the so-called Arab Spring, with a focus on the relationship between its virtual and physical dimensions. To enhance understanding of contemporary social movements, it pays particular attention to the interwoven relationship between the social media that now organise gatherings and communicate political messages, the practices of protest in urban space and the magnifying power of global and national media. Using case studies from Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, it analyses the spatial and temporal aspects of recent protests and suggests that the reciprocal interaction between social media, urban space and traditional media does not simply reproduce relations between these actors, but also transforms them incrementally.

The Limits of the State: Coercion and Consent in Chinese Tibet

Although China's Tibetans profoundly mistrust the ideologies of the party-state, associating them with illegitimate practices of domination, protest and revolt are rare and effectively suppressed. This might be seen as quasi-colonial domination, the state securing subjection through the performance of paramount power, demonstrated by its suppression of the 2008 protests, or it could be attributed to a form of indirect rule, by which local officials engage with local leaders to generate hegemonic consent. While both dynamics are present on the Tibetan plateau, ethnographic fieldwork among the Tibetan populations of Qinghai and Gansu Provinces reveals that consent is primarily generated by local officials who negotiate a form of local order with religious and tribal leaders. Ignoring the ideological demands of their superiors, they engage constructively with the expectations of the Tibetans about how order should be maintained and, in doing so, subvert the state's ideal of uniform and unitary sovereignty.

The appeal of neo-fascism in times of crisis. The experience of CasaPound Italia

The present works sets up to analyze the relationship between radical right activism and the unfolding of the financial crisis in Europe, investigating the extent to which the current economic circumstances have influenced right-wing movements’ political supply and repertoires of action. Using the case study of the Italian neo-fascist group CasaPound, and based on a mix of historiography and ethnographic methods, the present work systematically analyzes the ways in which the group tackles the economic crisis. We find that the crisis offers a whole new set of opportunities for the radical right to reconnect with its fascist legacy, and to develop and innovate crisis-related policy proposals and practices. The crisis shapes the groups’ self-understanding and its practices of identity building, both in terms of collective rediscovery of the fascist regime’s legislation, and in terms of promotion of the fascist model as a ‘third way’ alternative to market capitalism. Even more importantly, the financial crisis plays the role of the enemy against which the fascist identity is built, and enables neo-fascist movements to selectively reproduce their identity and ideology within its practices of protest, propaganda, and consensus building.

A Non‐Place Identity and a Fixed (Sacred) Text: Literacy Practices Shaping Identity/ies of a Slavic Baptist Congregation from the Former Soviet Union to the United States

AbstractBased on an interdisciplinary linguistic ethnography, I apply the term ‘non‐place’ to the collective identity of a Slavic migrant congregation in the United States. Those members socialised into their faith before migration had already been marginalised in their resistance to the former national Soviet identity. The New Literacy Studies in particular help to describe their historic Protestant literacy practices regarding a sacred, and thus fixed, text. A fixed sacred text provided the freedom to interpret the group's context, a perceived narrative to join, and authority for leadership to dictate a way of life. Events around text were warm and welcoming, utilising Western texts for legitimatised scripture interpretation, and accessible to both Russian speakers and second‐generation English speakers. With the assumed permanence of a sacred text, new believers retold their own narratives as part of the scriptural one, and had a ‘home land’ they had never stepped foot in.

‘The meanes of justification’

An anonymous manuscript letter with a library classifying title of Controversii et compendium Becari[Becanus], and also known as ‘A Letter from a Welsh Catholic’ (1625), offers a rare glimpse into a private, cross-confessional dialogue in Stuart Britain. Written from a Roman Catholic to his Protestant ‘cosen’, the letter highlights how theological and cultural controversies were disputed in ways that diverge from typical polemic. The letter combines the traditional Catholic discourse on religious imagery with a strident critique of Protestant doctrine and practice. The commentary here on the text highlights some of the key points of the argument, what the letter’s style indicates about its polemical nature and what, if any, insight the author’s affinity for the principality of Wales can tell us about the intertwining worlds of religious and cultural identity.

Review: Spirited Encounters: American Indians Protest Museum Policies and Practices; Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives

Review: Spirited Encounters: American Indians Protest Museum Policies and Practices; Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives

'It was like fighting a war with our own people': anti-war activism in Serbia during the 1990s

This article discusses anti-war and anti-nationalism activism that took place in Serbia and, particularly, in Belgrade during the 1990s. It analyzes anti-war activism as aiming to combat collectivestates of denial.Based on fieldwork research conducted in 2004-05, and particularly on an analysis of interviews conducted with anti-war activists in Belgrade, this text closely analyzes the nuanced voices and approaches to activism against war among Serbia's civil society in the 1990s. The article highlights the difference between anti-war and anti-regime activism, as well as the generation gap when considering the wars of the 1990s and their legacy. Finally, this text emphasizes the role of Women in Black as the leading anti-war group in Serbia, and examines their feminist street activism which introduced new practices of protest and political engagement in Belgrade's public sphere.

Novel Extracts

Novel Extracts Peter Whitehead Nora and ... (1990)1 Nora and ... was Whitehead's first published novel. It is a Paris-set narrative that unfolds against the backdrop of the 1968 student riots. Within this violent and libidinal context, the repressed research scientist Raymond Faulkner meets the feline and impassioned ex-student Nora, who we learn is working to complete one of her father's psychoanalytic case studies. Much of the novel circulates around the textual and sexual dynamics generated by this archive project. However, Whitehead also places emphasis on the practice and ritual of protest. In particular, as is reflected in the following extracts, he often returns to and develops upon imagery initially explored in Benefit of the Doubt. From Chapter 1 It wasn't easy to reach even the Boulevard St. Michel, but finally he found a small side-street he could slip through, and was quite startled to find himself close behind a group of students hastily building a barricade. A couple of cars had been thrust together and were being covered with splintered advertising material, torn from nearby walls and a Tabac kiosk. He recognised a fragment of the life-size poster for Les Folies-Bergère. It was strange to see the pink stockings and white frilly knickers kicking up over the bonnet of a Renault Quatre, as if the luscious creature was enjoying a quick bang before things got worse. Two students nearby were frantically using scaffold poles to dig near the trees, loosening the cobblestones. Why had he not expected the confrontation to be so passionate? He was astonished he'd so successfully blocked the images from his mind, preferring the easy way out, to think the [End Page 871] French were as usual blowing something up out of all proportion. He was clearly quite immune to such images, to imagining such violent anarchy actually on the streets. Not now, here, today, Paris, 1968. Where had all this energy come from so suddenly? He reached the main Boulevard in time to see another phalanx of police advancing up the street behind riot shields, and he nervously slipped into a doorway to hide and keep out of trouble. Further down the street were rows of armoured police cars looking like tanks behind the advancing police. A wave of students stormed down the main boulevard towards them, throwing what ever they could lay their hands on. The police advanced steadily and the students were forced back, but this clearly didn't matter to them—gaining ground was irrelevant—it was the ecstasy of the thrusting and screaming and hurling that mattered and after every retreat they thrust forward again, until more students came sweeping down the street from behind as if from nowhere and Raymond couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the pitched battle between the uniformed police and the scruffy people's army of students. But he felt nauseated suddenly, when something seemed to click in his mind and he was able to stop looking, and see, to know that the blows were real blows, and the staggering students were really being brutally beaten. He looked round, deciding he must escape, and saw he was hiding near an emergency exit door of the Luxembourg Cinema. He couldn't understand why the cinema seemed to be still open. He didn't know the violence had only spilled over from the university precincts into the neighbouring streets earlier that evening. He crept round towards the foyer and was amazed to see the woman in the ticket-booth calmly looking out from behind her window, knitting. Maybe she had left her glasses at home. He wondered what she must be thinking—obviously it was a film about one of those wars that people never stopped making films about. He asked her what film was showing, to make conversation. Apart from being over eighty and clearly almost blind, she was definitely confused: "A nouvelle-vague film. La Benéfice du Doute!" When he asked for more details, she said it was a play by Wilhelm Shakerspierre about the Vietnam war. Curious to learn more about the Bard's remarkable, hitherto undocumented divinatory powers, Raymond looked for a...

Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online

Sociologists of culture studying “fan activism” have noted an apparent increase in its volume, which they attribute to the growing use of the Internet to register fan claims. However, scholars have yet to measure the extent of contemporary fan activism, account for why fan discontent has been expressed through protest, or precisely specify the role of the Internet in this expansion. We argue that these questions can be addressed by drawing on a growing body of work by social movement scholars on “movement societies,” and more particularly on a nascent thread of this approach we develop that theorizes the appropriation of protest practices for causes outside the purview of traditional social movements. Theorizing that the Internet, as a new media, is positioned to accelerate the diffusion of protest practices, we develop and test hypotheses about the use of movement practices for fan activism and other nonpolitical claims online using data on claims made in quasi-random samples of online petitions, boycotts, and e-mailing or letter-writing campaigns. Results are supportive of our hypotheses, showing that diverse claims are being pursued online, including culturally-oriented and consumer-based claims that look very different from traditional social movement claims. Findings have implications for students of social movements, sociologists of culture, and Internet studies.

The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (review)

Reviewed by: The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 Marc R. Forster The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648. By Bridget Heal. [Past and Present Publications.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Pp. xvi, 338. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-521-87103-7.) Bridget Heal’s study of the cult of the Virgin Mary reinforces the trend in early-modern religious history that has emphasized the diversity of religious practice across confessional lines. Heal traces the evolution of Marian theology and piety (sometimes calling it “Marianism”) through the Reformation, using a variety of sources, most particularly visual sources. This study examines pre-Reformation piety, Protestant practices, and changes within Catholic Marianism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Heal begins her study by tracing developments within Lutheran Germany. Here she contrasts continuities in Marian imagery and practices in the conservatively Lutheran city of Nuremberg with the more radical changes in the Zwinglian-influenced city of Augsburg. Heal points out that Lutherans rejected the traditional theology that emphasized the role of Mary as a divine intercessor, yet Luther was typically moderate in his condemnation of traditional Marian piety. Luther was particularly tolerant of images, stating that he was concerned about the attitude of the viewers of images, not the images themselves. Most Marian paintings and statues remained in the churches in Nuremberg, often because they had been donated by members of elite families. But, Heal argues, Protestant writers and preachers also worked to transform the image of Mary from that of a powerful intercessor to a model of faith, obedience, and humility. The situation in Augsburg was quite different. Not only was the Protestant movement there strongly influenced by Zwinglian theology, including a strong element of iconoclasm, but the city was also confessionally divided through much of the period. Protestant churches in Augsburg were cleansed of Marian images, and by the 1530s Mary had almost completely disappeared from Protestant religious and public life. At the same time, after about 1550, Catholic ritual life was restored in Augsburg, and under Jesuit leadership Marian processions and feast days came to be markers of Catholic identity. There was a diversity of Marian practices in Catholic Germany as well. The Catholic Church had a somewhat mixed attitude toward the cult of the Virgin. On the one hand, the Council of Trent and official theology affirmed all aspects of traditional Marian piety. On the other hand, Catholic theologians were critical of popular “abuses” and “superstitions,” most of which were local or regional, and sought universal liturgical reform. Other Catholic reformers, especially the Jesuits, believed that the cult of the Virgin had broad popular appeal and should be promoted, as they did with their Marian sodalities and promotion of pilgrimages and processions. [End Page 382] Heal contrasts the “Counter-Reformation cult,” promoted by the Jesuits and strong in Bavaria and Austria, with the more traditional Marian piety found in Cologne. Here she follows the arguments of scholars such as Gerald Chaix and Rebekka von Mallinckrodt and shows how the traditional religious culture of Cologne survived, and even thrived, during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. For example, both the elites and popular classes continued to venerate Marian Gnadenbilder (holy images) from the Middle Ages. The Jesuits certainly promoted new religious forms in Cologne through their sodalities and their preaching, but these forms only supplemented traditional piety. The result was pluralism within Catholic practice, as there was within Protestant practice. In the last chapter, Heal tackles the difficult question of Marian devotion and gender. Here again, she emphasizes the diversity of practices. Mary’s gender presented multiple meanings to early-modern people, particularly women—mother, powerful intercessor, symbol of domesticity, a “woman like no other.” Heal cautiously suggests that, at least in Germany, the Protestant reformulation of Mary tended to demystify her, perhaps for Catholics as well. In any case, she insists on the diversity of meanings within a gender analysis. The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany provides a valuable overview of an important issue in religious history. The book is in one way difficult to categorize. On...

Objects for Peaceful Disordering: Indigenous Designs and Practices of Protest

ABSTRACTWhat do a piece of plumbing pipe, some wire netting, some adhesive tape, two loops of nylon webbing and a karabiner have in common? Nothing, until they are assembled in a design. In turn, the object these components comprise comes into being only with the presence of human beings. These are the components of a device known as a ‘lock-on’; some sundry objects that you would find at a builders' merchant and some people's bodies – peace activists pursuing non-violent direct action. Peace activists use lock-ons to join themselves together by the arms to enhance the power of their passive resistance. This paper identifies a number of theoretical approaches to objects of this sort. It is intended to initiate a discussion of the lock-on as an example of an ‘indigenous’ design that has appeared without designers, evolving as part of the practice of peace protest (Langrish, 2004).The paper concentrates on the sense of ‘practice’ that is found in the sociological study of culture, tracing its use in the work of Bourdieu (1977) and others, summed up recently by Reckwitz (2002). Drawing as it does from a range of sources, including the social study of technology, ‘practice theory’ seems to have a good deal to offer a conception of design that seeks to influence the world positively beyond the point of sale. In common with other recent strands in design research such as participative design, which has grown out of the study of human-computer interaction, practice theory acknowledges that our relationships to objects are socially important. Together with cultural knowledge and embodied skill, objects form ‘compounds’ with people that evolve through time (Shove, 2006).This paper raises the possibility that the transforming power of designing may be enhanced if it is acknowledged that it is most powerful when it takes place in full articulation with practices. This principle is inscribed in the contemporary ‘user-oriented’ design process, but the lock-on is an extreme example of it because no professional designers are involved in its production and its social purpose is not commercial but political. Politically engaged design is often directed at issues of sustainability and work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These contexts for designing may be the closest in kind to that which has produced the lock-on.A ‘practice-orientated’ approach to design might be able to engage with the full relationship between things and the agents they imply, their bodies, their minds, the knowledge they have, the emotions they feel, the discourses they engage with. For this reason, it seems to be a useful framework through which to understand an object like the lock-on, which has emerged out of an identifiable practice. The nature of this practice may also be inspiring in itself, as in this example, which works against crimes such as weapons of mass destruction. The paper offers an initial analysis of the evolution and current use of the lock-on in UK non-violent direct action as an example of an indigenous design that is part of a practice. It indicates the potential for further research that would seek more fully to understand the history and development of the lock-on in order to test the applicability of practice theory and to seek insights for designing in other contexts.

The Practices and Process of Neighborhood: the (Re)Production of Riverwest, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

This article examines the practices and process that (re)produce neighborhoods. I argue that the practices producing neighborhoods in the 1970s inform the practices (re)producing neighborhoods today. Drawing upon Lefebvre's concepts of social space and spatial practice, Bourdieu's concepts of practice and habitus, and Pred's concept of place as a historically contingent process, I examine the (re)production of Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood as a process. Practices of institution building and protest were central to the production of this relatively socially inclusive and activist neighborhood. Over the past 30 years, through what could be defined as the habitus of place, the process of neighborhood (re)production continued many of the practices first established in the 1970s, as new practices addressed social and cultural changes. A focus on practices and process draws our attention to the (re)production of a relatively stable, consistent, long-term neighborhood identity.

Re-enchanting the world: Maya Protestantism in the Guatemalan highlands

What does it mean to be both Maya and Protestant in Guatemala? Burgeoning religious pluralism in Mesoamerica and throughout Latin America is evident as Protestantism permeates a region that had been overwhelmingly Catholic for nearly five centuries. In considering the interplay between contemporary Protestant practice and native cultural traditions among Maya evangelicals, Samson documents the processes whereby some Maya have converted to new forms of Christianity and the ways in which the Maya are incorporating Christianity for their own purposes. At the intersection of religion and cultural pluralism, contemporary evangelicals focus on easing the tension between Maya identity and the Protestant insistence that old ways must be left behind in the conversion process. Against the backdrop of the 36-year civil war that ended in 1996 and the rise of the indigenous Maya Movement in the late 1980s, this work provides a unique portrait of social movements, cultural and human rights, and the role that religion plays in relation to the nation-state in post-conflict political processes. Re-enchanting the World fills a niche within the anthropological literature on evangelicals in Latin America during a time of significant social change.