Presented in person and online; details below.

Since the latter part of the twentieth century, new forms of Pentecostalism have made their presence felt throughout the globe. No longer world-renouncing, these neo-Pentecostalists have combined religious mission with strategic attempts to intervene in public life in countries ranging across the Global South and North. Denominations such as The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Brazil), The Redeemed Christian Church of God (Nigeria), and Hillsong (Australia) have expanded to become global corporations and owners of extensive urban estates. Within anthropology, recognition of the significance of globalizing Pentecostalism has proved a major catalyst in the formation of the Anthropology of Christianity. However, while scholars in this sub-field have made important contributions to anthropological understandings of cultural rupture, religious materiality, and the ideological formation of the modern subject, less analytical attention has been devoted to examining a context that is fundamental to the flourishing of neo-Pentecostalism: the global mega-city. 

In this presentation, I develop the concept of urban ‘stretch’, building on fieldwork on Pentecostal engagements with Lagos as both moral and material landscape. It is common in current social scientific literature to characterize neo-Pentecostal and evangelical engagements with space and place through imagery of territorial warfare. While ‘stretching’ retains the possibility of overtly inimical relations with the non-Christian world, it leaves room for a more positive and proprietorial orientation toward the city and its modernist promises of economic flourishing and societal progress. I explore the notion of stretch as inhabiting the metaphorical and literal ground between reach and over-reach, prudent consolidation and never-satisfied ambition, played out in churches but also urban infrastructures, universities, businesses and prayer camps, and often represented through detailed imaginaries that have concrete, measurable effects on Lagosian city governance. 

Speaker:
Simon Coleman (simon.coleman@utoronto.ca) is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. An anthropologist, he has carried out fieldwork in Sweden, Nigeria, and the UK. His research interests include pilgrimage, Pentecostalism, cathedrals, contemporary forms of ritual, and intersections between religion and urban infrastructures. Simon is a former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a current co-editor of Religion and Society. His latest books include Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Motion (2022) and the co-edited Ideologies and Infrastructures of Religious Urbanization in Africa (2023).

Zoom link:https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1

In-person: H.C Coombs Building, Room 1.309 (northern hexagon)