This dissertation traces the history of colonialism, Christian missionization, and large-scale gold mining on the small island of Misima, Papua New Guinea. Situated on the southwestern edge of the Kula Ring, the island of Misima provides a fascinating case study of dramatic shifts in cultural change. However, most of all, it addresses how Misimans talk about mining as a form of trickery (kakauwi). Trickery, Misimans argue, is central to the efficacy of persuasion, political power, and productivity. I follow this theme of trickery in traditional Misiman models of magic, Kula exchange, mortuary feasting, millenarian “cargo cults,” Christian worship, schooling, the development and eventual closure of a large open-pit goldmine, and, lastly, the emergence of political parties on the island. The central argument of my dissertation is that Misimans’ instance on the opacity of others’ minds not only reflects particular ideas about Melanesian personhood and communication, but it also provides a model that challenges many commonly held assumptions in cultural anthropology, particularly the centrality and transparency of intersubjectivity in phenomenological approaches to ethical problems.I am exploring the discursive and performative aspects of trickery found throughout Misiman history and contemporary life. The problem of Misimans’ engagement with “trickery” is an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the political nature of intercultural articulations (primarily between Misimans and white people) and intersubjective relations (in everyday Misiman life) as epistemologically uncertain. I argue throughout the dissertation that it is the very uncertainty of these relations, the opacity of others’ minds, and the capacity to “trick” others that make these interactions salient, productive, and recursive. In this dissertation, there is also a theme of trying to accurately describe Melanesian egalitarianism, and argue that taking Melanesian egalitarianism as an ultimate value in cultural life does a great deal to make sense of how “trickery” is not just a negative or antagonistic experience on Misima, but also has highly desired and positive connotations around the making and maintaining of egalitarian relations.

This dissertation on the broader political implications of Pentecostal growth in Latin America, and El Salvador specifically, is based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in San Salvador. The main ethnographic research site is Misión Cristiana Elim, a cellular Pentecostal mega-church in San Salvador in the midst of a process of shifting to integral mission, transforming from a traditional Pentecostal church to one that embraces social justice concerns. Starting analysis from religious categories, and adopting the broad definition of politics as “social world-making,” I pose the question of what forms of social world-making are implied in a Pentecostal model for collective change that hinges on individual transformation through conversion. My argument pivots on two observations: (1) individual transformation, central in Pentecostal cosmology cross-culturally, is typically conceived of as “moral self-work,” and (2) the Pentecostal subject (as enacted in El Salvador) is intrinsically relational. Building on this, I posit that moral self-work following conversion is also intrinsically relational, expressing what I call “a Pentecostal ethics of care.” By analyzing the latter, I argue, insight is gained in Pentecostal forms of social world-making. This analysis reveals two overlapping, yet quite distinct Pentecostal forms of world-making, which I refer to respectively as “Church-Building” and “Kingdom-Building.” On both models, social change is envisioned primarily as the incremental sum of numerous small individual changes. In “Kingdom-Building,” however, individual Christians are called to denounce structural forms of injustice. Neither of these Pentecostal models of social world-making map fully onto neoliberalism, the hegemonic secular form of world-making in post-war El Salvador. This study contributes to the anthropological understanding of Christian subjectivity, and to the debate on the political implications of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christian growth. Mapping the relationship between beliefs, subjectivities and forms of social action in El Salvador, this study also contributes to the growing scholarship on El Salvador.

This dissertation examines movements between harmonic and antagonistic modalities of Muslim-Christian relations in a context of increasing religious plurality. In Gondar, Ethiopia, an educational and symbolic center of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, the Muslim minority has recently sought increased public parity with the Christian majority, taking advantage of the unprecedented provisions for religious freedom in Ethiopia's 1994 constitution. These developments helped fuel an episode of open antagonism, and some violence, between Muslims and Orthodox Christians in 2009. Most of the time, Gondaré Muslims and Orthodox Christians coexist without issues, engaging in practices that construe intergroup relations as harmonic. They also work to manage latent antagonistic potentials through religious codes of silence, and are able to tolerate a mixture of affinity and vague antagonistic feeling for the religious other. In addition, many Gondaré Muslims and Christians subscribe to a narrative of primordial Ethiopian tolerance, which asserts that both religious groups have lived together peacefully for centuries. However, an open "relation of antagonism" can form when latent, ambiguous tensions burst onto the social surface and become "clear" (gels̩a). This dissertation argues that religious rituals in Gondar have a role both in facilitating mutual recognition across religious boundaries and "revealing" latent antagonisms, thus fueling interreligious conflict. The potential that is realized in any given situation depends in part on how Muslim and Orthodox rituals intersect—that is, how events and human actions bring different rituals onto the same scene, and whether or not this co-presence is seen as subversive to the high values the rituals perform. The project of interreligious coexistence in Gondar involves not only negotiating the co-presence of individuals with different religious identities, but also negotiating the co-presence of different ritual complexes. Relations between different ritual complexes are important because rituals have macrocosmic entailments, transvaluing the here-now to a higher scale, bringing actors into more direct relation with higher values, and, at times, linking lived time-space to distant historical events. In Gondar, ritual's propensity to link up with higher scales can evoke imaginaries of both macro-recognition and macro-conflict, typifying the religious other as a primordial friend or archetypical foe.

For decades scholars and journalists in Latin America have written about a “crisis of the family,” often linking it not only to changing economic realities but to a corresponding “crisis of masculinity”: an image of male profligacy, domestic and public violence, drug and alcohol addiction and abuse, and male unemployment. This dissertation argues that a number of religious and non-religious movements and institutions have converged upon a particular effort to solve this problem (the all-male peer group, modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous), and that this new form of social and religious organization is playing a unique role in reshaping religious life in Latin America. To pursue this argument, the dissertation makes use of over thirty extensive, life history interviews with participants in these programs and with other inhabitants of a rapidly urbanizing center in Costa Rica's rural Northern Zone, where the author conducted twenty-two months of participant-observation and comparative research over nearly a decade with three distinct men's groups as well as three churches (Catholic, evangelical, and Adventist). From this research and from the secondary literature, this dissertation argues that the phenomenon described by Elizabeth Brusco as Latin America's Protestant “reformation of machismo” is considerably broader than evangelicalism alone and is having much broader effects on gender and religion than has been previously appreciated. Much as Robert Wuthnow (1988, 1994a-b, 1998) first pointed out that support group culture has initiated a “restructuring of American religion,” a turning away from church hierarchies and towards more egalitarian support groups for a model for spirituality and spiritual community, a similar process appears to be taking place in many parts of Latin America, where Alcoholics Anonymous had by the 1990s more than tripled its North American membership rates. Using a comparative and longitudinal lens, the dissertation argues that these groups are not only renewing men's participation in religion and the family in many parts of Latin America, but are in fact transforming the way gender and religion are understood and co-constructed in the region.

A group of Baptist Christians living in Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare, are particularly concerned with issues of moral responsibility. These urban Christians frequently raise and evaluate possible courses of action in the face of what they perceive as ethical dilemmas - about paying bribes in order to navigate bureaucracy, about fulfilling obligations to family without compromising personal moral autonomy, about individual choices like drinking alcohol or large structural issues like their culpability as citizens in the political and economic upheavals of recent decades. In these circumstances where it is difficult to know the outcome of one’s actions, Baptists in Harare believe strongly in the limits of their own capacity to act in morally good ways, and they also affirm that God controls everything in the world. If Zimbabwean Baptists affirm both of these realities- which they term “sinfulness” and “sovereignty” respectively- how do they come to make morality such a central part of their everyday lives?

Throughout this dissertation, my argument is that Baptists in Harare take themselves to be morally responsible, despite being limited in choice, and that they assess and assert a relational view of human freedom as moral autonomy. The ideas about human moral responsibility and the divine-human relation to which these Christians are committed reveal their unique view of human freedom. Notions of freedom are an important element characterizing their particular type of Baptist Christianity. But this freedom is not characterized in classically liberal terms as being about choice or the capacity to act. Instead, this freedom must be understood relative to commitments to moral responsibility that arise first for Baptists in Harare.

In recent anthropological discussions of ethics, one presumption has been that a person must be free in order to be held morally responsible. In this dissertation, I challenge the presumed relation between freedom and responsibility by presenting a view of freedom based not on agency, but rather on conceptions of the human will and the relations in which a person exists. My argument contributes to explorations of the nature of freedom diversely conceived, and its relation to responsibility and models of moral personhood.