"We Are In-Between". : Health-seeking, Gender and Authority in a Charismatic Church in Mbeya, Tanzania

Abstract: This study examines health-seeking, healing practices, gender and authority in a charismatic, locally founded church, the International Church for Healing and Glory (ICHG) in Mbeya, Tanzania. Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2013 and 2014, it addresses the situation of people who resort to faith-healing in a medically pluralistic context. The ICHG is a church led by a male prophet, while membership is predominantly female; thus, gender is used as an analytical lens that deepens understandings of authority building, experiences of falling ill and healing practices.Theoretically, the study draws from gender theories, anthropology – especially anthropology of Christianity – and the body of research on Pentecostal charismatic Christianity (PCC). Methodologically ethnographic, it combines participant observation and interviews. The Introduction situates the study in the previous scholarship on PCC, gender and healing in African contexts. Chapter Two discusses the historical development, both political and religious, that contributes to the current religious landscape of Mbeya, and places ICHG on the continuum of these developments. Chapter Three maps the possibilities and limitations of ethnographic methods as tools for doing theology as it examines the oral theology and cosmology of the prophet. Chapter Four focuses on health-seeking from the point of view of charismatic Christians in a medically pluralistic context in which faith-healing offered by a variety of Christian churches, traditional therapeutic methods and biomedicine are all viable options when people fall ill. Health-seeking nomads, the subjects of the study, are people whose quest for healing drives them through these various spaces of healing and the different ontologies that are at work in each. The main argument made is that while people are aware of the boundaries between different healing systems, they can choose to transgress them and move between domains. Religious belonging is flexible. Chapter Five deals with the role of the church leader and founder, his authority-building strategies and fractures in his authority, and his calling narratives. The role played by gender in his leadership and how he displays himself as a leader are also addressed. Chapter Six engages with the stories of women in the ICHG who suffer from symptoms they see as spirit possession, which is analytically viewed as a loss of agency that especially threatens motherhood and acts of care. Chapter Seven examines the public healing practices and prayers aimed at chasing out the evil spirits, which, because illness and healing are strongly gendered, make the female body a focus of ritual practice. The argument made is that the discourses in the prophet's sermons and healing practices together contribute to the notion of a proper woman. Thus, ritual practice participates in the making of gendered values in the society. As it engages with previous research on gender and charismatic Christianity, the study also further adds to our understanding of less explored connections between faith-healing and gender and examines the perspectives of people who navigate the markets of healing.