A Thousand Eruptions

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Melanesia and beyond, this article explores movements of religious intensification within Christianity. The morphology of religious intensification is defined by a multiplicity of localized upsurges laterally interconnected by means of decentralized packs of inspired participants. Charismatic intensification is above all an intensification of affect produced through the workings and movements of the Holy Spirit. In contrast to the ‘domesticated affect’ of institutionalized Pentecostalism, religious intensification trades in ‘wild affect’—improvised, loosely structured mobilizations of affective outpouring. These contagious upsurges in spiritualized intensity propel participants toward a new metaphysical horizon, namely, the Parousia or Second Coming. The effusion of apocalyptic affect can in many cases be historically explained in terms of the subsidence of the colonial order; as one cosmological meta-narrative collapses, another rushes into the existential breach. Surging toward a new world here produces an unraveling of existing hegemonic teleology and eschatology that function to fix, dominate, and restrict human bodies.