Suspicious spirits: New Christianity and Radical Distrust in South Africa

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, a number of anthropologists have questioned the discipline’s “epistemology of intimacy” to show that in some parts of the world, Otherness plays an integral role in the construction of social unity. While Otherness has been rehabilitated as a productive, even unifying, relationship in certain contexts, it remains an insecure premise through which to relate in parts of the world where people idealize pure mutual identification and believe in the reality of witchcraft. In such places, Otherness is always implicated as a dangerous potential in even the most intimate relationships. South African churches have long resisted this potential in the ways that they relate to fellow Christians in church and to the social world beyond it. In contrast to their “hermeneutics of faith”, I pay specific attention in this paper to a church in South Africa whose religious ethic centred on a radical “hermeneutics of suspicion” that led believers to relate to their own bodies, fellow churchgoers, and a wider social world in terms of socially threatening Otherness. I argue that members of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, where this ethic was elaborated, found in radical Otherness the possibility of an ontologically singular position from which they could attempt to remake social worlds that would be immune from witchcraft – without exposing themselves to the dangers of new social relations.