Back from the dead?

Souls and the afterlife within Oksapmin Pentecostal-evangelical Christianity

Abstract

An important aspect of theoretical debates within the anthropology of Pentecostal-evangelical Christianity has been to show that while these religious traditions demand the creation of radical cultural discontinuities within the lives of converts, they also entail the retention of pre-existing indigenous spiritual elements, reconfigured as subordinate figures of evil vis-à-vis paramount Christian values through a process referred to as ontological preservation. Here I contribute to these discussions by showing how this process has informed how the Oksapmin imagine the relationship between traditional and Biblical beliefs about the soul, a neglected area of enquiry within the literature, despite its centrality to the lives of Christians globally. Analysis reveals a clear process of ontological preservation to have taken place, as the posthumous expressions of the soul continue separately as Satanic manifestations alongside new paramount Christian understandings of a life-breath given by God. I seek to add to this theoretical framework by showing how this process of diabolised ontological preservation may be accompanied by a simultaneous radical change in ontological, and not only cosmological, status. That is, as well as being preserved as something Satanic, the traditional soul ceases to be a soul and instead becomes an evil spirit.