![]() Izhava narratives suggest ambivalence: while failure stories remain individualized, narrated in terms of bad luck or others' cheating, success stories are presented as exemplars of a twentieth-century global master narrative of progress. ![]() This article explores how members of an ex-untouchable, ‘backward’ community of South India – the Izhavas of Kerala – represent and make sense of their entanglements within ‘modernity’. It threatens to bewilder scholars as well unless we learn to think beyond the classificatory schemes outsiders so readily deploy and insiders so assiduously avoid. The refusal of ordinary men and women to settle has long frustrated government administrators and religious reformers alike. Ethnographic evidence from northern Mozambique suggests that the “backsliding into heathenism” Pentecostal leaders decry is experienced locally as a capacity, a capacity for mobility and mutability, for shifting places and altering identities. In so doing, I bring existential insights to bear on such themes as rupture and discontinuity, which already, but inadequately, suffuse studies of Pentecostal conversion. In this chapter, I offer a counternarrative, not in denial of the widely reported statistical evidence but in affirmation of the ambivalence with which individuals behind the statistics experience novelty. ![]() Recent scholarship on Pentecostalism in the global South gives the impression of a singular trajectory of inexorable growth. ![]()
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