ABSTRACT: Based on long-term ethnographic research in central Tanzania, this paper focuses on Pentecostal/Charismatic practices of spiritual warfare. Most Pentecostals/Charismatics possess a detailed, albeit sometimes fragmented, knowledge about different categories of spirits that belong to the Devil’s team. At the same time, participation in spiritual warfare is also, and foremost, a question of acquiring a set of sensibilities, dispositions, and embodied skills for taking action against spiritual adversaries. I draw on phenomenological thinkers (such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) as well as on a body of anthropological scholarship that, in part inspired by phenomenology, has shown how religious socialization revolves around different modes of knowing and learning about otherworldly forces. I show how participation in deliverance sessions in churches is a process through which Pentecostals/Charismatics cultivate certain alertness to the presence of spiritual adversaries as well as a ritual mastery that involves experiencing their own bodies as channels from which divine power can be transmitted. I further show how spiritual warfare prayers are taken into a variety of everyday situations and contexts where spiritual adversaries sometimes present themselves, not as objects of thought, but rather as practical problems that are ready-to-handle with an automated bodily response.
Martin Lindhardt (Thu,) studied this question.