The anthropology of Pentecostalism in Africa and along its transformative routes: A review essay

Abstract

If the turn of the twenty-first century featured the transfer of the Christian center of gravity from the Euro-American West to the global South, then a large part of the reason for the emergence of majority world Christianity can certainly be attributed to the explosiveness of churches across the African continent.' Not without reason, then, scholarship on African Pentecostalism has proliferated, and to the degree that globalization dynamics are intensifying African migration to and inter-relationship with the West, research on the African pentecostal diaspora and on transnational Pentecostalism as it concerns the African context are also beginning to appear. This essay overviews six recent books published in this second decade of the third millennium, equally divided between the sub-Saharan and West African regions.