Explore the vast range of titles available.

I examine the growth of Pentecostalism in the Haitian diaspora through both a neo-Weberian framework and the argument, derived from Walter Benjamin, that the cultural translation of religious doctrine should resonate with the original and not merely substitute scholarly categories for sacred meanings. Haitian migrants to Guadeloupe, French West Indies, appropriate Pentecostalism to produce a transnational enclave in the face of marginality and displacement. Using Christian idioms, they defend themselves against denigrating stereotypes and articulate sentiments of loss and remembrance of the Haitian homeland. Their theology of sin, salvation, and the spirit therefore overlaps with anthropological frameworks about the production of community. These two languages complement each other, and each provides a partial theory to explain the need for moral separationism as well as its likely effects. Examining this complementary relationship suggests both the specificity of Haitian Pentecostalism and the limits of Benjamin's literary model for ethnographic interpretation.

The small Jewish community of Copenhagen is one of the most liberal and assimilated in Europe. In its liturgy, its leadership, and its ritual practice, however, it maintains strictly orthodox forms. In this article, I examine how this orthodox dominance has persisted, despite the often vigorously expressed dissatisfaction of the liberal majority. I argue that the confluence of Jewish religious forms with the cultural setting of contemporary Denmark tends to confer control over ritual practice on the orthodox. The interaction of Jewish institutional structures with Danish social patterns leads to orthodox social control, whereas the interaction of Jewish religious ideas with the Danish cultural setting promotes cultural control. These outcomes have implications for social scientific approaches to contemporary conservative religious movements, which have often been characterized primarily as forms of opposition to modern social change. The political dynamics of such movements are not simple reflections of a broad opposition between tradition and modernity; they emerge out of the intricate and often unpredictable interplay of religious structures with the social and cultural worlds within which those structures are embedded.