CAEDITORS’ NOTE

ANNE ALLISONDuke University

CHARLES PIOTDuke University

This issue brings together two bundles of articles, one on Pentecostalism,the other on sovereignty. Unlikely bedfellows perhaps, religious and politicalsovereignties nevertheless often share a common conceptual vocabulary and aretheorized together by scholars such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, AchilleMbembe, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, among others. Today, termsdrawn from this “political theology” tradition—bare life, states of exception, necropol-

itics, the politics of life, biopower—and a host of hyphenated sovereignties (parastatal,partial, fractal, modular) have become part of the everyday anthropological lexi-con. What counts as life and a life worth living in the contemporary period? Whatdoes it mean when exceptional states have become the norm and citizenship hasbeen reduced to bare life? How have global humanitarianism, the medicalization ofpopulations, bioterrorism, and increasing securitization transformed the relation-ship between states and citizens? In what sense have churches and NGOs taken onsovereign functions as states have withdrawn from the social field? How to think“life” in an age when laissez-faire and the increasing disposability or superfluityof populations is accompanied by perpetual violence and increasing surveillanceand intervention. What of the Foucauldian passage from sovereignty to biopowertoday?

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 27, Issue 2, pp. 191–192. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2012 bythe American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01139.x

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:2

We open with a set of articles on Pentecostalism in the United States thatexamines the ways in which believers approach the divine (sovereign) throughconjury (Jones) and sensuous embodiment (Brahinsky). McGovern’s article drawstightly the connection between the Pentecostal and political sovereignty, explor-ing the ties among Cote d’Ivoire’s President Gbagbo, Ivorian Pentecostalism, andEvangelicals in the U.S. Congress—a striking ethnographic instance of the con-vergence of political and religious sovereignties (and of the Schmittian dictumthat these two sovereignties are iterations of one another). The remaining essaysaddress more directly the terrain of political sovereignty and its travails today.Bernstein examines the body politics of Buddhist monks in Siberia as they ma-neuver between divine and political sovereigns. McKay and Samsky explore howpopulation and citizenship are being refigured in Mozambique and Tanzania ashumanitarian organizations, NGOs, and pharmaceutical companies replace statesin organizing the biopolitical field. Caduff looks at emergent governmental regimesin the United States as bioterrorism and biosecurity have become state prioritiesand as science and sovereignty have become mutually entangled. Redfield’s articleconsiders the role of expatriate humanitarian officials working for Medecins SansFrontieres—an organization that exemplifies governmental humanitarianism at itspurest—as that organization wrestles with the micropolitics of national origin andglobal circulation.

As with all the best anthropology, the ethnographic in these articles is a siteof theory building, a place in which “Theory” is both generated and challenged.Singh’s article is exemplary in this regard, calling into question the political the-ology paradigm of Agamben and Schmitt altogether, claiming that its terms anddesignations impoverish our understanding of how power works and how life isorganized in central India, foreclosing other analytic possibilities in the process.Could there be—is it possible to imagine—a life beyond sovereignty?

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