Eds. Allan Anderson, Michael Bergunder, Andre Droogers, and Cornelius Van der Laan. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2010. - 310 p.

In a sea of recent scholarly publications in the field of Pentecostalism and charismatic movements, this book stands out as truly unique in its scope and conceptual understanding. The editors and authors set out to assess the current state of this field of research in the context of the latest approaches in various academic disciplines. This is not just a collection of information about what has been done in this area over the past ten or twenty years, but a serious attempt to compare specific empirical research with the general state of theory and methodology.-

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dov in the humanities and social sciences. Therefore, the task of the book is indeed unambiguously ambitious.

The book is the result of a long-term project called the European Research Network on Global Pentecostalism (GloPent; website: http://www.glopent.net/), launched in 2004 by three research institutes: the Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies at the University of Birmingham, represented by Alan Anderson; and the Hollenweger Center at the University of Birmingham. The Free University of Amsterdam (Hollenweger Center at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), represented by Andre Drogers and Cornelius van der Laan; and the Department of Religious History and Missionary Studies at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Heidelberg, represented by Michael Bergunder.

Project participants and authors represent several disciplines: history, cultural studies, tender studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and theology. The idea was to connect these perspectives in a way that would allow for a shift from a multi-disciplinary view of Pentecostal / Charismatic Christianity to an inter-disciplinary view. In my opinion, the authors managed to make progress in this direction. This is evidenced, in particular, by the fact that all authors, when identifying achievements and gaps in their own discipline, turn to other disciplines, trying to understand how the approach of "their" discipline could be included in a broader framework. In this sense, I would highlight Joel Robbins ' very interesting thoughts on what the contribution of anthropology could be, i.e., what exactly anthropology could reveal based on its specific approaches and methods. However, this kind of reflection is also present in other authors, including in the introduction by Alan Anderson.

The project is also ambitious in another respect: the authors of the book are both insiders and outsiders, that is, both Pentecostal scientists and those who are not Pentecostal. This is a conscious position that problematizes the very essence of disputes about scientific epistemology, academic objectivity, and subjectivity. The professional attitude in an academic environment is to be as "objective" as possible; at the same time, in recent years, the professional attitude is to be as "objective" as possible.-

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Over the past decade, a new academic sensibility has made it impossible to claim perfect neutrality. In this particular case, it is impossible to ignore the growing body of research carried out by scholars, mostly theologians, who themselves belong to the Pentecostal churches. These researchers have some insider intuition that can correct and enrich the overall vision of the phenomenon under consideration. As Anderson writes in the introduction, "an agnostic external researcher may view typical Pentecostal practice in a purely functional way, as nothing more than another religious element of the modern global mix, while missing some specific features that the analysis will not be complete without" (p.6).

Needless to say, outsiders, in turn, have special advantages: they retain freedom from some of the extreme judgments and evaluations found in insiders. For example, outsiders may be critical of the Pentecostal leadership, which insiders sometimes describe in almost hagiographic awe; or they may distance themselves from the new fashion to bring the rehabilitation of Pentecostalism to the level of its romantic idealization.

Thus, combining the efforts of one and the other serves to better understand the whole. But the mere presence of insiders and outsiders among the authors of the book requires methodological reflection from each of them; it can be said that they are forced to respond to a fundamental epistemological challenge faced by both neutral academic scientists and engaged ("engaged") authors: how to combine emic and etic approaches, an inside view and an outside view? This applies to the choice of sources, how these sources are interpreted, how existing public and academic biases and stereotypes are taken into account, and many other aspects.

The book is divided into three parts: (1) Interdisciplinary Perspectives; (d) Social Sciences and Humanities; and (3) Theology. The first part opens with a text by Alan Anderson that focuses on the central theme of "diversity, taxonomy, and definitions," which is an attempt to deal with the frightening diversity of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity and the terrible confusion of periods, " waves," "trends,"and" sects." Anderson doesn't try

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to give a strict definition, but refers to Wittgenstein's principle of" family similarity " (Familienahnlichkeit): "When describing and defining something," Anderson writes, " one must leave 'blurred edges' so that an inaccurate definition can still make sense " (p. 15). Anderson then proceeds to examine several approaches to the taxonomy of Pentecostalism in sequence, offering a very detailed and instructive analysis. He begins with a " typological approach "(based on the" experience of the Holy Spirit " as a key trope), then stops at the social sciences approach, moves on to the historical approach, and ends the review with a theological approach. Each of these approaches is useful in its own way for understanding the phenomenon as a whole. In conclusion, he notes that "a multidisciplinary study of global Pentecostalism requires a broad taxonomy that uses the analogy of 'family similarity'; this will allow for all its historical connections, as well as its theological and sociological aspects " (p. 27). What follows is an equally in-depth analysis by Andre Drogers regarding the "essentialist and normative" approach to Pentecostalism.: "Perhaps more than other disciplines, religious studies as a whole, due to its specificity, is prone to such approaches [i.e., normative and essentialist-]. And the study of Pentecostalism is no exception. Some of its extremely specific features are particularly conducive to this " (p. 31). This is also related to the dilemma of the emic/ethical (looking from the inside and looking from the outside). Drogers writes about the need to follow a narrow path "between Scylla and Charybdis of positivist and constructivist solutions to the problem of subjectivity" (p. 42). How acute this problem is in the case of Pentecostal studies is clearly seen in the history of religious and academic normative disputes that accompany the study of Pentecostalism.

Michael Bergunder's chapter focuses on how the study of Pentecostalism was influenced by the "cultural turn" in the humanities. This chapter is a good example of how post-structuralist epistemology helps us see this phenomenon as a discourse or series of discourses related to both religion and science. Bergunder shows, in particular, how such a discursive approach makes it possible to understand Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity not in the "classical" terms of "denomination" or even "religious tradition", but as a kind of " sete-

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a single structure". He also deconstructs Pentecostalism in the direction of de-Westernization, with a particular emphasis on postcolonial, subaltern representations of the sources of the whole phenomenon, its practices and ideology (I will return to this emphasis later).

Elizabeth Brusco addresses Pentecostalism in the context of gender studies, touching on the disparity between the predominance of women and the immutability of male leadership, and offers an analysis of the relevant issues, drawing on her own field research in Columbia, where she studied and compared the narratives of women and men. The gender aspect is also discussed in Henry Guren's chapter on the central phenomenon of evangelical culture-conversion. The author draws on his field research in Central America (Guatemala and Nicaragua). Its main idea is to consider conversion not as a one-time radical coup (in the image of the Apostle Paul's address "on the road to Damascus"), but as a conversion carrier-a long process that depends on many personal, social, and institutional variables.

Birgit Mayer's chapter looks at Pentecostalism from the perspective of globalization, drawing on specific material collected in Ghana, Africa, but raising theoretical questions: how true are the classical Max Weber - derived ideas about the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism - and the entire secular modern perspective-in view of the new evidence pointing to the possibility of a new religion? religious " enchantment "of the global world of late modernity? Mayer goes on to explain the success story of Pentecostalism in terms of "glocalization" - its unique "ability to place the local in the framework of larger concepts. In this sense, Pentecostalism is always in the process of becoming, it is a movement and a performance, and not an established religious system based on fixed structures" (p.121). (This vision corresponds to the notion of "network structure" that Bergunder discussed in his chapter; see above.) Another important emphasis Mayer places on what she calls the materiality and tangibility of Pentecostalism (p. 127) - their desire for bodily experience and their focus on consumption, which is just the opposite.-

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a typical view of classical Protestant worldly asceticism and self-sufficient spirituality.

The four subsequent chapters that make up the second part of the book are devoted to approaches relevant to various disciplines: psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history (Stefan and Odilo Huber, Joel Robbins, Stephen Hunt, and Cornelius van der Laan, respectively). Each approach has its own advantages and complements our general understanding of Pentecostalism. In psychology, the authors distinguish between exogenous and endogenous approaches: the former is based on the general premises of current psychological theories, the latter focuses on the psychological dynamics within Pentecostals (both groups and individuals). In anthropology, three points are distinguished: Pentecostalism as a cultural process (it shows "how Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on discontinuity, affects the cultural process, introducing a new dynamic of cultural change" - p. 173); Pentecostalism as a lived religion; and the relationship of the phenomenon of Pentecostalism with modernity. The sociology of religion continues to address the classic question of modernity (here the initial counterpoint is David Martin's contribution to both the study of Pentecostalism and the theory of secularization). The sociological approach also allows us to reconsider the fundamental question of the demography and social composition of Pentecostalism; to think about the validity of the "deprivation theory" as a way to explain the unprecedented growth of Pentecostalism; to consider the possibility of understanding Pentecostalism as a "new religious movement"; to conduct a combined analysis of "rivivelism" and" rutinization " as key social mechanisms operating within religious communities, and so on..

Van der Laan, who represents the historical approach, refers to his experience of studying the early Dutch Pentecostals and their mission in Lijiang, China, in the 1920s, but he makes some more general considerations about how to reinterpret the available historical sources. He promotes one of the strong points of the book as a whole: the need to de-Americanize and generally de-westernize the global history of Pentecostalism. He's writing: "While our story will depend on the published letters, reports, and periodicals of Western agencies and their missionaries, our understanding will remain intact. -

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it appears very distorted. Such documents and texts were written with a view to Western perception - in order to gain support for the work of the missions " (p. 210). Van der Lahn concludes that the growth of Pentecostalism should be explained based on local motives and local spiritual and socio-cultural search.

By the way, it seems that this is the general belief of the participants of this collection and the entire GloPent project: in the same spirit, the theories of "network structure", "multiple sources" and "contextualization" proposed in other chapters of the book draw attention to the so-called eccentric content of the entire phenomenon, i.e., the absence of a single center. Perhaps it is no coincidence that GloPent, as a European project, is skeptical about the North American genesis of Pentecostalism. Since most authors are engaged in research in different parts of the non-Western world (Latin America, Africa, and Asia), they tend to de-westernize - and this, of course, is not only empirical, but also methodological, epistemological de-westernization. In any case, it is a fact that today the phenomenon of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity belongs to the "majority world", that is, the non-Western world, the"global South".

The editors invited Pentecostal theologians, whose texts made up the third part of the book. Four chapters are devoted to four theological disciplines: pneumatology, missiology, practical theology, and Ecumenism (written by Veli-Matti Kerkijnen, Amos Jong and Tony Ritchie, respectively, and Mark Cartledge and Cecil Robeck Jr.). It seems that these chapters are not completely integrated into the book; however, this was a conscious decision of the editors: give voice to Pentecostal scholars and supplement the book with theology, which, by the way, is usually considered marginal to the emphatically experienced nature of Pentecostalism. The authors of the third part do not deny this thesis about the centrality of personal experience for all evangelicals; nevertheless, the appeal to theology allows us to take into account what is usually ignored. Joel Robbins, in his chapter written from an anthropological perspective, talked about the need to know Pentecostal theology - the categorical and intellectual framework of "popular (oral) theologies" that empirical researchers study. Pentecostal theology, formerly largely marginal and "non-academic-

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It has become more mature in recent decades; it contains at least some of the basic ideas that are characteristic of the phenomenon of global Pentecostalism. Moreover, we can detect important changes in the theological framework concerning the history of Pentecostal perception and self-identification in various religious and secular contexts around the world.

Overall (with the exception of one unfortunate omission - the lack of an analysis of the growing political influence of Pentecostalism), the book in question covers in depth all the main topics, covering theoretical and conceptual aspects of the most relevant discussions that have taken place in recent decades. The breadth and depth of this book make it a true milestone in the scholarly study of Pentecostalism.

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