Christy Schuetze:	Good afternoon. Welcome to Swarthmore, or welcome back to Swarthmore, whichever applies to you in your case. It's good to be here, and I'm excited to have this opportunity to share. A brief overview of the book manuscript, which I completed last year during my sabbatical leave. I spent most of that leave in Mozambique, where I do my research. Thank you very much to Randy Frame, who's here, who watched my dog while I was out of the country. So, this is the working title for the book currently, which is off in the hands of a publisher at the moment. The book is a combination of seven years spent living in Central Mozambique, over a period that spans over 17 years, which is shocking to me looking back. It's already been 17 years. 
	But about four of those years were devoted full time at [NaGraphic 00:01:11] research in Central Mozambique, where this era is indicating. So, in the book, I'm able to offer longitudinal perspective on a really rapidly changing context. So, I began this book project to solve a puzzle. In 1999 and 2000 as a volunteer high school English teacher in Gorongoza, my students often invited me to attend Sunday worship services at their Pentecostal churches. Eager to emerse myself in the life of this rural district, and with church life central to many young people's weekend social activities, I always accepted these invitations as a perfect opportunity to involve myself in life outside of school grounds. 
	I spent countless hours in different Pentecostal churches with names ranging from the familiar like Assemblies of God or Apostolic Faith, to the unyielding such as Communion at the Harvest, Rainbow Ministry, and Evangelical Pentecostal Church of Christ Await the Arrival of Our Lord Matthew 25:13. On Sundays, women with their young children in tow will fill to overflowing each of the informal church buildings that I entered. Women clearly formed the substance of this growing religious movement, but why? The puzzle gained complexity as I began to notice that Pentecostal churches were growing in popularity at an astounding rate. Over the years, I watched with fascination as new churches mushroomed up across the green landscape of this small plateaued town, numbering what I later counted to be 105 separate church organizations, and I could only fit a small number of those on this slide. 
	Another aspect of the puzzle emerged for me in my third year living in the district. So, after I was a volunteer for two years, I stayed for an additional year working as a research assistant for a Mozambican anthropologist. I was working to research the work of spirit mediums there, which opened up an entirely different world to me. As I interviewed doesn't of spirit mediums about their healing work, I learned that there was also a rapid increase of new spirit mediums in the district. It was something the astounded area residents, who referred to this situation as an epidemic. Like the majority of church participants, almost all of these new spirit mediums were women. But in nearly all the Sunday worship services of Pentecostal churches I have attended, I listened to church members preaching about the evils of [inaudible 00:03:58], or traditional healing practices. 
	Church leaders repeatedly exhorted members to avoid consulting spirit mediums, and instead to turn to prayer, to God, to Jesus, or the Holy Spirit for assistance with their family's misfortunes. Preachers, like in spirit mediumship and engagement in its healing practices to devil worship, to making dangerous bargains with demons. God would only help the faithful with their misfortunes. But in order to convert to a Pentecostal church, spirit mediums are required to burn all of the tools that are central to mediumship. That's what you see in this picture, a group of church members helping a spirit medium convert to the church and burning her tools. So, how then, was this rapid increase in the number of spirit mediums happening at the same time the Pentecostal church participation boomed? Why were women so prominent in both of these new realms?
	So in the book, I focus on marriage relationships as key to understanding these processes. In fact, I reveal how marriage relationships are frequently figured as both the problem, something to be managed and improved; and as a solution, as the focus of healing efforts in both the context of spirit mediumship and Pentecostal churches. So, you might be asking yourself, "Well, how can marriage be related to these two very different religious movements?" So to give you some understanding of this, I'm going to zoom out and show how these religious changes are part of Proverb processes. So, recent years have been characterized by an astounding global spread of Pentecostal churches. The rapid proliferation of new Pentecostal style churches around the world has arguably been one of the most remarkable sociocultural phenomena in recent times. Pentecostal charismatic church is an umbrella term intended to capture some of the commonalities of a wide range of independent church bodies that are loosely connected through forms of practice, discourse, and shared history. 
	Pentecostal churches share a central philosophy of the role of the Holy Spirit in people's lives. Through the Holy Spirit, people are deeply transformed and take on a very active faith. Their close connection to the divine is revealed through prophecy, dreams and visions, speaking in tongues, healing through prayer, or the laying on of hands, and deliverance or protection of evil forces. The lack of a centralized bureaucratic structure has facilitated the rapid growth of these churches around the world. In less than one century, church movements of this style worldwide has gone from 0 to more than 500 million faithful. And the growth of Pentecostal churches has been particularly dramatic in Sub Saharan Africa and in Asia, as this map illustrates. This extraordinary growth has contributed to shifted the global center of gravity of Christianity from the west to the global south. 
	Recent studies agree that the appeal of Pentecostal churches in most context lies primarily in their emphasis of divine healing and the protection from evil forces that they offer. Social scientists have noted that in widely separated context of the world, women form the majority of participants. In [Gorongosa 00:07:47], women are also the striking majority of new spirit medium. So, for those of you who are unfamiliar with spirit mediumship, let me give you a brief description of that. Spirit medium are individuals with special connections to the spirit world. They use their personal connections to individual spirits to help others resolve all sorts of misfortune, whether physical, unless, or financial problems, or conflicts between members of the family. Diverse types of misfortunes are often understood to be a form of communication where spirits express their displeasure with people. 
	Spirit medium are able to channel spirits into their bodies, so that the spirits can come out and speak through them directly to patients within families. In this way, spirits of the deceased are able to voice their complaints and make demands that, when properly fulfilled, will cause the spirit to calm down, allowing the restoration of order and well being. In the literature on religious practices in Africa, overwhelmingly, Christian churches have been studied in isolation from spirit possession. Even in context where practices are taking place along side each other, which is most places in Sub Saharan Africa, scholars have tended to purify the object of studying, focusing real attention solely on the practices of a single tradition. Just as a literature is divided in terms of subject matter, it's also divided in terms of its theories of how to interpret women's participation in these realms. 
	Women spirit possession has often been analyze as a disguised form of protest against the abuses of patriarchal authority. Whereas in sharp contrast, feminist scholars have critiqued the teachings of Pentecostal churches and other conservative religious groups as promoting religious ideology that serves to keep women under patriarchal control. In my book, I reveal how examining both women engagement in Pentecostal churches and in spirit mediumship, highlights the similarities between these apparently distinct religious groups. Rather than individual women empowerment or disempowerment, women active in both realms are engaged in efforts of social healing and renewal. Women who are active in either realm are able to gain new degrees of control and stability in their domestic relationships. 
	So in my book, rather define my focus around the study of a particular religious group, I focused on what I refer to as a single therapeutic field. Pentecostal churches and spirit medium offer different options of resort for women and their families when they're confronting hardship. So, I approached the work of spirit mediums and Pentecostal church groups through the lens of social healing. The most common association we have with the notion of healing is that of cures for physical disease. But a focus on social healing draws attention to the ways in which physical diseases and their distribution are socially shaped, while also highlighting how social illnesses are addressed in therapeutic practices. In the healing philosophy of Pentecostal churches and spirit mediums, problems of physical disease and social disease are not regarded as distinct issues that have different types of sources. 
	In fact, physical illnesses often are seen as a sign of social problems in need of resolution. Overall, the lens of social healing allows me to highlight how religious practices are not just reflective of, but constitutive of social life. So, to give you aa sense of how these practices shape social life, and what this therapeutic field I'm talking about is like, I open the book with stories of two different women, who navigated through this therapeutic field, being pulled to Pentecostal church participation, and other times towards spirit mediumship. So, when I give you a brief overview of these two different stories, to give you a sense of what this is like. The first is Alyssa's story. Alyssa and her husband, Marco, were the leaders of a Pentecostal church called [spanish 00:12:23], or Church of the Covenant in the neighborhood of [Gorongosa 00:12:27] district capitol. 
	Alyssa and Marco headed this church until 2001, when their youngest daughter, Balita, became I'll, suffering fainting spells. Balita's physical symptoms emerged at a time when she was struggling to manage a failing second marriage. Like the Balita's first marriage, her second was also characterized by continual conflict, physical abuse, and financial abandonment. Balita was not Alyssa's only child facing difficulties. In fact, none of Alyssa's children were free from misfortune. One grown son had lost all four of his offspring to illness while they were infants. Alyssa's eldest daughter had already suffered through two divorces, and her third marriage wasn't looking any better. Ongoing conflicts with her third husband had led her to return to live with her parents. Alyssa also suffered at the hands of Marco, who since the Civil War's end, had taken to drinking, and was prone to periodic bouts of rage. 
	Thought at their church, Alyssa and Marco had long preached that strong faith in God and fervent prayer was the only true solution to illness of family problems. Years passed without resolution or even temporary relief of their troubles. Their family's unending sting of misfortunes were shaking their faith. Alyssa and Marco made a joint decision to try other ways to resolve their family's problems. Following strict rules that prohibited members from seeking the services of spirit mediums, Marco and Lisa had to temporary suspend participation in their church. This freed them to consult the spirit medium to find out the cause of their problems. Their consultations revealed the cause of their family suffering to be an [infuko 00:14:21] spirit, the spirit of a man who had been killed by Lisa's father's father. This spirit was attacking the ascendants of his murderer, causing the suffering that Alyssa and her children had seen over many years. 
	The spirit attacks were both an expression of anger and a way to communicate that he had serious demands that had to be met. The spirit demanded to marry Alyssa. With Alyssa as his wife, he would be able to work through her to heal others. Alyssa and Marco decided that to ensure the well being of their descendants, they must accept the spirit's demand, leading them to abandon church participation permanently. This decision engaged Alyssa and Marco in a long and complicated process to create a permanent bond with the spirit, incorporating it into their family. But in order to establish this spiritual marriage, Alyssa's husband, Marco, was required to actively demonstrate his approval of the relationship. To comply, Marco traveled far and wide to collect all the objects the spirit demanded, including a stool, a medicinal board, a basket, a small two edged ceremonial dagger, items that are all typical parts of the spirit medium's tool kit. These material objects served as the resting place for this spirit, and the means through which to channel communication, and to consolidate healing powers. 
	The spirit also directed Marco to construct a special house in their family compound that would serve as the spirit's dwelling place. Through these actions, Marco became like a groom who builds a home for his new bride in his family's compound, and gathers the clothing, money, and goods her parents require as part of bride wealth. For the [inaudible 00:16:22] event that mark Alyssa as the new spirit medium, Alyssa, Marco, their daughters, and neighbors gathered in the newly built spirit house, along with the spirit medium overseeing the process. Together, they sang to call Alyssa's new spirit husband to possess her, so that they can present him with the tools he had requested and finalize the marriage. But, they quickly encountered a problem. After trying several rounds of songs to call the spirit into her body, the possession wasn't taking place. Something was blocking Alyssa's spirit. The spirit medium leading the initiation asked Alyssa and Marco, "Do you usually argue at home? Yesterday, you weren't talking." 
	Before long, Marco admitted that he had insulted and hit Alyssa the previous after an afternoon of drinking. The group demanded that he apologized to her. Once he admit he had made an explicit and heart felt apology, he said, "This is what I did. This is all I did. Now, let's do our work here." The group then resumed singing. In the second round of singing, things went smoothly. Not long after the start of the first song, Alyssa began to shiver and quake, and the spirit came through her body with little effort. Once the spirit emerged, now speaking through Alyssa's body, he turned to Marco and demanded another apology for beating Alyssa. Marco apologized again, this time directly to the spirit, saying, "Those things that happened were mistakes." To this, the spirit replied harshly, "If you do it again, I will beat you from the morning until the sun goes down." Marco promised, "I won't do it again." The spirit retorted, "Don't do it again."
	Having diffused the spirit's anger, the group addressed their main goal. Marco presented the spirit with each of the tools he had collected. This process cemented the spirit's bond to the family, making Alyssa the spirit's wife and living medium, the focal point of his connection to the world. Creating this bond, ensured the spirit's rage had been cooled, transforming him from a vengeful spirit into a member of the family, which in term transformed him from the cause of Alyssa's family years of suffering into a source of protection and prosperity. This new spiritual marriage bond also transformed the nature of Alyssa's relationship with her living husband, Marco. Five years after this initiation was complete, I returned to spend time with Alyssa. She explained that once she began working as a spirit medium, her troubles faded and she began to feel happiness again. 
	Now, Alyssa told me things were dramatically different. "There's never fighting at home. Now, we are living well." Soon after Alyssa established this relationship with her spirit in 2001, her youngest daughter, Balita, also began the process of becoming a spirit medium. Balita's domestic conflicts that led to divorce with her previous husband and the ongoing crisis with her current husband were understood as the actions of a spirit who destroyed her marriages with living men in order to be recognize as her primary husband. Later, Balita's older sister, Graca, also began the process of initiation in response to the recent lost of her infant and years of struggles with different marriages. Alyssa and her daughters are just three women who are transforming misfortune into well being through the process of spirit mediums. They're part of a rapid and ongoing increase of spirit mediums in Gorongosa.
	In the Gorongosa neighborhood where Alyssa reside, there is hardly a homestead among dozens of scattered residences that does not house at least one recently initiated female spirit medium. The striking changes in the world of spirit mediumship in the region, however, are not confined to demographic trends. Recently initiated spirit medium are also transforming the practices of spirit mediumship. Most new female mediums, like Alyssa and her daughters, are working with Infukwa spirits, which is a class of spirits relatively uncommon in the past. Older spirit mediums who had been practicing for many years typically work with majoka spirits that are inherited through family lineages. 
	Majoka mediums work with white and black colors. You can see the cloth draped over her lap is half black and half white. These colors symbolize the dual nature of these spirits. Because majoka spirits are already incorporated in the lineage, and are passed down from one generation to the next. Majoka spirits do not attack a family with destruction and ill will, but are dedicated to work for its protection and prosperity. Thus, the while color symbolizes benevolent nature. However, black indicates how if neglected or mistreated, they may cause problems. But in sharp contrast, most initiated spirit mediums who work with Infukwa spirits have visible changes in their tools and working style. Infukwa are not spirits that are inherited through family lineages. They're arriving to a family for the first time. These are spirits of foreigners, people outside of the family, and usually from outside of the region, who were killed violently. 
	They typically make their presence known by inflicting a family group with intense and prolonged suffering. Mediums that work with these newly prevalent foreign spirits wear clothing that is bright red, a color that represents the blood spill when the person was killed, and also symbolizes the spirit's rage and volatility. Becoming a wife of an Infukwa spirit brings about significant transformations in the social relationships of the living. In this relationship, the spirit becomes the supreme authority of a family group, making or approving of all major decisions. If a women with a spirit marries a living man, this significantly alters the marriage relationship. Her husband does not pay the [inaudible 00:22:49] of bride wealth, which is the material wealth that's exchanged from a husband to a bride's family that establishes a marriage bond between two families. Without the bolo, this is not an authentic marriage. In fact, some people describe the living husband of a woman who has a spirit husband as a lover. 
	He is like a servant, someone who helps with the healing practice, and who serves the spirit by providing descendants for it. Because the children of the relationship are considered to be the offspring of the spirit husband, the marriage, in a sense, shifts from being patrilineal to matrilineal, since the children of this relationship belongs to the spirit, and thus the lineage of a woman's father. In the event of a divorce, the children will remain with their mother, where ordinarily, they go along with their father. The relationship also shifts from patrilocal to matrilocal. Because the spirit husband resides among the woman's kin, her living husband must come to reside with her at her family's homestead. It's also widely known that the wife of the spirit should not be hit, beaten, insulted, or ordered around since the spirit will cause serious harm to anyone who disrespects his wife. 
	Thus, many living husbands are afraid of their spirit seniors, and treat their wives with utmost care and respect. Finally, the money that comes from the healing work of these spirit mediums remain in the complete and direct control of the spirit husband, who will designate how the money be used and for what ends. Outside the home, a woman who's a spirit medium also finds herself in the knits of new social relationships. Initiation inserts a woman social networks of other mediums. This network is express through fictive kinship terms. For instance, a woman who oversees the initiation of a spirit medium becomes known to this new medium as mother. If this new medium later goes on to oversee the initiation of another medium, this newest medium refers to the first as grandmother. So in this photo, all of the women share membership in a common lineage, meaning that each woman's initiation can be traced back to one person. These kinship terms are not nearly symbolic, but they're enacted. Relationships between spirit mediums are characterized by obligations and preciosity, similar to those characterizing kinship relationships. 
	So now we have a sense of the life of a spirit wife, I want to shift to examine a different story, which really just examine women's experiences in Pentecostal churches. In the book, I pair Alyssa's story with the story of Ana because Ana faced a similar situation, but chose a very different path. Ana and her parents were active members of the Pentecostal church where I based one year of ethnographic field work. She's a middle aged successful trader with seven children. Like Alyssa, Ana faced a wide rage of misfortunes. She struggled with her husband who is prone to jealousy, abuse, and alcoholism. In 2006, she decided to abandon her husband and return to live near her parents. Ana was also embroiled in conflicts with her brother. Her daughter lost her first born child in infancy. He son suffered persistent fevers, and later, he father was struck by a debilitating illness. In response, Ana's mother and father temporarily withdrew from participation of the church they were active in, and began consulting spirit mediums to find the source of their family suffering. 
	Through this process, then covered Infukwa spirit, who claimed responsibility for causing the turmoil in their family. He also declared that he had caused the dissolution Ana's marriage and demanded Ana as his wife. Ana's family urged her to accept the spirit marriage request to resolve their family's problems, but she was incensed by the suggestions. Speaking to me about this one day, Ana quoted biblical scripture and argued that she could not give into the demand of this demand who wanted to enslave her in a spiritual marriage bond. Ana's disobedience of her elders, eventually led her family to disowned her, but she was resolute. She explained to me, "They are sacrificing me to hell, so that they can gain salvation. And me? Well, I abandoned paradise just because of their desires for me. I will never do that. I am not afraid, afraid to die. This flesh, this can die, but my spirit must be saved." 
	While her family's church abandonment was temporary, what they asked of Ana, to become a wife of this troubled spirit would have required her to abandon church participation permanently. Unlike Alyssa and her daughters, when Ana was faced with this situation, she chose the opposite course. Like many other women in Gorongosa, pressure to bare the burden of their family suffering, she chose to follow the teachings of her Christian faith, even if it meant alienating herself from her family. Ana told me that she considered her real family to be her fellow church members, and trusted that she could rely on their support in any situation. Life becoming a spirit medium converting to Pentecostalism entails the creation of a new identity, and inserts one in a new network of spiritual kin. The members of the church where I based myself for a year of research create a very formal community identity, in which they differentiate themselves sharply from non-believers. Church members refer to themselves as [foreign language 00:28:56], or holy people, whereas people who are not members of any church or even those who go to Catholic Churches are referred to as [foreign language 00:29:06], people of the world. 
	They imagine each other as members of a family employing fictive kinship terms to address one another. As with spirit mediums, these fictive kinship relationships are also enacted in practice as church members come to each other's aid in times of crisis, just as what would be expected of family members. Also like spirit medium, Pentecostal church philosophy emphasizes the active and direct connection between humans and the spirit realms. But rather of marking with the spirits of individual people, Pentecostal church participants conceive themselves as mediums for the Holy Spirit. In their daily life, they seek to make the spirit presence manifest in their actions and behaviors. As with becoming a spirit medium, church women also conceive of their Christian identity as being involved in a spiritual marriage. They considered themselves to be married to Jesus. In fact, Jesus is referred to as an Infukwa because he was killed violently and returns to play a direct role in people's lives. However, all Christians are mediums for the same Infukwa spirit of Jesus. 
	Of particular importance to church women is the women's group, adult women who have married and have already had at least one child ... They made an exception for me ... are considered part of this group, which is a great value to the church. They're considered to be the mothers of the church and central to its moral guidance. The women's group gathers together each Thursday morning for a women's worship service. During this service, women read scripture and preach to each other. To my surprise, the content of their teachings are focused overwhelmingly on offering advice and counseling on how to maintain a marriage relationship. Frequent topics of advice range from some things you might expect to hear in a conservative Christian context, such as how to be attentive in the domestic fear, washing your husband's clothes, making sure you have food ready for him when he returns at the end of a long day, and that sort of things. There were also lots of unexpected things such as racy descriptions on how to please your husband and yourself sexually, the importance of refusing sex to ensure spacing between births, and excerptations to think of your husband as a child who must be guided and cared for as a way to muster patience, care, and endurance in difficult relationships. 
	Marriage also figured prominently in the mission of the wider church body. Conceived of as a family, Pentecostal church groups take an active role in overseeing processes that traditionally fall under the purview of kin groups. From counseling youth on choosing a marriage partner, to counseling couples prior to marriage, to overseeing the marriage ceremony itself, to taking over responsibilities for counseling couples in dispute. Church bodies mediate the entire marriage process as a key aspect of their central vision to reorder and heal society by transforming it in accord to Christian ideals. Individual women I spent time with also saw church conversion and church participation as a strategy to strengthen troubled marriages. Many told me they hoped the influence of church leaders would draw their husbands to convert and then eventually reform their behavior. 
	Since Pentecostal churches prohibit use of alcohol and tobacco, women whose husbands were prone to alcoholism were particularly hopeful their husbands will follow their lead. Beyond this, church teachings in general emphasized fidelity and the importance of men to take up their responsibilities in marriage. In the event of marriage disputes or abuse, women could call on the assistance of male church leaders who will counsel a couple in their own home, using scripture to teach about proper behavior and respect in marriage. So, by this point, I hope that you're beginning to wonder, "Why marriage?" Why does this theme keep reappearing, women struggling with marriage, women marrying spirits, women conceptualizing their relationship to Jesus as a marriage, women struggling to hang on to marriages, even terrible abusive ones. Shouldn't they be getting out of troubled marriages? Shouldn't they be seeking independence? 
	The reality is that in the context of Gorongosa, marriage is of vital importance to women. Marriage relationships are essential to women's social advancement. Through marriage and motherhood over the years, women who advance in age and become mothers of adult children, advance in respect and authority, eventually moving from being a wife and guest among there husband's kin to becoming the mother of the lineage. In the Gorongosa context, most women have limited to no education and few to no avenues for social advancement outside of their realm of the family. Further, marriage is essential to the material well being of the children. The fact is that family groups in Gorongosa need to pull their time and resources toe survive. This is a place where the vast majority of people make their living from small scale farming. The change in political economic context has been making it even more difficult to get by. Just as marriage is becoming more essential to women's social and material survival, it has also become more prone to instability. 
	So, to understand why marriages are facing more instability, we're going to zoom out again and give a little context. This is an aerial view of the district capitol of Gorongosa. In the capitol where the population is concentrated, there's about 30,000 residents. This is a context where people's struggles to survive has been historically produced and compounded in recent years. During most of the years of its rule, the Portuguese Colonial government leased this central region out to a private company, which used forced labor and taxation to compel residents into working on plantations and for profit ventures investing nearly nothing into education or healthcare or other social services. Nearly non existence prior to independence, efforts to offer widespread access to healthcare and education after independence in 1975 was soon undermined during those Mozambique 16 year civil war, which lasted until 1992. 
	During the war, Gorongosa was the base for the resistance group, Ranono, making this period particularly disruptive of resident's lives. The war brought with it not only destruction of infrastructure and disruption of lives, but also ushered in structural adjustment programs, mandated as conditions for wounds and aid by the World Bank and the IMF, which continue to have a powerful legacy. Caps on government spending for social services have severely impacted the already ailing health system, leaving Gorongosa's district hospital with one doctor to serve the entire district population of 90,000 residents. Patients are normally seen by medical technicians with limited training who are underpaid and overworked, and have to make due with outdated equipment and limited supplies, leaving many residents to treat the hospital as a last resort. With structural adjustment have come rapid economic changes. In fact, the local economy of Gorongosa has changed so rapidly in the past decade that the town no longer seems as the same place as when I first arrived there in 1998. 
	Foreign aid has focused on large scale infrastructure projects to help fuel the economy and to help attract more foreign investment. Completed in 2003, a highway project funded by USAID transformed Gorongosa from a small town at the end of the dead end road to a center along the only highway linking the north and south of the country. So, this is a picture taken five years apart of the same intersection. You can how rapidly things changed in this context. Gorongosa is now a major stop for travelers on this major highway, contributing to the increasing prevalence of criminal activity, and prostitution, and exasterbating the spread of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV AIDs. In Mozambique, it's estimated that about 16% of the adult population is HIV positive, but this central region of the country is one of the hardest hit. The rate is estimated to be well above 20% in Sofal province when Gorongosa's located. Growing numbers of patients suffering from HIV AIDS are placing an even more strain on an already burdened health system. 
	With the new highway, there's been a rapid expansion in the market in Gorongosa, making lots of new products available for purchase. But most of these items are only affordable to people with regular cash income from higher social classes, such as government civil servants, teachers, nurses, or workers for NGOs. The vast majority of long term Gorongosa residents are small scale farmers, and so can only watch these changes in the market and in town without participating in them. With economic reforms designed to facilitate private capital investment and cut public spending, world residents have seen little benefit from the countries rapidly growing GDP. Subsidies to farmers to support inputs and equipment are nearly non-existent in this district. So, it is harder each year for farmers to grow enough produce to both feed their families and to sell for the cash that they need because each year you need more cash. 
	So, this situation contributes the increasing rates of malnutrition and thus infant death. Statistics from the Gorongosa district hospital illustrate how malnutrition increased dramatically in the years 2003 and 2006. In 2006, the number of children hospitalized for severe malnutrition had more than doubled since 2003. So, this is an overview of the context in which marriage for Gorongosa women are becoming increasingly prone to instability. This is the context for domestic conflicts over the spending of scarce household resources, for alcoholism as an escape from memories from the war or the daily hardships of life, for why so many women experience financial abandonment for husbands who travel elsewhere in search of employment, or who neglect to provide for their children because they are using too much of their small income to purchase expensive consumer good, like cell phones or motorcycles out of pride, or out of a desire to also be counted among the local elite. 
	This is the context for the prevalence of Infukwa spirits, who bring prolonged and sustained hardship to family groups, deaths of infants, deaths of adults from strange and incurable diseases, family members who's prolonged illnesses deplete the resources of large extended families who search desperately for the resolution. In this context in Gorongosa, as elsewhere around southern Africa, women who live amid economic uncertainty and moral flux seek to sustain domestic relationships that are in jeopardy. Becoming spirit mediums or converting to Pentecostal churches provides women contrasting needs to manage situations of severe hardship and instability. Both of these processes change a woman's identity, inserting her of new networks that supplant the support of kin, and provide her with a means to both make sense of and transform suffering. These networks of belonging provide women with increased levels of stability and influence in their households. 
	However, this increased authority is not power that a woman holds directly. Women's new levels of power and authority comes when they act as mediums from male spiritual figures. In the case of spirit mediums, it is her spirit husband who has the ultimate power and authority in the household. In the case of a church participant, a woman draws on the masculine authority of the scripture, on her municipal relationship with Jesus, or on the authority of male church leaders who can intervene in marital crisis. These new networks of spiritual healing are extremely powerful largely because they do not seek to replace or condemn, but compliment existing social relationships of a patriarchal society. What is key is that in these new networks of spiritual healing, women channel masculine authority in ways that discipline men. Sorry, I lost my place. Oh, discipline men who are not living up to their responsibilities in marriage. 
	A great deal of feminist scholarship conceptualizes women's agency in terms of resistance to dominant patriarchal norms. What is happening in Mozambique with these new networks spiritual healing does not represent direct resistance to patriarchal society. These examples cannot simply be considered a case of women's empowerment. In fact, in both cases, women conceive of their religious participation as servitude, as an obligation, and especially in the case of spirit mediumship, as unwanted, unnecessary, and sacrificial response to a spirit's demands. What is happening with women's insertion in these new networks of spiritual healing calls for closer examination. It requires us to move away from the idea of power as resistance, and to acknowledge that history, culture, and larger politically economic forces often influences one's agency. 
	It requires us to take a more fluid and multiple, rather than a singular fury of agency, in which modalities of agency which defy the logic of resistance to and subversion of norms are also accepted. Women who become spirit mediums and those who convert to Pentecostal church do not attempt to change existing social structures in order to reposition their place in society. They work within and through the norms of a patriarchal society to manage experiences and hardship and suffering. Taking up social healing perspective allows us to see that women are not motivated by a desire for individual advancement, but their efforts are focused on ways to bring about wider processes of collective or social healing. 
	In fact, more than anything, these social healing efforts are moral project focused on strengthening and reforming patriarchal society. The many feminist might now recognize women's participation in spiritual healing in Mozambique as a form of empowerment, in their efforts to transform their misfortunate well being, women's efforts are in effect leading to real transformations in society that increase women's power of their life situations. Their actions help to bring stability to a world up ended by unprecedented hardships. Through their central role and new forms of mediumship, and in the growing Pentecostal movement, women's healing efforts are reshaping social worlds. Thank you.