Un mysticisme pour tous. Conceptions de l'individu et conditions d'implantation des protestantismes évangéliques: Europe, Maghreb, Arctique, Océanie. – Mystou

This research project addresses the sociocultural transformations which are induced, in numerous societies, by the emergence and the development of evangelical protestant churches (charismatic and Pentecostals). It brings together eight researchers working on eleven societies from five word regions (Europe, Maghreb, Alaska and Siberia, Oceania). This wide comparative project, based on multi situated field work, is not an addition of disparate monographies . Its purpose is to evaluate the way in which evangelical protestant churches contribute to the deep historical changes affecting the physiognomy of world Christianity. The project will aim to do so from a common and circumscribed interrogation, grounded on the in depth knowledge researchers have acquired of the different cultural contexts. Indeed, in many diverse societies, the second half of the 20th century has been a time of deep changes in the history of Christian evangelisation. Whereas Christianity has been perceived as a form of imperial domination which has generated resistance in the past, we are now witnessing this same Christianity being used as powerful tool for claiming local identities, to the point that it is sometimes considered as an authentic indigenous property. This reverse of perspective has lead to unexpected conversions and missionary involvement, in very diverse populations. The shift is also based on deep local transformations of the conception of the individual, which will be analysed. One of the central, and innovating, characteristic of evangelical protestant churches is the importance it grants every individual, in emphasising to the extreme the idea of a powerful intimacy between oneself and the Divine. This 'mysticism for all', to which social actors are drawn by a 'theology of personal success', claimed as a path to salvation and of entry into modernity, generates and accompanies unprecedented individuation processes. The research project aims to comprehend these deep metamorphoses in the field of Self-representation as an important way for understanding the success of evangelical protestant churches. It will examine the complexity of transformations induced by the emergence of these churches, transformations of the individual and of the group, through the articulation of the field of imagination (spiritual, supernatural, cosmological) to those of symbolic action within each society (quest for prestige, new positions of power, reconfiguration of networks, new socialisation, economic and political forms). In placing ourselves from an emic perspective, in trying to understand churches which have settled 'on village scale', among local populations who are not necessarily migrants, this project intends to isolate relevant elements which can contribute to explain the establishment, the success and the development of this form of Christianity. This common project will reflect upon the issue with the use of questions such as favourable conditions, and local abilities to follow some religious paths rather than others. The societies on which this comparison will be based all share the idea that they are marginal or peripheral. They also nurture the fantasy of an entry into modernity (perceived as access to success, progress, to becoming, to globalisation), and present themselves as the supra elected people of the born again. Taken together, they break up the traditional North / South dichotomy, or post-colonial / western societies, and rather fit into the idea of a modernity which produces religious forms, where stakes concerning identity, ethnical or national are replayed (renegotiated) in local histories. The team of researches will analyse the different means of establishment of evangelical protestant churches 1) in protestant Christian Europe, through the study of three insular societies of North-West Atlantic: Iceland, Faeroe, Shetlands. 2) North Africa with the Kabyles of Algeria and Tunisians and sub-Saharan African in Tunisia. 3) In Oceania in the Cook and Austral Islands (Polynesia), and among the Baruya-s and Ankave people of Papouasia New Guinea (Melanesia). 4) Arctic regions among the Tchouktches of Siberia and the Yupik of Alaska.