Narrating conversion
If conversion to Christianity involves, as Peter van der Veer has argued, a ‘conversion to modernities’, what does this modernity look like in the Baringo area, an area of forestalled opportunities for ‘development’, and of broken hopes of partaking in a global modernity and getting one’s share of national wealth? Also, given the fact that missionary Christianity in Kiserian is the main provider of an infrastructure of future-making in Kiserian, what visions and expectations do those Il Chamus who are employed by the AIC mission or otherwise identify as dedicated Christians formulate?
To understand their ‘futural orientations’(Bryant and Knight 2019), we will examine how Il Chamus Christians in Kiserian recount their personal histories of converting to Christianity. Most accounts were elicited during interviews, which means that their narrative structure was shaped by the interaction between researcher and interlocutor. Yet the particular framing of the accounts also hints at how dedicated Christians convey their views to others in the locality. The conversion accounts refer mostly to processes of ‘primary’ conversion (Gilliland 1991, Droz 2005); that is, their shift in orientation from what they call ‘culture’ to Christianity. ‘Secondary’ conversion – that is, a reorientation toward a stricter interpretation of Christian scriptures and behavioural norms that demands another rupture with the demands of one’s immediate social environment – plays a minimal role in the Baringo area (see Schulz 2008).
1 Whereas several authors have identified the notion of ‘being saved’ or ‘a saved one’ to apply only to the second type of conversion (very often, to those who joined a Pentecostal or Evangelical church), we found that Il Chamus Christians employed this term to refer to both conversion processes.Our exploration of Il Chamus Christians’ accounts starts from a view of conversion as a conscious act of changing one’s view of how divine power or other hidden spiritual entities affect one’s personal life and the world at large; a change in perspective that actors themselves identify as a significant reorientation (Jules-Rosette 1976, Scharrer 2010: 99). It is a genuinely social process because it involves recognition by others.
We understand our interlocutors’ retrospective constructions of their turn to Christianity as pertaining to a spectrum of discursive acts by which Il Chamus Christians claim proper religiosity (Harding 1995), make sense of their life situation, and express their aspirations and hopes for a better future. In line with the ‘linguistic turn’ in social-science scholarship on conversion since the 1990s, we stress the constructed nature of conversion accounts (e.g. Knoblauch 1995, Knoblauch et al. 1998); they are not sources of objective information on, for instance, motivations for religious reorientation and change in affiliation. Whether elicited during interviews or recounted in casual conversations, conversion accounts follow socially embedded, culturally specific conventions of narration that shed light on particular understandings of personhood, personal agency, and ‘capacities to aspire’ (Appadurai 2013). As autobiographic narratives, conversion accounts mirror broadly shared understandings of sociability and individual agency, and mediate between individual experience and broader social expectations (e.g. Snow and Machalek 1984, Sprondel 1985, Staples and Mauss 1987).