Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This piece is excerpted from the second chapter of my dissertation entitled Power and the Spirit: Methodological Studies in a Black Apostolic Church. At the beginning of this primarily historical chapter I offer a fairly straightforward social history following the standard accounts of the development of Black Pentecostalism in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. I then provide a different reading and writing of those past events, which is the excerpt below. Here I perform a “genealogical” rendering of some of the events offered by standard historical accounts, cross-cutting them with other sociological happenings from the period, in order to conjure an alternative way of remembering the initial appearances of the Holy Ghost in the New World. This work provides some thoughts on the working of a genealogical methodology for sociologists. In addition it provocatively demonstrates how such a methodology can rigorously construct a counter memory of what may have been previously repressed by more standard accounts. Finally this genealogical piece recounts a series of events occurring roughly 100 years ago, a relevant act of remembering as American sociologists gather at their centennial annual meeting to account for the rising and declining significance of their discipline.