The Overflow of Gifts
This chapter discusses the ways in which offerings circulate within and beyond Nanping Christian networks. I focus on two case studies—ubiquitous offering boxes and a Thanksgiving service—that I compare to non-Christian practices. Engaging with anthropolo
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The Overflow of Gifts
“We store up treasures for ourselves and turn away from our neighbors in need. Forgive us, that we may live in the freedom of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Sundays and Seasons Guide, Lutheran Worship, Year C 2019)
Through the exploration of Christian buildings across the Yanping District, the second chapter of this book has explored how these constructions stand as an acting partner in the emergence of local Christianity. The range of agency they display indicates that these material objects like many others are agents of the networks within which local Christians evolve and through which they manifest their religious affiliation. In the third chapter, I have explored what Nanping Christians do inside these buildings and pointed out how a central and particular actor should be considered to better understand the ways in which churchgoers congregate, refashion their collective performance, and shape their networks. I use the Levinasian notion of the interrogative face to characterize the role this center, their Lord, occupies within Nanping Christianizing assemblages. Then, Chap. 4 has followed Christians when they go out of their worship places and engage with the Nanping society. I have uncovered how they operate under a twin sponsorship of two distinct entities—the Church and the pastoral clergy. While each denomination negotiates the exact role and significance of these two intertwined regulators, their organizing presence remains a distinctive pattern of Christian communities. In the continuous © The Author(s) 2020 M. Chambon, Making Christ Present in China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55605-1_5
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and structuring dialogue between human actors and material agents, a conversation not proper to the religion of the cross, three distinctive entities emerge at once within Christian networks: the face, the Church, and the pastoral clergy. Each Nanping assemblage may perceive, define, and articulate them differently, but the active collaboration of this trio remains the structuring property of Christianizing networks. Along the first part of this book, I have progressively identified and described different types of acting components which all play significant roles in the construction and expansion of Nanping Christianizing assemblages. Consequently, those networks appear highly heterogeneous because of the radically different entities which participate in their making. The flow of agency they allow and foster is sustained, channeled, subdivided, and oriented through peculiar actors that the anthropology of Christianity need to consider and sort out. To continue this exploration, and to better understand the unity and diversity of the Christian phenomenon in Nanping, this second part reverses the perspective and looks at how the distinctive Christian trio participates in and emerges through the dialogue that material agents and human actors nourish. Instead of focusing on one of the characterizing actors identified throughout Part I, I now approach them organic
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