| abstract |
This dissertation presents an historical and macro-sociological account of the rise of Christian denominational hierarchies in the Progressive Era as the
paramount social context of the rise of Pentecostalism, in order to counterpose the ritual innovation of Azusa Street Mission Revival as in dialogical
negation of these rising hierarchies. I argue that the development of rites of anti-hierarchy was made possible, in part, owed to the reactivation of the
Revolution-era's anti-hierarchical discourse and culture. I illustrate how altar-centered ecstasy came to be highly valued in American evangelicalism and
how Pentecostals rhetorically pitted their ecstatic charisms against clergy-mediated goods. I argue that, by maintaining their bodies and embodied knowledges
as reliable sources of religious goods, early Pentecostals resisted religious dispossession in a period of wide-spread economic and cultural dispossession.
I argue for a fuller understanding of the historical construction of Pentecostal altar space, chiefly at Azusa Street Mission, as a ritual threshold of
change—individual, political, and global. To this end, I forward a reading of the rites of "baptism of the Holy Spirit"—as defined by at Azusa Street
Mission—as Carnival ritual. To do so, I first locate the discernible influence of agrarian thought/practice via the collective representations of latter rain
and harvest. I argue that the palpable agrarian character of early Pentecostal thought about the altar suggests the influence of calendrical rites on the
social construction and reception of the Pentecostal altar. Harvest rites are "rites of the threshold," or "rites of transition," or "rites of reversal"
in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. By constructing a Bourdieusian-Bakhtinian model of the rites of seasonal reversal, I produce a reading of Azusa Street
Mission that highlights the Revival's likeness to Bakhtin's Carnival. I then argue that, in keeping with the logics of seasonal reversal, the early
Pentecostals transformed into a feminine Bride, and the Holy Spirit was accordingly feminized through glossolalic dialogue. The time space of the
Pentecostal altar was, therefore, constructed as a female seasonality of power.
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