Dr Matthew Engelke

Matthew Engelke received his PhD at the University of Virginia. He is a specialist on Zimbabwe and the anthropology of religion. He has conducted field research in Harare and Chitungwiza on the Masowe weChishanu Church, an apostolic movement with roots in the Makoni District. His primary interest in this work is on the role of textual authority within Christianity, particularly as it relates to theological and philosophical notions of presence, but he has written as well on ritual, language and material culture, spirit possession, conversion, and religious history. Dr Engelke has also conducted work in the history of anthropology on Victor and Edith Turner, focusing on their collaboration and on the gendering of authority within the academy. During his time in Zimbabwe, he became interested in the discourse of human rights at the local level, and has been actively involved in the LSE's Centre for the Study of Human Rights. In March 2006, he began a new project, funded by STICERD and the British Academy, on the British and Foreign Bible Society. Most of this research is on the Society's work in England and Wales, and focuses on a number of themes, including: Christianity's role in the public sphere; the dynamics of secularization, and the semiotics of the book. Some of the research has also been archival in nature, and connected more closely to his training as an Africanist (looking in particular at Bible Society history in South Africa). In addition to publishing on these research projects, Dr Engelke has written more broadly on issues of theory and epistemology within anthropology. He is the editor of Prickly Paradigm Press, a deputy editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa, and an editorial board member of the Journal of Southern African Studies. Alongside these academic pursuits, Dr Engelke regularly serves as an expert witness in asylum appeal cases for Zimbabweans in the United Kingdom.

Selected publications:

2008. (editor) The objects of evidence: Anthropological approaches to the production of knowledge. Oxford: Blackwell. (Third special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute).

2007. A problem of presence: Beyond scripture in an African church. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2006. (co-editor with Matt Tomlinson) The limits of meaning: Case studies in the anthropology of Christianity. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

2005. The early days of Johane Masowe: Self-doubt, uncertainty, and religious transformation. Comparative Studies in Society and History 47(4): 781-808.

2005. Sticky subjects, sticky objects: The substance of African Christian healing. In Materiality, Daniel Miller (ed). Durham: Duke University Press.

2004. Text and performance in an African church: The Book, "live and direct." American Ethnologist 31(1): 76-91.

2004. "The endless conversation": Fieldwork, writing, and the marriage of Victor and Edith Turner. In Significant others: Interpersonal and professional commitments in anthropology, Richard Handler (ed). [History of Anthropology volume 10] Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

2004. Discontinuity and the discourse of conversion. Journal of Religion in Africa 34(1/2): 82-109.

2002. The problem of belief: Evans-Pritchard and Victor Turner on "the inner life." Anthropology Today 18(6): 3-6.

1999. "We wondered what human rights he was talking about": Human rights, homosexuality, and the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. Critique of Anthropology 19(3): 289-313.