ABSTRACT
Gow points out the similarities between the regional systems of the Bajo Huallaga and the Alto Xing, which he sees as both articulated through a combination of local heterogeneity and global homogeneity'. Christianity has until recently been one of these corners: there was some good ethnography of Christian peoples, but there was no wider theoretical, comparative dialogue to speak of. African Christians were Africans first and foremost, Melanesian Christians were Melanesians, Amazonian Christians were Amazonians, and so on. There was no global framework of intellectual homogeneity' that would allow such a comparative examination to develop. In contrast to Greer's chapter, Gow's is a very elegant presentation of precisely the kinds of arguments the anthropology of Christianity has largely had to leave behind in order to get up on its feet. For anthropologists, the existence of such claims for and rituals expressive of discontinuity raises the question of how this folk rhetoric of change relates to actual processes of cultural transformation.
