Spirito/spiriti, rinascita/tradizione Rinnegamenti e continuità nella salvezza pentecostale

This article investigates the Pentecostal rebirth experience on the basis of fieldwork conducted in
Rwanda. The aim is to show how, in this experience, salvation and tradition are bound in a complex
relationship, liable to different interpretations, whose investigation concerns some critical points of the
anthropological debate on Christian movements in Africa. To this purpose the article illustrates a
particular form of Pentecostal ritual in which the deliverance from the evil forces is connected to the
examination of the individual past. Consequently, the article analyzes the accounts of their personal
experience of the salvation and evil forces offered by different social actors. It will be shown how
these accounts are different but complementary: whereas some Reborns point out the need to refuse the
legacy of the past generations as a curse, the Pentecostal pastors highlight how this rejection is a
spiritual war to deliver the mission context from its past. However, it is in particular the prophets who
warn that in this war the enemy can be never defeated once and for all, and that salvation needs the
permanent threat of the past.
In this regard, the article inserts the Pentecostal experience of salvation in the debate on African
appropriations of Christianity as forms of cultural resistance.