The Contract with God

Abstract

Understanding contested cultural boundaries continues to be a theoretical and empirical issue for anthropologists. For some time, cognitive and other likeminded anthropologists have used cultural consensus analysis (CCA), developed by Romney, Weller, and Batchelder (1986), to quantitatively estimate the level of cultural sharing around a particular domain. This method has limits and, as its critics (fairly or unfairly) have pointed out, can present a static, homogeneous image of culture. Residual agreement analysis (RAA) helps address this lacuna. This extension of CCA can identify subcultural variation and elicit the structural nature of such shared deviation. Utilizing data from Brazilian Pentecostals, CCA demonstrates that this community shares a model of lifestyle success known as A Vida Completa. Residual agreement analysis, however, shows systematic deviations from the overall cultural consensus across two congregations. This finding suggests that the distinction between how these two churches conceive of A Vida Completa may not be due to unique cultural beliefs but rather to differential emphasis of an underlying shared cultural model. This research demonstrates a novel extension of CCA and provides insights into the characteristics of Brazil’s fastest growing religious community.

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