When it rains, it pours – on top of the paper by Girish Daswani  that I came across yesterday, there is a new paper by Simon Coleman that is really worth attending to. It is an intervention in discussions of Pentecostal Networks, an idea that Simon Coleman himself originally helped construct. While Coleman never sinks to such depths, discussions of Pentecostal networks have a tendency to descend into tropic discussions of rhizomes; what is worse is that the invocation of rhizomes usually masks the analytic presumption that each iteration or node in the network is more or less interchangeable; it is just the ‘ground,’ the places that these nodes are embedded in, which vary.

What is really nice about Coleman’s article is that it focuses on difference – not merely in how it juxtaposes the networks of two separate Pentecostal movements (Sweden’s Word of Life and the Nigerian Redeemed Christian Church of God), but it shows that inside of each network, the value of the nodes is predicated on degrees of spatial and organizational difference, and that the greater the difference between two nodes in a network, the higher the value of the shared connection is for each. This is a salutary reminder in any discussion of networks, but it is especially useful in the anthropology of Christianity, which (again, in less skillful hands) often seems to be  torn between a presumption of complete Christian identity across any iteration, or an absolute nominalism that would foreclose either a comparative analytic turn, or an acknowledgment of the imbricated nature of different Christianities.