1. Although much anthropological discussion of ritual has focused on symbolic objects and actions, specific concern with the linguistic dimension of ritual can be traced back at least as far as Malinowski's Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935). Lienhardt's ( 1961 ) work on Dinka religion encouraged this concern by offering, in addition to a chapter on ritual action, a separate chapter on religious language. Since then, a substantial body of literature has emerged. These studies can be summarized under the following general headings: specialized religious vocabularies (Fabian 1971; Zaretsky 1974; Wheelock 1981 ); genres of religious language (Bauman 1974; Fabian 1974; Gossen 1972, 1974; McDowell 1983; Briggs 1993); religious speaking as illocutionary act (Austin 1975; Ahern 1979, 1982; Finnegan 1969; Gardner 1983; Gill 1977; Ray 1973; Rosaldo 1982; Tambiah 1968, 1973, 1979; Wheelock 1982); religious language as discourse (Fabian 1979a; Jules-Rosette 1978; Samarin 1976); religious language as power or authority (Andelson 1980; Bloch 1974; Field 1982; McGuire 1983; Kratz 1989; Kuipers 1990); ecstatic language and glossolalia (Eliade 1964; Goodman 1972; Jennings 1968; May 1956; Motley 1981; Pattison 1968; Samarin 1972); evidence of authoritativeness and speaker responsibility for utterance (Du Bois 1986, 1993; Duranti 1993; Chafe 1993; Kuipers 1993).

2. Performance in the domain of Charismatic ritual healing is treated separately in Csordas (1994a).

3. To my knowledge, three versions of the rite are extant. One was developed by The Word of God covenant community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a second by the Franciscan-oriented Children of Joy community in Allentown, Pennsylvania (since disbanded), and a third by the Charismatic community centered around the Benedictine monastery of Pecos, New Mexico. My discussion draws primarily on the first of these variants. The minor doctrinal and theological differences among them is beyond the scope of this work.

4. McGuire (1975, 1982) gives a detailed account of linguistic and rhetorical techniques by which Charismatic "testimony" achieves these results in Life in the Spirit Seminars.

5. A more comprehensive analysis of Charismatic healing can be found in The Sacred Self (Csordas 1994a). See also Csordas (1983, 1988, 1990a, 1990b, 1996); McGuire (1982, 1983); Ackerman (1980); and Charuty (1987).

6. This is the only instance of ritual clothing among Charismatics aside from the mantles and veils of the Sword of the Spirit communities. I am not aware of any ceremony in which members of a healing ministry are formally invested with this ritual garb.

7. Healing practice in covenant communities takes on a different complexion, partly because of the existence of ongoing everyday relationships and partly because the significantly younger membership is not afflicted with as great a proportion of physical illnesses. In the early 1970s some covenant communities made the deliverance from evil spirits a mandatory part of becoming a community member, institutionalizing the premise that everyone is in need of healing. Later, the directive, ongoing relationship of pastoral leadership ("headship") counseling tended to replace formal healing sessions as the preferred setting for healing and spiritual growth. This system is felt to be consistent with the relatively masculinized ethos of covenant communities that regards much of Charismatic emotional healing, with its imagery processes and biographical review (see below), as too "feminine." Covenant community leaders, or coordinators, have the responsibility to pray for those in their charge, and there are informal opportunities for persons to ask one another for prayer for a variety of issues in addition to healing, but private sessions for individual supplicants take place infrequently.

8. The latter practice is associated primarily with the Protestant healing evangelist John Wimber. A Catholic Charismatic healing service in the Wimberite style is described in Csordas (1990a).

9. The concept of genres is as relevant to everyday speech as it is to the domains of performance in ritual, literature, or verbal art. As Bakhtin (1986: 60) observed, "The wealth and diversity of speech genres are boundless because the various possibilities of human activity are inexhaustible, and because each sphere of activity contains an entire repertoire of speech genres that differentiate and grow as the particular sphere develops and becomes more complex." Indeed, Bakhtin captured the relationship between everyday speech and the kind of speech we are analyzing with his distinction between primary (simple products of "unmediated speech communion") and secondary (complex and ideological) speech genres (1986: 62).

10. It is worthy of note that Protestant charismatics use different opening formulas in their prophecies, such as "Thus saith the Lord." This difference is largely one of diction that reflects the influence of different Bible translations preferred by different strains of Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals. However, it also serves as a kind of cultural diacritic that distinguishes these strains from one another.

11. Bourdieu warns "against all forms of the occasionalist illusion which consists in directly relating practices to properties inscribed in the situation" and argues "that the truth of the interaction is never contained in the interaction" (1977: 81-82). The critique is aimed specifically at social psychology, interactionism, and ethnomethodology; analysis of ritual performance can be exempt only insofar as it recognizes (1) that creative transformation is in part a function of preexisting dispositions embedded in a world of commonsense reality and a particular social structure; (2) that the rhetorical elements in use (e.g., demonology, prophecy), as well as the individuals who use them, have histories that in part determine the interaction; (3) that social practice generates motives as much as it is guided by them; (4) that transformative intent expressed within a situation or interaction cannot in itself be taken as evidence either of nature of transformation or even of the fact that some kind of transformation has been achieved. It must be left for the reader to decide if the present analysis meets these criteria.

12. Imagery plays an even greater role in some forms of Charismatic healing (Csordas 1994a).

13. McGuire (1975) emphasizes the central role of sharing in the resocialization of neophytes, and argues contra Gerlach and Hine (1970) that public witnessing is a more significant overt act of commitment and "bridge-burning" than is the public utterance of glossolalia.

14. The relation of performance and motive as form and content should be compared to the relation between the notion of "discourse" developed by Fabian et al. (1979a) and the notion of "metaphor" elaborated by contributors to Sapir and Crocker (1977). The former discuss the metaphorical content of discourse, whereas the latter point out that metaphors not only reveal logical structure but also are performed or enacted in discourse.

15. The familiar notion of a motive in psychological terms is that of a reason for action somehow rooted in an individual's personality. This "subterranean" conception of motivation is influenced by psychoanalytic theory and by the legal concept of a motive as a hidden factor that must be uncovered by the skillful criminal prosecutor. The concept of motive elaborated here is, through Burke (1966), influenced by the literary notion of motive as orienting theme and, through Weber (1947) and Mills (1940), by a sociological interest in action. It is compatible with the "extrinsic theory" of thought as propounded in anthropology by Geertz: "Thinking, conceptualization, formulation, comprehension, understanding, or what have you consists not of ghostly happenings in the head but of a matching of the states and processes of symbolic models against the states and processes of a wider world. . . . This view does not, of course, deny consciousness: it defines it" (1973: 214-215).

16. Definitions even from context do not give the whole picture, however. Connotations of the terms can vary slightly from setting to setting, and from one community or branch of the movement to another. Also, despite their coherence as a vocabulary of motives, the terms differ among themselves in a variety of ways. A Catholic Pentecostal theologian who reviewed the list identified the following factors relevant from the movement point of view. The terms differ in generality, in relative importance, in the precision of their concept, in the availability of alternative expressions, and in their individual development over time in the movement. Formal analysis taking all this into account is beyond the scope of the present work.

17. The rhetoricians' technical term for such shifts in meaning is "catachresis," which Max Black defines as "the use of a word in some new sense in order to remedy a gap in the vocabulary" (quoted in Sapir 1977: 8). The process of catachresis is an important one in the history of any language, for, as Sapir points out, it is these shifts in meaning that "through time, provide a language with its abstract vocabularies" (1977: 8).