11/11/2025
JOIN US for a Brown Bag Talk “Enterprising Spirit and Entrepreneurial Practice, Religion, and the Making of Entrepreneurs in Post-colonial Zimbabwe” with Josiah Taru, Postdoctoral Associate, Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance, Rice University, on Friday, November 14, 12pm, Sewall 570 and Zoom.
Click the link to register for the Zoom meeting: https://tr.ee/GdmZcM
The talk examines ways in which Pentecostal Christian values, everyday practices, and rituals implicitly foster the spirit of entrepreneurship and enterprising within a Pentecostal community in Zimbabwe. By shifting attention from religious programs and events organized to teach about entrepreneurship and prosperity explicitly, I show how, often neglected, everyday practices and rites such as baptism, tithing, and positive confession inculcate, reinforce, and ritualize the spirit of enterprising and entrepreneurship at a time when the Zimbabwean economy is poorly performing. These everyday practices and rituals inspire Christian ‘survivalist entrepreneurs’ whose businesses provide a means to sustain their everyday and spiritual lives. The examples discussed show that becoming a ‘born again’ leads to both ‘salvation’ and entrepreneurship.
Josiah Taru is a postdoctoral associate at the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance. He trained as an economic anthropologist at the University of Pretoria. His work focuses on how Pentecostalism shapes individual and collective economic subjectivities in a highly informal Zimbabwean economy. Taru is working on his first book project, Pentecostal Christianity as Lived Religion in Postcolonial Zimbabwe: Coping and Resilience in Times of Economic Uncertainties. Some of his work has been published in African Studies Review, Religion, State and Society, Journal for the Study of Religion, and Anthropology Southern Africa.
