Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala

Kevin Lewis O'Neill

sept 2019 · University of Chicago Press

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“A necessary addition to the literature on Latin America’s Pentecostals, whose number exceeds 100 million . . . a highly readable text.” —Times Higher Education

“It’s not a process,” one pastor insisted, “rehabilitation is a miracle.” In the face of addiction and few state resources, Pentecostal pastors in Guatemala City are fighting what they understand to be a major crisis. Yet the treatment centers they operate produce this miracle of rehabilitation through extraordinary means: captivity. These men of faith snatch drug users off the streets, often at the request of family members, and then lock them up inside their centers for months, sometimes years.

Hunted is based on more than ten years of fieldwork among these centers and the drug users that populate them. Over time, as Kevin Lewis O’Neill engaged both those in treatment and those who surveilled them, he grew increasingly concerned that he, too, had become a hunter, albeit one snatching up information. This thoughtful, intense book will reframe the arc of redemption we so often associate with drug rehabilitation, painting instead a seemingly endless cycle of hunt, capture, and release.

“O’Neill uses his dramatic story of the manhunt to rethink Foucauldian pastoral power . . . [an] utterly brilliant book.” —PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review

“The theme of Kevin Lewis O’Neill’s fascinating book, Hunted—i.e., drug addicts kidnapped and held in involuntary confinement in treatment centers run by Guatemalan Pentecostals—may strike readers as so outré or outrageous as to provoke a reaction . . . Hunted consists in brilliant participant-observer reportage.” —Pneuma

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Kevin Lewis O’Neill is professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto.