This chapter ties together the arguments of the book and sketches out their broader implications. It addresses, in particular, three issues. The first is what Messianic claims regarding divine indexicality and authority may tell us about political culture and local perceptions of secular government authority in the South Sudan-Ethiopia borderlands. The second is whether the Messianic preoccupation with truth and self-awareness is a distinctively ‘modern’ disposition or an attitude that is historically and culturally informed and therefore also speaks to local notions of spiritual mediation. Finally, the chapter returns to Christian Zionism and Africa’s Messianic frontier and sketches out some of the ways in which the case of Gambella’s Messianic Jews may be indicative of processes and trends evident among African born-again Christians more broadly.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that the early twenty-first century can be seen as a period of resurgence in the English folk arts. A conceptual opposition to commercially manufactured and distributed pop music remains fairly central to contemporary conceptions of the folk arts by those within and outside of English folk culture. The book demonstrates the ambiguity and permeability of the boundaries between the two idioms, and this ambiguity has now become the subject of explicit celebration by contemporary English folk musicians and dancers. Presentational dance contexts within English folk culture are numerous and quite varied, but the most common and widely recognised is morris dancing. The book analyses the versions of Englishness that can be found within the work of contemporary English folk artists.

This chapter deals with Nuer Protestant hymnody and explains how and why various Nuer Christian groups came to adopt different musical styles and aesthetics. The chapter sketches the history of Nuer hymnody, starting from the colonial period and the work of missionaries, through the development of a large corpus of hymns by Nuer Protestants, to the Pentecostalisation of Nuer church music in recent decades. It then discusses the ways in which Adventists and Messianics responded to the latter process with their own sonic practices and compositions. The chapter shows how different musical styles were grounded in different understandings of the ways in which the divine is made present and different views of the sensibilities and dispositions a born-again must cultivate. It also argues, however, that these styles and aesthetics constantly evolved and were the subject of ongoing conversations and debates that, like Bible Study and Christian literacy, were central to the endless project of born-again subjectivation.

One of the most powerful constructs of England associated with the folk arts is that of England as rural idyll. In 2008 the BBC broadcast the first series of Lark Rise to Candleford, a Sunday-night period drama adaptation of Flora Thompson's three novels set in the rural Oxfordshire of the late nineteenth century. Images of rural England are also a significant theme in album and website artwork associated with contemporary English folk music. Within the English folk arts there is often a particular insistence on the regionally and locally distinctive character of England's folk music and dance. The period since the 1980s has seen the publication of a number of largely eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English musicians' tunebooks. The construction of a 'strange England' has been prominent, in the work of a number of visual artists who have drawn on or been inspired by rural folk traditions.

This chapter examines the diversity of approaches and cultural engagements that characterise the recent resurgence of English folk. It provides an examination of possible commonalities across this diverse genre. The chapter highlights some of the key elements of English folk music practice that have been foregrounded, or have developed in profile and significance, within the resurgence. The act of varying each rendition of a tune has, come to be seen as a constituent element of a good English instrumental folk performance. The phrase 'funky chords' is often used by musicians as a catch-all term for any harmonic element of a premeditated arrangement that successfully undermines the conventional diatonic harmonies prescribed by the inherent features of English traditional music. The chapter argues that the Englishness is inherent in the contradistinction of the performance technique with perceived common practice in Celtic musical traditions.

This chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book. It opens by introducing the Church of God (Seventh Day) and its offshoots in the frontierlands of Gambella, and the preoccupation of Nuer Messianics with truth and biblical authenticity. It then discusses why and how exploring the ideas and practices of Nuer Messianics in the Ethiopia-South Sudan borderlands contributes to the study of religious mediation and to the literatures on African born-again Christianity, African Judaising movements, and spiritual life in Ethiopia and South Sudan.