This article examines the
role of socio-moral space in people’s experiences of divine presence.
More specifically, it addresses the questions of how social others
influence people’s experiences of God and Satan among the indigenous
evangelical Yine people of
Peruvian Amazonia, and the consequences these interactions have for the
individual believer and the collectivity. For the Yine dreams are a
privileged site of human encounter with other-than-human beings, and
they also feature centrally in their Christian lives.
It is in dreams that they interact with angels and sometimes with the
devil. By examining Yine evangelical dreams as mimetic points of
encounter involving not only the dreamer but also transcendent beings
and fellow believers as active agents, the article shows
that Yine experiences of God’s presence cannot be conceptualised as an
individual matter, but are highly dependent on the social other: they
come to be as co-acted experiences of the divine.