For the Amazonian Yine people, Christian denominationalism provides an
important means for organizing social life. Denominations in this
context are not, however, to be understood as clearly bounded entities.
Simultaneously with forming and renewing denominational boundaries, the
Yine continuously cross, dissolve, and redefine them. This article
attempts to understand the denominational dynamics among the Yine
people, and in particular their back and forth movement between
Evangelicalism, Catholicism, and Pentecostalism, without viewing their
denominational allegiances as subordinate to other forms of social
organization or as something religiously insincere. Seeking inspiration
from the ethnography of personhood and humanity in Amazonia, it suggests
that denominations among the Yine can be understood to exist as
unstable forms of belonging, as “thickenings” of different kinds of
Christian moral relations to sociality, that take place on a continuum
pictured not as a line but rather as a space. At the more general level
the article shows how Christian vernacular denominationalism is likely
to not be based on dogmatic differences but to be rather something that
comes to be in practice. Furthermore, the article makes explicit how
denominational boundaries are not always of the one and the same kind
everywhere but vary between denominations.