Denominational Differentiation: Foucauldian Ethics, Charismatic Affects, and the Anthropology of Christianity in Southern California Jon Bialecki, University of Edinburgh NOTE: this essay was originally presented under a different title to the Friday morning seminar at the anthropology department of the London School of Economics, and then functioned as a job talk for several years running. I had always intended to release this as an article, but this essay quickly became a creature of its time, and on top of that the demands of keeping up with the secondary literature on Foucault made revising this piece unappealing. More to the point, while the argument remained the same, my theoretical language mutated, and three works – my in-press book, and my conventionally published essays “Diagramming the Will” and “After the Denominozoic” – ended up making such a similar theoretical point. That said, there is nothing in this article I disown, and a great deal of the ethnography has never appeared anywhere else. This talk begins with the observation that the anthropology of Christianity is increasingly Foucauldian. Considering the importance that linguistic and semiotic orientated approaches have also played 1 in this newly emerged, though quickly growing, subfield, 2 the anthropology of Christianity cannot be reduced in its entirety to Foucault, but that does not take anything away from the continually escalating importance that Foucauldian conceptions of both governmentally and of ethical processes of subjectification are playing in ethnographies. This is in part due to influence of Talal Asad; while not