This dissertation examines "acting in"as a subaltern tactic though which marginalized Christians from local Oriya villages leverage an ideological and cultural space for practicing and sharing a Christian piety in modern Odisha, India; a region that has experienced significant anti-Christian violence in the past two decades. This research examines the cultural and political work accomplished through two modes of "acting in"; performances through which specific kinds of performances enable specific kinds of relationships.;The first mode of "acting in" occurs in the openness of village streets and incorporates highly stylized epic narrative presentations of Christian scriptures realized through song, dance and drama. This "acting in" draws on local performance conventions in order to affect a resonance between the audience's experience with similar performances of Hindu epics and the "acting in" performances of Christian narratives presented here. This resonance, a domain of experience that Dwight Conquergood calls an "embodied epistemology" enables the dramatic presentation of Christian stories - and even the Christians themselves - to be received by villagers as if emanating from a shared past.;The political notion of "acting in" becomes evident as I demonstrate how the tactics of this first mode of "acting in" include a jettisoning of practices deemed foreign. This combination of carefully crafted performance and the absence of foreign cultural markers enables Maranatha Ministries Christians to become accepted in the village - and undifferentiated from their Hindu neighbors. This lack of differentiation produces a functional invisibility to the state and unofficial means of surveillance that might otherwise find it expedient to govern Christians as a distinct social entity. In this way "acting in" enables peaceable relations between Maranatha Ministries Christians, their village neighbors, village elders and regional and state authorities. Ironically, invisibility to the state is achieved through performance of what state officials call "oral tradition" a practice first employed by the state itself for tourist purposes.;The second mode of "acting in" occurs in the seclusion of a house church and incorporates verbatim scripture recitation rather than epic stylized scriptural narrative. While some church leaders claim verbatim recitation as a local practice, I investigate a plurality of claims and interpretations of verbatim scripture among local church pastors, executive leaders and sponsoring agencies in the West to reveal a highly complex stance on the part of Maranatha Ministries in which verbatim scripture is and is not local, is and is not Western, and is and is not required to maintain a relationship through which resources at times flow into an impoverished village locale.;Contradictions abound in the precarity of Odisha's modern political society, as Maranatha Ministries Christians navigate an unstable environment where their enemy is and is not the state, their enemy is and is not Hinduism, their enemy is and is not Hindutva. What unfolds is a marvelously complex stance that requires considerably agility and poise on the part of the marginalized Christians. "Acting in" is the performative expression of this stance that enables both piety and agency in the political uncertainties of modern Odisha.
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