Spirit Media and the Spectre of the Fake

2016

Once a matter of beliefs, symbols, values and worldviews, religion has progressively appeared in recent anthropological works as material religion, a highly concrete phenomenon based on affects, senses, substances, places, artifacts, and technologies. But what happened to transcendence, the dimension of religious worldmaking that remains beyond – hidden, untouched, unseen, unheard or unfulfilled? Is it necessarily the 'other' of material religion, a residual category that carries no ethnographic value? Retaining an emic concern with authority and a reflexive awareness about processes of boundary-making, in this article I approach material religion as a field of problematization inhabited by anthropologists and religious subjects alike. I examine some of the protocols whereby Pentecostal Christians in Ghana engage critically with the problem of materi-ality in their own religion, and argue that this operation lends ethnographic access to the role of transcendence in material religion's everyday.

2020

The reviewed collection of articles constitutes a continuation of an academic discussion of material religion. On the basis of research in different cultures, the authors try to show the way Christians conceptualise, negotiate, contest and challenge questions of material aspects of religious life. They interpret materiality not merely and solely in a narrow sense, i.e. as specific ritual objects (candles, icons, altars, statues, and so on), but as a set of historically and culturally specific relationships between material and immaterial / spiritual in a certain religious tradition. The criticism of the review mainly focuses on the disbalance between 'theory' and 'practice' in the material religion studies presented in this collection. In some articles, the ethnographic component often appears to be in the shadow of ambitious and recurring methodological manifests.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, Ghana, “Spirit Media: charismatics, traditionalists, and mediation practices in Ghana” is about an African charismatic-Pentecostal church and an African neo-traditional religious movement and their engagements with electronic mass media technologies. Theoretically situated at the crossroads of media, religion, and the senses, the book explores the generation, spread, and adoption of new, mass-mediated forms of religion in the context of political and social developments in Ghana since the 1990s, including the return to democracy and the liberalization of the public sphere. It compares how new media technologies and formats reconfigure the sensory mediation of religious presence in two very different religions that turn out to be much closer entangled than their media expressions suggest at first sight.

2014

This chapter is an initial attempt to bring together some of the exciting scholarly work carried out on various genres of African Pentecostal-Charismatic popular culture. My main argument is that PCPC is very much a “live” popular culture. The notion of a “live popular culture” gains its meaning when analyzing how the experience of immediacy is manipulated (see also Brennan 2012). This experience of immediacy is brought about by the potential of new technologies, and is also thematized within Pentecostal discourse itself. I draw together three themes from research carried out by scholars working on African PCPC in order to show how it becomes “a live popular culture”, and how Christian songs, performances, and recorded or printed texts are experienced as animating and/or animated. These themes are: (a) the role of PCPC in the transformation (sacralization) of African public spaces; (b) PCPC as a device for producing Christian subjects; and (c) Pentecostal-Charismatic aesthetics as symbolic technologies that give meaning to local and global worlds. All three render sounds and images “alive”. The spiritual battle is “presented” in these sensual spaces, rendered as something to be felt, and made meaningful, with all the risks that acts of signification and presencing bring with them.

Church Times Magazine, 2022

The prosperity gospel, which promises bountiful wealth as a proof of God's blessing, is one of the most visible and contentious aspects of charismatic Christianity in Africa. Spirituality and a desire for financial wealth are two aspects of what people often think of as leading a fulfilling life. Religious ideals and economic pursuits are heavily weighted in our culture. These two ideals, however, have the ability to clash with one other, resulting in mental suffering. The main issue with prosperity teaching is its understanding and application of the Scriptures. Many Bible passages are used by prosperity instructors in their teachings, providing the appearance that their ideas are securely rooted in the Word of God. Here, we shall be making a biblical conscious and scholarly effort to address the core principles and ideas of prosperity teachings, rather than argue with particular preachers and already established theories. This is a thorough effort to define concepts, investigate previous researches, mirroring materialism under the concept of God’s word, taking a view at the history of African Pentecostalism and making quality recommendations for the practitioners, church members and of course the church authority at large. Throughout this paper, the term Materialistic Ideology will be interchangeably used with the term Gospel of Prosperity

This article focuses on the infrequency with which “gifts of the Spirit” are experienced during services at a small Pentecostal church in Pretoria, attended mostly by Afrikaans-speaking men who self-identify as homosexual. It aims to shed some light on the ways in which pastors work to shape churchgoers’ perceptions of the world, their place in it, as well as how experiences of marginalisation and suffering relate to spirits (and their absence) that are understood to mediate between heaven and earth. I argue that difficulties related to the cultivation of faith, on which relationships with the divine are constructed, frustrate direct experiences of spiritual gifts. I also show that certain steps are taken in this church, with varying degrees of success, to try and render the invisible corporeally present. An analysis of sermons is folded into a broader discussion of spiritual self-fashioning and the roles of technologies of the self within the church in an attempt to provide an inclusive, broad-based analysis of “gifts of the Spirit” in a Pentecostal Charismatic Church (PCC) that engages with religious belief on its own terms.

In many parts of Africa, charismatic-Pentecostal churches are increasingly and effectively making use of mass media and entering the public sphere. This article presents a case study of a popular charismatic church in Ghana and its media ministry. Building on the notion of charisma as intrinsically linking religion and media, the aim is to examine the dynamics between the supposedly  fluid nature of charisma and the creation of religious subjects through a Ž fixed format. The process of making, broadcasting and watching Living Word shows how the format of televisualisation of religious practice creates charisma, informs ways of perception, and produces new kinds of religious subjectivity and spiritual experience. Through the mass mediation of religion a new religious format emerges, which, although originating from the charismatic-Pentecostal churches, spreads far beyond and is widely appropriated as a style of worship and of being religious.

Journal of Religion in Africa, 2009

This book "speaks" to the reader in two voices. In one, it carries forward anthropologist Joel Robbins' request for ethnographic studies of Christian communities. The other voice speaks as the ghost of Max Weber eager to unconceal ongoing rationalization processes amid a group of African charismatic Christians resisting the "disenchantment" of the world. These two voices have been distilled, harmonized, and amplified over the din of glossolalia and rustle of miracles. All this is new and welcome in the study of African Pentecostalism. Kirsch teaches anthropology at the University of London and has done extensive fieldwork in Zambia among the prophet-healing churches. The main church in this study is a small rural Zambian Pentecostal-charismatic Church, pseudonymously named Spirit Apostolic Church (SAC) in order to keep anonymous the villages and individuals mentioned in the study. This book opens up new ways of investigating, interpreting, and understanding Pentecostalism in Africa-especially its charismatic rationalization of the Spirit. For Kirsch, the SAC is undergoing a process of religious rationalization that is marked by a dialectic between the charisma of the leaders and the needs of internal communication. Kirsch shows us how the Holy Spirit (or charisma, if you like) is contributing to the process of religious bureaucratization while at the same time impeding it. We see the church embarking on a process of Weberian rationalism and routinization of charisma, but the path toward it is an enchanted (re-spiritualized) one. Kirsch studies SAC by focusing on its "literacy practices" and then deploys his findings to challenge the received scholarly notions of "charisma" and "institution." He argues that the proper way to study religious organizations is not to oppose charisma to bureaucracy, to assume the emergence of writing is tantamount to a process of routinization, or to treat the difference between charisma and institution as unbridgeable. The thrust of his study is to show "how the dimensions of 'charisma' and 'institution' are synchronically related to each other and coalesce in a particular religious setting in Zambia" (p. 8). At the heart of book is the treatment of the Pauline distinction between Spirit and letter. What he reveals is that the small rural Zambian congregation is not concerned with the distinction between spirit and letter, but is moved by both. The familiar Weberian distinctions between prophet and priest, between charisma and bureaucracy, have coalesced. The administrative officer needs spiritual endowment to function and the charismatic prophet-healer-buoyed by a social practice of reading and writing-easily morphs into administrator and secretary as situation demands. Kirsch approaches the overall study in two related steps. He first attempts to lay out his theoretical arguments and then undertakes specific and comparative case studies to convey his ideas and elucidate his anthropological paradigm. His efforts sparkle in the second part, but not as much in the first. Though the author is an anthropologist and not a theologian, given the audience of this journal it is germane to mention that the book fails to adequately tease out the theological or philosophical presuppositions underlying the internal communication or nascent Weberian disenchantment. costal-charismatic churches, we know little or next to nothing about the critical role communication plays within them. This book has opened the internal communication system of so-called Spirit-filled churches for academic scrutiny. We can now begin to ask how and why are the Holy Spirit and internal communication becoming the principal tools for control, domination, or democracy in them.