Este texto é uma tradução para o português da introdução escrita pelo antropólogo Talal Asad para o volume editado Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, publicado em 1973. Asad reflete sobre a história da antropologia britânica como teoria e campo profissional e aponta para a influência de processos geopolíticos mais amplos, como a colonização e a descolonização, sobre ambos. Evitando posturas que reduziam a antropologia à mera ideologia imperial, assim como defesas conservadoras de sua neutralidade axiológica, Asad defende de forma pioneira a absorção reflexiva do próprio colonialismo como tema de problematização antropológica.
Can a voice touch? This possibility is indeed what underlies ‘soaking in tapes’, a devotional practice performed in Anagkazo Bible and Ministry Training Center, a Pentecostal seminary based in Accra, Ghana. Soaking in tapes is a form of impartation, or grace transmission, homologous to the biblical method of laying on of hands. In this article, I explore the conditions of possibility of this transposition of touch into speaking and hearing, arguing that the haptic voice of soaking in tapes is predicated upon a cultivated receptivity and a specific bond connecting addresser and addressee. I situate the practice in the school's broader pedagogical apparatus, where it operates simultaneously as a spiritual exercise, a method of discipleship, and a technology of church government. I conclude by showing how soaking in tapes gives a pedagogical inflection to the general tactility and flow‐orientated materiality of global Pentecostal power.
O testemunho é um gênero narrativo que agrega uma grande variedade de temas de interesse para os estudos da religião e para as ciências sociais de maneira geral. Seus traços formais mais explícitos -como a relação performativa entre a fala na primeira pessoa e a verdade ou o foco experiencial no evento e na transformação -apresentam uma série de ressonâncias com outros domínios da vida moderna, como as cortes de justiça, a mídia, a literatura autobiográfica, e mesmo a autoridade etnográfica (Clifford 2008). O testemunho frequentemente articula a enunciação pública da verdade com um "relato de si" (Butler 2015); logo, não é estranho encontrarmos traços fortes da fala testemunhal nas chamadas políticas do reconhecimento, interessadas em pluralizar regimes sensoriais hegemônicos através de uma inflexão crítica da experiência social pela via da raça, da etnia, do gênero ou da sexualidade. Poderíamos investigar as ressonâncias formais e mesmo fenomenológicas, por exemplo, entre o padrão testemunhal condensado no célebre spiritual norte-americano Amazing Grace -I once was lost, but now I'm found -e o processo secular de autorrealização denominado "sair do armário" (Sedgwick 1990). Tal concepção ampla do testemunho é não somente válida, mas certamente nos levaria a debates produtivos sobre a natureza mais testemunhal do que propriamente confessional da reflexividade contemporânea em geral, ou seja, mais pública e vicária, muitas vezes extensamente mediatizada (Warner 2002), do que interiorizante.
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 materiality in their own religion, and argue that this operation lends ethnographic access to the role of transcendence in material religion’s everyday.
In this article I revisit current debates on immanence and transcendence in the anthropology of Christianity and promote an encounter between the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and my fieldwork experience among committed Pentecostals in Ghana. My argument seeks mutualclarification and oscillates contrapuntally between these two discursive traditions through moments of harmonization and dissonance. The philosophy of radical immanence and Pentecostal spirituality are presented as two lines of flight from the hegemonic "immanent frame" of secular modernity, a shared marginality that facilitates my engagement with Deleuzian notions, such as virtuality, modes, intensity, flow, desire, and refraction, in order to account for the heterogeneous ways whereby the Holy Spirit manifests itself amid the creation. This attempt at reconciliation brings about evident frictions, and I conclude by revisiting some fundamental differences between Deleuze's monistic pluralism and Pentecostals' pluralistic monotheism.
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