While Pentecostal churches derive their growing popularity in large part from their ability to combat witchcraft in society, I argue here that Pentecostalism is itself an alternative form of witchcraft discourse. As such, it falls prey to the same ambivalent relationship between power, success and social obligation that witchdoctors and politicians must face. I discuss Pentecostalism and witchcraft in terms of their relationship to neoliberal understandings of individual agency and economy in contrast to the moral economy of social obligations. At the same time I draw parallels between the ritual techniques of Pentecostalism and witchcraft cosmology, demonstrating that, despite Pentecostal churches' efforts to transcend the power of witchcraft, they in many cases become encompassed by witchcraft discourse, often taking on the appearance of witchcraft itself.

This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban patois) in Côte d’Ivoire, arguing that the struggles to define the indexical values of Nouchi and the performative bluff of urban street life associated with it have played a central role in the production of Ivoirian national identity. Speakers of Nouchi integrate references to American pop culture with local Ivoirian lexical content, which allows Nouchi use ambivalently to index both modernity and autochthony. In so doing they overturn the hierarchical schema of evaluation defined by proximity to the French standard. Nouchi indexes a new pan‐ethnic Ivoirian identity based on the alternative modernity of cosmopolitan urban youth. Urban youth reject the Francocentric elitism of the postcolonial state but themselves exclude Northern migrants, whom they qualify as less than modern, from Ivoirian citizenship. [modernity, enregisterment, French, Nouchi, indexicality, Côte d’Ivoire]

In response to an oft-encountered stance against semiotic or symbolic analysis in current anthropological theory, I argue for a broader understanding of semiosis as inherently both affective and material. Affect theory and new materialism move away from conceptualizations of human subjectivity and cultural construction and toward an ontological framework focused on material entities and vital flows. By meshing their language with that of classic symbolic anthropology, I demonstrate how the materiality of symbols produces and transmits affect and that, indeed, the efficacy of ritual is based on the manipulation of affect. Rather than thinking of signs as delimited representations fixed in structures, I emphasize their indeterminacy and ambiguity as the source of their social efficacy. Drawing on my research on affectively charged material objects in the storage spaces of US homes, I demonstrate that the affective force of these things stems from their open-ended and often unrecognized chains of semiotic associations. Ultimately, I present semiotic affect as a way to return to theorizing the social as an intercorporeal force that precedes the conscious determination of the subject. The sign is an encounter rather than an act of recognition. And it can only be felt or sensed: signs act directly on the nervous system. (Marks 1998:38) Matter can shimmer with undetermined potential and the weight of received meanings.

Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands function much like masking practices, concealing even as they reveal, using the visible to hide/signify the invisible. The classic masking scenario is one in which men wear masks and claim to be powerful ancestral spirits, keeping the fact of their performance a secret from women and uninitiated boys. However, the secrecy is ambiguous, for women give signs of knowing and men seem to believe in the spirits they pretend to be only pretending to be. In Côte d'Ivoire, where masks are a symbol of national identity, consumption focuses around displaying supposedly authentic name brand labels. Urban Ivoirians call this display of wealth and consumption 'bluffing', exposing the artifice of their supposed affluence. Still, the success of their performance depends on the authenticity of expensive European and American brands, in a market where most of what is available is counterfeit. Underneath the public secret of their performative display lies the deeper secret that they remain uncertain of the legitimacy of their purchases. Masks and brands both metaphorically delineate a metonymic though invisible connection to authentic power, but the secrecy of what lies beneath the masked performance provides an unstable ambiguity in which it is always possible that the surface is that which it represents. Brands always contain this instability between appearance and the genuine, for all are ultimately copies whose uncertain authenticity we cover up with public secrecy.We now declare that the trademark of [Côte d'Ivoire] will be the mask, for it is representative, rather pleasing to observe, and enshrouded in an air of mystery.Duon Sadia, the Minister of Tourism of Côte d'Ivoire, as cited in Steiner 1992a: 53The modern trademark does not function to identify the true origin of goods. It functions to obscure that origin, to cover it with a myth of origin. Beebe 2008: 52

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