Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana

Abstract

This essay traces Charismatic preaching and the moral importance of the fake pastor across public spaces and genres in Accra, Ghana. I argue that fear of the fake pastor creates a local theory of moral performance that sets the conditions of possibility for the legitimacy of the pastor as a public figure. Although rapid circulation generates anxiety about spiritual sincerity, it also produces continual hope for the miraculous and the potential for morally legitimate agency. The specter of the fake pastor provides a symbolic nexus for the transformation of spiritual into economic value in privatizing Ghana. This transformation occurs in the language of public moral belonging. A pastor's moral authority relies on public style and performance to connect spiritual power, moral sincerity, and economic potency. Fakery appears as the margin, the horizon against which a moral center is clarified. The fake's centrality to public moral discourse is rooted in the possibilities and dangers of individuated agencies associated with Ghana's liberalization.

Trickster Ethnography

“…By this I mean that rather than remain characters in mythological folkloric tales they are appropriated by various ongoing national, economic, and artistic projects. Indeed in urban cosmopolitan African worlds defined by business people, politicians, and artists, actions and intents are often explicitly debated and discussed as tricksters (Shipley, 2009;Hannerz, 1987). In Kinshasa, as White shows, the trickster manifest in performances and discourses of popular urban music, shapes a particularly African modernity (White, 1999: p. 158).…”

“…Hip-hop artists and popular musicians have also adopted Ananse tales in their lyrics and poetic forms, with one artist even taking the stage name of Kweku Ananse. Ananse stories while describing particular aspects of Akan sociality have been explicitly appropriated to define a Ghanaian cultural nationhood and transposed to address aspects of modern urban life in Ghana (Shipley, 2009(Shipley, , 2013(Shipley, , 2015.…”

De epifania a método: a teopolítica do testemunho em um seminário pentecostal em Gana

“…Uma enorme gama de testemunhos sobre milagres, aparições divinas e transformações morais e sobrenaturais tem circulado na esfera pública local, um dos seus efeitos sendo uma notável trivialização do poder transformador da conversão e do carisma. Antes um gênero de enunciação cristão dotado de normas distintas, o testemunho em Gana tornou-se ambíguo em seus limites e saturado por contingências, sendo contraefetuado por constantes rumores sobre falsos conversos, profetas e pastores (Shipley 2009), assim como por formas de esteticização, comodificação e espetacularização, frutos da "pentecostalização" da cultura popular ganense (Meyer 2004b). Nesse sentido, se esses ministérios tomaram a desregulamentação neoliberal da esfera pública como uma oportunidade para midiatizar suas mensagens e saturar o cotidiano com testemunhos, esse mesmo processo também os submeteu às características de sua época, como a informalização da economia e uma crise geral de legitimidade no imaginário social (Comaroff e Comaroff 2006).…”

Flowing and framing

“…Part of it is due to this spirituality's own flexible structures of ecclesiastical authority, often represented in the scholarship through ideas of 'movement' (Csordas 2001), 'waves' (Asamoah-Gyadu 2005), and 'family resemblances' (Anderson 2010), instead of rigid historical, social, and theological identities. This cross-contextual tendency is catalyzed to a point of eruption by the entanglement of Pentecostalism with the widespread crisis of legitimacy that has affected the African 'post-colony' (Mbembe 2001) in a neoliberal epoch, expressed through growing informality at the level of political economy and anxieties about the fake and the occult at the level of social imaginaries (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000;Apter 2005;Shipley 2009). …”