‘Don’t make it a doctrine’: Material religion, transcendence, critique

Abstract

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.

Ordinary ethics and its temporalities: The Christian God and the 2016 Ghanaian elections

“…4. To suggest that ethical practice and its temporalities are entangled through action is not to suggest something new (Bear, 2014;Gell, 1992;Mbembe, 2001), especially not in the literature on Protestant Christianity (see Bialecki, 2009;Bielo, 2017;Meyer, 1999;Reinhardt, 2015Reinhardt, , 2016aReinhardt, , 2016bRobbins, 2007). 5.…”

Religion as Mediation

“…I agree with Kleine (2016) that this code does not only pertain to Christianity, but is applicable to religion in a broad, crosscutting sense. 15 See Bruno Reinhardt (2016) for stressing the importance of paying detailed attention to how Pentecostals in Ghana talk about and enact transcendence. He makes this point so as to criticize a tendency in the approach of religion from a material angle to reduce religion to its sheer materiality and corporeality and, in so doing, to overrule people's own distinctions and practices of transcendence.…”

Acts Is Acts

“…In repeatedly oscillating from one clause to the other, with the support of alliteration and metalepsis as rhythmic linguistic devices, participants in ritualized speech become aware of the possible conditions of speech as such (Bloch 1974;Cordas 1990;de Abreu 2021). Moreover, they experience such conditions on a physiological level, thus associating linguistic embodied awareness with spiritual anointment (Bialecki 2017;Csordas 1993; de Witte 2011;Espírito Santo 2013;Meyer 2010;Ng 2020;Reinhardt 2014Reinhardt , 2016.…”