Soaking in tapes: the haptic voice of globalPentecostal pedagogy inGhana

Abstract

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.

Flowing and framing

“…For instance, Coleman's interlocutors frame activities like Bible reading as a holy gymnastics, whereby one progressively becomes the "equivalent of a spiritual body builder " (2006: 170). I found in my fieldwork analogous ideas, in this case centered on notions of nurturance (Reinhardt 2013(Reinhardt , 2014. The main outcomes of the ingestion of scriptures through repetitive reading and recitation are both the ability to 'think Biblically' and an increase in spiritual power, according to Jesus' claim in John 6 : 63 that "The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and they are life".…”

“…Yet, another set of practices are openly centrifugal in terms of language ideology and personhood, like corporate prayer and methods of impartation. This appears most explicitly in the habit of 'soaking' in bishop Dag's recorded sermons (Reinhardt 2014). It is important to notice that, as a link of a much broader chain of transmission, bishop Dag is not an all-powerful, monopolist point of emanation, being himself an allos, "another of the same kind".…”

Vulnerable minds, bodily thoughts, and sensory spirits: local theory of mind and spiritual experience in Ghana

“…At the Lighthouse, tongues, boisterous prayers, and collapsed shaking bodies overcome with the Holy Spirit are standard fare; so are smartphones, social media accounts, and pastoral exhortations for members to be technologically savvy (Reinhardt 2014). Like many charismatic evangelical services in Ghana, those at Lighthouse emphasize spiritual warfare: the assumption that Christians are intimately and actively involved in a supernatural battle between the soldiers of God and his demonic opponents, who are present and active in their everyday world.…”

The Apparatus of Belief: Prayer, Technology, and Ritual Gesture

“…Emerging during the formative years of these disciplines circa 1900, these influential accounts describe prayer as a history of progressive abstraction from the material world into the silent recesses of a cognitive interiority. 10 I have deployed these concepts as a critique against this model, one which persists and continues to orient many of the basic assumptions behind the academic study of prayer. 11 The organization of new prayer-gestures such as the radio as point of contact suggest a new direction in the study of prayer that attends to the particular material and technological "exteriorizations" that sustain and enliven the contemporary performance of belief.…”

“…In Jesus' name, Amen. Transcriptions from the prayer time of the Healing Waters Broadcast will help evoke the specific textures of what Bruno Reinhardt, in his analysis of the pedagogical practice of "soaking in tapes" in a Ghanaian seminary, aptly terms the "haptic voice" [10]. These visceral testimonies, in turn, will shed light on the specific implications of this tactile radio voice for Pentecostal rituals of faith healing.…”