“There Is a Spirit in that Image”: Mass-Produced Jesus Pictures and Protestant-Pentecostal Animation in Ghana

Meyer, Birgit

doi:10.1017/s001041750999034x

Cited by 65 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Mediation here is closer to the idea of a conduit, or a means of transport of divine agency (cf. Abreu 2009;Meyer 2010); in this sense, mediamediation comes close to McLuhan's (1967) notion of a prosthetic extension of the human sensorium. Finally, normativity is evoked quite explicitly in Meyer's definition of mediatic "sensational forms" as "authorized modes for invoking and organizing access to the transcendental that shape both religious content (beliefs, doctrines, sets of symbols) and norms" (Meyer 2011: 751).…”

Section: Conclusion: Pentecostal Circulation Beyond Mediationmentioning

confidence: 58%

Flowing and framing

Reinhardt

2015

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Experiential and mediatized, Pentecostal Christianity is one of the most successful cases of contemporary religious globalization. However, it has often grown and expanded transnationally without clear authoritative contours. That is the case in contemporary Ghana, where Pentecostal claims about charismatic empowerment have fed public anxieties concerning the fake and the occult. This article examines how Pentecostalism's dysfunctional circulation is countered within seminaries, or Bible schools, by specific strategies of pastoral training. First, I revisit recent debates on Protestant language ideology in the anthropology of Christianity, and stress Pentecostalism's affinity with notions of flow and saturation of speech by divine presence. Second, I move to data collected in the Anagkazo Bible and Ministry Training Center, and investigate this institution's pedagogical framing of Pentecostalism's otherwise erratic flow of speech and power according to two normative operations: Biblical figuration and the emic notion of transmission as 'impartation' . I conclude by stressing how the metapragmatics of figuration and impartation in Anagkazo requires an understanding of religious circulation that exceeds the dominant scholarly focus on religion-as-mediation.

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Section: Conclusion: Pentecostal Circulation Beyond Mediationmentioning

confidence: 58%

Flowing and framing

Reinhardt

2015

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“…Recent scholarship on religion and media reinforces this point. This research describes debates within various Muslim and Christian communities about the uses of new audiovisual technologies, demonstrating that disputes center not on instrumentality or efficiency per se but on the forms of ethical sociality and subjectivity these media foster (e.g., Eisenlohr 2009;Engelke 2010;Hirschkind 2006;Larkin 2008;Meyer 2010). For broader reflections on mediation as social process, see Boyer (2012); Gershon and Manning (2014); Mazzarella (2004).…”

Section: Four Theses On Mediationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Uncanny Medium: Semiotic Opacity in the Wake of Genocide

Tambar¹

2017

Current Anthropology

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In recent years, Turkey has witnessed the proliferation of new means for representing and mourning the Armenian genocide. This essay examines how the practice of criticizing historical atrocity, central to discourses of human rights, is itself institutionally regimented. Exploring the institutional impetus for critique, the essay offers a theoretical framework for understanding how oppositional groups challenge the parameters that designate the legitimate objects of critique. I focus attention on what I term an uncanny medium of critique, that is, a representational medium that makes the form of its publicity appear at once familiar and unsettling. The medium in question has been developed by the Saturday Mothers-a group that regularly gathers to publicize forcible disappearances that took place largely in Kurdish-majority provinces in the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, the organization has begun to publicly commemorate the deportation and killing of Armenians in 1915. The essay analyzes how the vigils evoke even as they unsettle ideological boundaries that are constitutive of social life in the contemporary nation-state-between public and private, the political and the domestic, and the past and the present. The Saturday Mothers mobilize the discourse of kinship and motherhood that has undergirded a militarized nationalism, but they do so for the sake of claiming familial responsibility for Armenians who have been historically defined as an ethnicized enemy. The group's practices allow us to place at the center of anthropological analysis moments of semiotic opacity, in which the medium that facilitates and undergirds social transactions becomes densely, even disruptively, apparent as a figure within that social field. With the concept of an uncanny medium, I suggest that opacity in mediation can be socially generative and put to political work.

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“…Em muitas das configurações de pesquisa que nós encontramos, notamos que nas práticas de mediação estabelecidas não havia nenhuma separação clara entre meio e mensagem, ou forma e conteúdo, no nível dos praticantes religiosos. Por exemplo, para os Ewe, uma estátua legba não é entendida como constituindo um mero objeto material que tem um espírito por trás, mas como uma real corporificação de poder espiritual (Meyer 2010b), bem como, no catolicismo, ícones transmitem uma sensação de Deus (a rejeição a "ídolos" feitos por humanos, TRADUÇÃO Birgit Meyer apontando a pura materialidade do ícone, é uma crítica típica dos Protestantes para com a mediação Católica). De maneira similar, apesar da questão sobre o uso do rádio para leituras públicas do Corão ser ou não adequado ter envolvido negociações complicadas entre Muçulmanos no norte da Nigéria no período colonial (Larkin, 2009; veja também abaixo), uma vez tomada a decisão a favor, tais leituras formaram uma parte praticamente natural da vida pública na qual o Islã é onipresente.…”

Section: ' D E S a Pa R E C I M E N T O ' D A M í D I Aunclassified

Mediação e Imediatismo: formas sensoriais, ideologias semióticas e a questão do meio

Meyer

2017

CAMPOS

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Tomando como ponto de partida o paradoxo de que imediatismo não é anterior, mas antes um produto damediação, esse artigo argumenta que a negociação de tecnologias mediáticas recentes é um elemento-chave paraa transformação da religião. Invocada para autorizar a experiência de poderes espirituais como imediatos e reais, amídia tende a “desaparecer” ou se tornar “hiper-aparente” no ato da mediação. Argumento que entender a mídiacomo intrínseca à religião exige uma crítica fundamental das abordagens, tanto da religião quanto da mídia, quepropõem uma oposição entre mídia e imediatismo.

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“There Is a Spirit in that Image”: Mass-Produced Jesus Pictures and Protestant-Pentecostal Animation in Ghana

Cited by 65 publications

References 30 publications

Flowing and framing

Flowing and framing

The Uncanny Medium: Semiotic Opacity in the Wake of Genocide

Mediação e Imediatismo: formas sensoriais, ideologias semióticas e a questão do meio

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