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- Convenors:
-
Ferdinand de Jong
(Freie Universitat)
Anna Niedźwiedź (Jagiellonian University)
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- Chair:
-
Birgit Meyer
(Utrecht University)
- Stream:
- Religion
- Location:
- Chrystal McMillan, Seminar Room 2
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 12 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The aim of this panel is to examine to what extent media and practices of mediation enable a long conversation with religious heritages. We focus on religious discourses on past, present and future, and how their material representations are authorised and authenticated in the present.
Long Abstract:
Cultural heritage is connecting past, present and future and is often invoked to overcome the disruptions caused by the upheavals of modernity, in Africa and elsewhere. But the connections that cultural heritage provides between past and present are hardly ever without disruptions, and require forms of mediation that conceal these very disruptions.
In this panel, we focus on the mediation of religious heritage. Media are often used to represent religious heritage and to suggest a temporality of continuity, or, precisely, discontinuity. The mediation of religion has been subject to considerable research, especially in the context of Pentecostalism. In this panel, we would like to expand Birgit Meyer's theorisation of media and the aesthetic formations they enable by examining other religion heritages and the specificity of their mediations.
The aim of this panel is to examine to what extent media and practices of mediation enable a long conversation with religious heritages and how media are authorised and authenticated. As the mediation of religion promotes both rupture and connection with past and future, it requires forms of authorisation and authentication that need to be negotiated. As these negotiations are often ambiguous, this panel examines how this ambiguity is represented in material mediations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Looking at the embeddedness of digital technologies among Ghanaian traditional priests, this contribution aims to present the ambiguities and opportunities offered by the adoption of new media in the context of a religious tradition.
Paper long abstract:
Being for long time stigmatized by Christian discourses on the morality of African spiritual mediations, in recent years Ghanaians traditional priests took the chance to speak for themselves through social media, therefore entering a globalized network where people from different backgrounds become involved with African spiritual practices as followers and clients. Indeed, offering their services online, and embedding digital technologies into their practices of mediations with the spiritual domain -- readings, initiations, healings -- many priests successfully mobilize people imagination on African spirituality bringing their own, local knowledge, on a global stage. At the same time, given the competitive configuration of the "spiritual market" in Ghana and beyond, they also have to legitimize and maintain their position. Therefore, dynamics of validation, revelation and concealment of real spiritual powers are subject of discussion and criticism among practitioners, observers and policymakers. Focusing on the aesthetics through which some Ghanaians traditional priests display their material relationship with the spirits they work with, this paper aims to look at the role of digital media in connecting people and spirits in order to understand how new technologies are appropriated, regulated and normated in the context of a non-centralized, non-book based, religious tradition.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focusses on religious objects and practices used by Ghanaian Catholics to form and confirm their identities as both "good Christians" and "real Africans". Various material and sensational forms mediate disrupted continuities between "traditional" and "Christian" world views.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary Catholic discourses and debates concerning "African tradition", "African heritages", "African traditional religion" and "African spirituality" are full of ambiguities that can be summarized in the form of two dominant and opposing trajectories. On one hand, the "African past" is rejected as "uncivilized" and demonized as "pagan"; something to be left behind after a disruptive moment of conversion. On the other hand, it is cherished and celebrated as "valuable continental heritage", an "authentic African way" turning the continent into an "immense spiritual lung for humanity" (a metaphor used by the Pope Benedict XVI during the Synod for Africa in 2009).
I propose to analyze how these two trajectories are reflected in the use of material objects and in bodily practices by today's African Catholics. I will refer to ethnographic material collected among Catholic parishioners in central Ghana. Various material objects, such as adinkra symbols, chief's umbrellas and other royal insignia, as well as sensational forms related to dances, clothes and the performance of prayers, are seen as mediating disrupted continuities between "traditional" and "Christian" world views. Labelled as "our tradition" or "heritage", they are eagerly included in Catholic feasts and everyday religious practices as expressing "African Christian" identities. However, other or even the same objects and practices are problematic and contested by Ghanaian Catholics when they are labelled "African traditional religion". This case study suggests that the construction of certain objects and practices as "heritages" and "traditions" opens mediations and conversations between imagined religious past and contemporary African Christian identity.
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork in Lagos, I explore the framing of the past and the handling of tradition among Nigerian Pentecostals. Using the vector of the museum, I explore the aspirations and tensions among those safeguarding traditional objects and how they locate a problematic past in the present.
Paper long abstract:
Based on fieldwork in Lagos, my research explores the framing of the past and the handling of tradition among Nigerian Pentecostals. I investigate the often fraught relationship between visions of Christianity, modernity and tradition, by studying those working in close proximity with traditional religious and ancestral objects in ethnographic museums and heritage-focused institutions. Since Pentecostals explicitly condemn many past beliefs and their objects as facilitating idolatry, my research draws out the tensions at play and the specific biblical terminology used, the rhetoric employed, and the moral stances adopted by these Christian publics in order to frame its socio-political and cultural effects. I do so by analysing the ethical commitments made in sermons and circulated among members through broadcast and via widely-read literature and how this plays out in the workplace. And I consider how Pentecostal doctrine can affect heritage-making by shaping perceptions of ancestral objects as 'fetish', 'evil' or 'demonic' artefacts but, simultaneously, give utility to those same objects through processes of de-sacralisation, historicisation or aestheticisation within museum spaces. I explore this dynamic among heritage-makers, academics, contemporary curators and artists, as well as private art collectors - all of whom seek to find a place for the past in their lived present and imagined future.
Paper short abstract:
In 2010, a found photograph of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba caused a controversy in the Senegalese public sphere. This paper explores why the photograph questioned the established iconography of the Saint and how its authenticity was hotly debated - creating a disturbance in the decolonial archive.
Paper long abstract:
Media afford experiences of the sacred that are no less genuine than more immediate experiences of the sacred. Responding to Walter Benjamin's thesis on mechanical reproduction, the anthropology of religion researches the conditions of possibility for media to provide authentic experiences of the sacred. This paper examines the authorisation of auratic imagery in the medium of photography, and how their authority can be contested.
The colonial mug shot of the Sufi Saint Cheikh Ahmadou Bambou constitutes the only recognised photograph of the Saint in Senegal. Demanding recognition for their Cheikh, his followers have disseminated his image and established the Saint's legacy as a national heritage. The photograph has become enchanted and sacralised as the only authentic icon of the Saint, its colonial status as "document" overwritten by a new regime of visual devotion. When, in 2010, another photograph of the Senegalese saint was found and printed in a Senegalese newspaper, the "authenticity" of that photograph was immediately questioned and its distribution forbidden.
This paper examines how the found photograph disturbed the established iconography of the Saint and how the suppression of its circulation aimed at re-stabilizing the religious doxa of a decolonial archive. Focussing on the public contestation of the photograph, this paper examines how it was subjected to a process of de-authentication that situated the photograph squarely in the colonial archive, purifying the decolonial archive.