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Paper short abstract:

This is an exploration of the gestures in Evangelical religious performances. It aims to understand how certain ‘visible bodily actions’ acquire social significance such that they convey spirituality. The point of departure are the communicative gestures of Nigerian Yoruba religious practitioners.

Paper long abstract:

Common to the Afropean world is religion, in this case, Christianity. It includes a message and practitioners both of which have to be communicated to observers as holy and spiritual respectively. Stepping away from dogma, the performance of religiosity is integral to the spread of religion and the ability of religion to captivate is inextricably linked to gestural signals and embodied practices not only of its practitioners but also of its material objects of representation and significations. Of interest to me in this discussion is to understand how a religious gesture emerges, assumes its meaning and significance such that there is a communal and conventional consensus that is built around a specific ‘form + meaning’ relationship. What informs the perception of certain movements of the body, including facial expressions, head, and hand gestures (kinesics), postures, deictics, and paralanguages among others as ‘spiritual’ rather than mundane? What social pressures inform their selection and configure their uses? Are there specific language ideologies that work in their evocation to elicit, as it were, ineluctable pious deference, and that factors in their deployment to assert specific identities?

By posing and investigating the question- what is sacred in gestures, I intend to seek responses to the above questions as well as to explore the dynamics process involved in transforming a communicative signal into an index of spirituality. Data would be drawn from archival material and extant practices as observed among the Aladura Church and Deeper Life Bible Church from the Yoruba nation in Nigeria.