Journal of the American Academy of Religion Advance Access originally published online on February 14, 2008
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2008 76(1):82-110; doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfm092
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Powerful Pictures: Popular Christian Aesthetics in Southern Ghana
Birgit Meyer, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail: b.meyer{at}fsw.vu.nl
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Abstract |
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If images are life-forms, and objects are the body they animate, then media are the habitats or ecosystems in which pictures become alive. (Mitchell 2005: 198)Situated in an approach of religion in Africa that stresses the need to move beyond essentializing oppositions of Africa and the West, this article focuses on the Christian popular culture that has emerged in Ghana in the aftermath of democratization, enabling the unprecedented public presence of Christianity, in particular Pentecostal–Charismatic Churches, in the public sphere. Analysis of this Christian popular culture compels us to acknowledge the relevance of the material dimension of the Christian imagination, and, in so doing, to address the genesis of a Christian environment with powerful pictures that involve people into a particular religious aesthetics. My key concern is to show how Christian pictures, though thriving through modern possibilities of reproduction, ultimately refuse to appear as "mere" representations and tend to retain the somewhat excessive potential to partially merge with the divine—and above all satanic—power which they depict, calling for adequate action.
The research on which this article is based has been conducted in the framework of my Pionier research program, Modern Mass Media, Religion and the Imagination of Communities, that has been granted by the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO). Earlier versions have been presented to the Christianity and Media Group, Centre for Religion and Media, at New York University (March 2005), to the Christianity Working Group at the University of Chicago (April 2005), and as part of the Saul A. Sidore Lecture Series "Modernity and Evil" at the University of New Hampshire (September 2005). The author would like to thank David Frankfurter, Peter Geschiere, David Morgan, Jeremy Stolow, Jojada Verrips, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions. Special thanks also go to Ann Williams Duncan for editing the text.