Page 149 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

134 Brian Larkin

this lineage are those who insist on the materiality of the technology itself
and how the technics of media create the infrastructural conditions that
set limits on our experiences and social orders. Print, radio, and television
reorder the information they transmit. They impose conditions on the
recording and storage of that media and on the bodies and senses of those
that retrieve it. We need to pay attention to how the technics of media
institute that ordering precisely to understand how those wider philoso-
phies are caught up and transmitted in networks that they do not completely
determine. Modern religious publics are creatures that emerge from the
interweaving of these two theoretical lineages: those that stress the materi-
ality of media technics and those that insist on cultural mediation of tech-
nology. In the case of Gumi this assemblage draws together the dispersive
qualities of broadcast media with the professional codes that define the use
of those technologies and the theologies and practices of Salafi revivalism
within the Muslim world. My aim in this chapter has been to try to tease
out some of the complexity of this assemblage, the layering between com-
peting systems of ideas and organization that constitute the dynamism and
force of new religious movements.

Notes

Research for this chapter was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research and the research program on which this volume is
based. I am grateful for feedback during seminars at Emory University, Wesleyan
University, the University of Jos, and the University of Amsterdam. And I am par-
ticularly grateful to Birgit Meyer for a close reading of the chapter and to the
Pionier Project fellows for discussion and debate from which I benefited greatly.
1. Their full name is Jama’atu Izalat al-Bid`a wa Iqamat al-Sunna, or, The
Movement Against Innovation in Favour of a Return to the Sunna.
2. There have been a number of excellent studies of Gumi and Izala’s rise and
influence. See, for instance, Barkindo 1993, Gumi 1992, Kane 2003, Loimeier
1997, Umar 1988, 1993.
3. Benedict Anderson’s (1991) imagined community of nationalism is a powerful
case in point. For Anderson, nationalism is a new mode of belonging tied to a
transformation in the experience of time, space and human association brought
about by a media technology (print) and an economic system (capitalism).
4. Interview, Sheikh Sanusi Gumbi, Kaduna, June 7, 1995.
5. Interview, Sheikh Yusuf Ali, Kano City, July 31, 1995
6. Yusuf Ali, a prominent Tijani Sheikh in Kano who attended SAS said opposi-
tion against the institution by traditional ulama was so intense that as late as
the 1960s students had to enroll without them knowing. When his teachers