Page 216 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Modes of Binding, Moments of Bonding 201

Figure 8.4 Afrikania members posing in their shrine (brekete) in Accra. Photo
by the author.

representations contradicts religious traditions that are not about sym-
bols, formats, and representations, but about embodiment and experi-
ence. The division between public and private registers of relating to the
spiritual remains strong and points to a difference in the role of the body
and the senses in the constitution of religious subjectivity and bonding.
While Afrikania’s symbolic approach foregrounds the visual and the
vocal, it neglects the other sensibilities, notably touch, and the experien-
tiality of practices like initiation and spirit possession. Afrikania’s repre-
sentational modes of addressing and attracting “the people” thus clash
with the embodied modes of religious bonding in traditional religious
practice.

Conclusion: Bodies, Spirits, and Mediation

This chapter has examined the ways in which a charismatic-Pentecostal
and an African traditionalist “church” in Ghana seek to establish religious
bonding, that is, to produce in people a sense of being connected to each
other as a religious group and to the spiritual realm, both through ritual
mediation and through mass media. Taking as a point of departure reli-
gion’s “problem of mediation,” I have approached religious media figures’