Page 218 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Modes of Binding, Moments of Bonding 203

one-to-one base and many rituals are performed in secret rooms where
nobody but the priest may enter. Moreover, access to religious knowledge
in traditional cults is restricted by long processes of initiation. This con-
cealment of spiritual practice and restriction of knowledge does not fit the
televisual logic of mass enchantment and makes its mass mediation prob-
lematic (cf. Van de Port 2006 and in this volume).
As a movement that strives for revaluation of indigenous religious tra-
ditions, Afrikania engages in the representation of traditional religious
practices and beliefs to the general public, envisioned primarily as
Christianized and (thus) alienated. This entails the creation of a new,
Christian-derived format for Afrikan Traditional Religion as a world reli-
gion. But there is a tension between Afrikania’s concern with representa-
tion of the spiritual to “the general public” and traditional religious
concerns with the presence of the spiritual in the bodies of practitioners.
The embodied, experiential kind of religious bonding generated by prac-
tices of spirit possession, initiation, and spiritual healing, finds no place in
Afrikania’s intellectualist project of addressing and attracting the public
in a discursive register. The body only features in Afrikania’s representa-
tions as an image of beauty and neatness or as a symbol of traditional
religion, not as medium for engaging with the spirits. Unlike charismatic
media ministries, then, Afrikania’s media representations do not connect
its audience to the spiritual and thus can hardly play any role in generat-
ing religious bonding.
By stressing the difference between charismatic and African tradition-
alist media practices, I am not arguing that traditional spiritual power
cannot be mediated by modern media technologies. On the contrary, the
very reason that certain places and activities connected with the presence
of spirits may often not be filmed or photographed is that cameras are
believed to be able to catch a spirit and take it away or to disturb it and
interfere with its operation. Conversely, a spirit can interfere with the cam-
era’s operation and prevent the images from appearing. Several “spiritual-
ists” explained to me how they would use a person’s photograph to
spiritually heal or harm the person depicted over a long distance (see also
Behrend 2003). None of them used video for this purpose, but one said it

could be possible. In traditional African religiosity, then, the power of
vision is closely connected to spiritual power. Images and spirits are not
separated by a relation of referentiality, but connected by a relation of pre-
sentationality. An image does not represent spiritual power but makes it
present (ibid.; Meyer 2006c). It can acquire power of its own and seeing it
can affect the seer. In other words, the image is iconic rather than sym-
bolic; it does not symbolize, but it embodies the spiritual reality behind it.
Interestingly, then, charismatic-Pentecostal looking practices, in which