Page 259 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

244 Rafael Sánchez

were presented at a conference at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Research at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the
Anthropology Department of New York University, as a BOAS Lecture at
Columbia University, at the Graduate Workshop of Anthropology of Latin
America and the Caribbean (WALAC) at the University of Chicago, at the
Anthropology Department of The Johns Hopkins University and at the Center for
Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank the
members of these audiences for their comments and questions. Adam Becker,
Deborah Kapcham, Webb Keane, John Kelly Brian Larkin, Claudio Lomnitz,
Birgit Meyer, Rosalind Morris, Nancy Munn, Emilio Spadola, Rupert Stash, and
Paula Vásquez have generously read and commented on the paper at different
stages of its development, for which I am most grateful. I also wish to thank here
my wonderful research assistant Isabela Luján. Much of the paper was developed
at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, where I was a Fellow in
2006, and completed while I was a Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Center for Latin
American and Caribbean Studies. I would like to thank the directors of these two
centers, Faye Ginsburg and Angela Zito, and Thomas Abercrombie, respectively,
for their generosity and intellectual stimulation. As always, Patricia Spyer has pro-
vided invaluable intellectual and personal companionship. Finally, I owe an
immense debt to the Pentecostal sisters, their families and followers with whom I
work in Caracas.
1. Needless to say, what I have here in mind is not any “real” presence but the
effect of such presence brought about by a wide range of digital and electronic
technologies, especially television, that seemingly obliterate the difference
between so-called real presence and its representation. See Samuel Weber
1996, 121, 161.
2. In line with the squatter’s understanding, by “the undeserving,” I mean all
those mundanos or worldly, mundane beings that have not been baptized or
“born again” in the Holy Spirit; that is, virtually everyone who is not a
Pentecostal.
3. The literature on Pentecostalism grows at a pace that is hard to keep up with. I
have found especially useful Corten and Marshall, 2001; Robbins 2004; Meyer
2004b; Stoll 1990; De Witte 2005b; Oosterbaan 2005. In general, for Venezuela
the essays on Pentecostalism by David Smilde are especially insightful. For the
bearings it has on some of the arguments in this chapter see especially Smilde
1998.
4. In order to protect the confidentiality of the Pentecostal squatters among
whom I have done fieldwork during the past two years, all proper names have
been changed.

5. For Hegel’s treatment of the Christian Trinity see Hodgson 1988, 111–198,
417–432.
6. If that is what it is, given the squatters’ borrowing in order to formulate their
self-understanding of both person and agency from a globalized repertoire
largely shared by Pentecostals everywhere.
7. For an illuminating study on this connection see Meyer 1999.