Page 29 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

14 Birgit Meyer

power in Bahia’s mediascape while celebrities in the world of arts and pol-
itics also stress their affinity with Candomblé. Van de Port argues that
Candomblé indulges in a “public performance of secrecy” (Chapter 1),
which testifies to its deeply ambivalent attitude toward new media. A sim-
ilar stance prevails in the neotraditional Afrikania Movement in Ghana
that struggles to rescue “African Traditional Religion” from the assaults of
Pentecostal churches that have become hegemonic in Southern Ghana.
Comparing the media practices of Afrikania and the International Central
Gospel Church (ICGC), Marleen de Witte (Chapter 8) shows that
Afrikania finds it difficult to accommodate itself to the predominance of
visibility that prevails in Ghana’s current public sphere. While Afrikania
seeks to master its own representation in the mass media, paradoxically
the traditional priests whom it claims to represent wish to maintain an
aura of secrecy, insisting that the gods and their abodes do not lend them-
selves to be captured through the eye of the camera, and reproduced on
screen (see also Meyer 2005a; see also Ginsburg 2006, Spyer 2001). Brian
Larkin (Chapter 5) investigates how the availability of print and radio,
which were coded as prime media of colonial modernity, became central
to conflicts about the modalities through which Islam was supposed to be
present in public. He shows that the embracement of these modern media
by Sheik Abubaker Gumi was part of reformulating Islam, a project
through which Islam was aligned to a more rational religious practice that
fits in with the modern, secular state. Showing how this rearticulation
yielded conflicts with Sufi movements, which had hitherto been domi-
nant in Northern Nigerian Islam, but which now also started to engage
with radio, Larkin shows that debates and conflicts about media, and the
new forms of public presence allowed by them, is central to religious
transformation.
The point is that the availability of new media may ensue critical delib-
erations about their potential to generate and sustain authentic experiences
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and forms of authority within existing religious traditions. Technology
thus never “comes in a ‘purely’ instrumental or material form—as sheer
technological possibility at the service of the religious imagination” (van de
Port 2006, 23), but is to be embedded in the latter through an often com-

plicated negotiation process in which established authority structures may
be challenged and transformed (see also Eisenlohr 2006; Kirsch 2007;
Schulz 2003, 2006a). Of crucial concern here is the question of how the
aesthetics and styles that particular new media forms imply clash or can be
made to merge with established religious aesthetic styles. In other words,
as message and medium, content and form, only exist together, the big
question is how earlier mediations are transformed by being remediated via
new media (Bolter and Grusin 1999; see also Meyer 2005b, Hughes in this