Page 68 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Chapter 2

Purity and the Devil: Community,

Media, and the Body. Pentecostal

Adherents in a Favela in

Rio de Janeiro

Martijn Oosterbaan

Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole
network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contempo-
rary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified.
—(Foucault [2002]1984, 2)

Defilement is never an isolated event. It cannot occur except in view of a sys-
tematic ordering of ideas. Hence any piecemeal interpretation of the pollu-
tion rules of another culture is bound to fail. For the only way in which
pollution ideas make sense is in reference to a total structure of thought whose
keystone, boundaries, margins and internal lines are held in relation by rituals
of separation.
—(Douglas 2002 [1966], 51)

Introduction

1
The small public square in the middle of the favela was crowded when
the famous pastor Marcos Pereira da Silva of the Igreja Assembléia de