Page 79 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

64 Martijn Oosterbaan

gospel music are often understood as a positive contribution to the purifi-
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cation of the space of the favela. Take, for example, what the locally
famous gospel singer/musician Leandro told me during an interview:

Music, that is it. Louvor is the instrument—in the church we call it lou-
vor—sing and everybody sings. Louvor is something that flows, so when
people louva the Lord Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes automatically, you feel
that joy and you transmit that to other people. And the people become glo-
rified, become sane, and even people who are ill, physically ill, spiritually
ill, feel cured through the louvor, people are cured through the louvor. For
example, those who are on the verge of doing something stupid, who want
to commit suicide, who want to leave their family, who want to leave every-
thing behind or do bad things. Normally when those people listen to louvor
that is dedicated to Lord Jesus, that louvor makes them feel different, the
opposite to what they felt. Those people open their heart and let it flow, and
nothing bad happens.

The unique capacity of louvor to reach people through space creates the
possibility to experience it as the transmission of the Holy Spirit while
simultaneously allowing for the idea of a spiritual occupation of space.
Such a link between music, space, and religion was apparent not only in
the favela of my research. In her research among evangélicos in the favela
Acari, Cunha also noticed that the evangélicos occupy physical and social
space with the aid of speakers, microphones, and musical instruments
(Cunha 2002, 92).
As I have argued elsewhere (Oosterbaan 2008), the popularity of evan-
gelical radio should be understood in relation to both the landscape and
soundscape of the favela and in relation to the specific affinities between
radio and Pentecostalism in Brazil. It is often through sounds that people
feel touched by the Holy Spirit and in close contact with God. In the
dense social space of the favela, where sound has acquired a privileged
position at the crossroads of the public and private, this quality of evan-
gelical radio to touch people is dialectically related to the sounds of other
social groups and the perceived moral transgressions that evangelicals are
concerned with.
Just as with other cultural practices, the self-disciplining efforts to avoid
listening to certain radio programs are strengthened by the dense urban
setting and the proximity of people in the favela. Both church members
and unconverted neighbors exercise a continuous control over the born-
again subjects, eager to expose that they are also “of the world,” not just in
it. To many evangélicos it is of great importance to maintain the boundaries
between them and the unconverted (ímpios) not only because of their feel-
ings of belonging to those who will be saved, but also because the violent