Page 201 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

184 Dorothea E. Schulz

highlight a person’s special emotive capacities play an instrumental role in
the interactive generation of spiritual authority.
Believers’ perception of the special powers of individual media also
come out in the ways in which some of them, in an act of “technological
transference,” associate the technology’s powers with its physical incarnation
(i.e., with the technical apparatus). In the case of some charismatic leaders,
this “transference” manifests itself in the ways in which acolytes engage
with the physical manifestations of their leader’s authority, such as various
religious paraphernalia and memorabilia of the leader’s spiritual career.
Their engagement with his sermons relies on a range of multisensory
practices that allow for and mediate the experience of the extraordinary
and of transcendent immanence. Mediated through their sermons, these
charismatic leaders’ spiritual powers invade spaces of the mundane and give
them, literally, a new touch.
Sound-as-touch is not the only synaesthetic modality through which
spiritual leadership is rendered immanent and authenticated in West
African Muslim contexts. Visuality constitutes another important form of
synaesthetic mediation that draws on various materials and technologies,
old and new, to generate “imagetexts” constitutive of (and circumscribing)
particular forms of spiritual experience and worship (see Roberts and
Nooter Roberts 2003: 55–9; Morgan 2005: 65–7). Visual representations
of a leader’s spiritual authority generate a dialectical movement between
seeing and the experience of being seen (e.g. Mitchell 1994; Pinney 2004:8).
Similar to the sensation of sound-as-touch, meeting the gaze of the leader’s
portrait or photograph involves, according to many followers, a (literally)
striking haptic experience. Posters, stickers, other visual decorations, and
video-taped sermon recordings, for instance, provide occasions for his
followers to interact with him in socially sanctioned ways, such as touching
his (photographed) hands with their foreheads or stroking the sleeves of
his robe. For some female acolytes, donning a “veil” with an imprint of
the leader’s portrait means to inhabit a physically felt space in which the
leader’s spiritual powers touch and engulf them in a protective embrace.
While emanating from entirely distinct technologies of mediation, visual
representations of sainthood allow for various modes of tactile engagement
and thus generate sometimes novel experiences of oneself as religious subject
(Schulz 2004, ch. 9).
Similar multisensory forms of engagement and authentication are at work
in the case of Muslim women who assert a position of moral or spiritual
leadership. Yet, interactions between them and their (predominantly
female) acolytes also point to substantial differences with respect to first,
the particular form of charismatic authority that these female leaders are
thought to hold and, second, the particular modality through which a leader’s