Page 320 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

problem of representativeness is depicted by the smoke in the painting shown
in ¤g. 14.2, which, in the ¤rst place, is what intrigued me to write this essay.

Notes

The ethnographic material on which this chapter is based was collected in the frame-
work of the NWO-Pionier research program “Modern Mass Media, Religion and the
Imagination of Communities” (http://www.pscw.uva.nl/media-religion). Earlier ver-
sions were presented in the Pionier Seminar (February 2003), the Anthropology and Me-
dia Seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London, March 13, 2003),
and the Meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (Providence, April 24,
2003). I am most grateful to Augustine Abbey and Ashiagbor Akwetey-Kanyi for their
tremendous help in doing ¤eldwork on the Ghanaian video-¤lm scene, and Charles
Hirschkind, Stephen Hughes, Bruce Knauft, Annelies Moors, David Morgan, Sudeep
Dasgupta, Rafael Sanchez, Mattijs van de Port, and Jojada Verrips for their stimulating
comments on earlier versions of this essay.

1. David Morgan drew my attention to Jan Gossaert’s painting Saint Luke Painting
the Virgin (1520). This fabulous painting depicts the virgin as surrounded by smoke and
angels, so as to visualize her miraculous apparition. Saint Luke is shown to make a paint-
ing of this apparition with his hand being guided by an angel, since he is unable to see
what spectators of the image can see. As in the painting described above, there is an
image within the image which is only visible to the outside spectator. Gossaert’s painting
pinpoints the impossibility of depicting or capturing divinity straightforwardly in an
image, and maintains that religious ways of seeing are necessary in order to make the
image materialize. It seems to me that the roadside painting of the cameraman targeting
Jesus can be placed in the same tradition, which pinpoints that representations of di-
vinity can only be achieved through divine mediation. The image of the cameraman,
however, goes one step further in suggesting that the camera employed in mediating the
divine mysti¤es and conceals, rather than merely reveals.
2. This notion is inspired by Webb Keane’s idea of representational economy, which
is meant to “capture the ways in which practices and ideologies put words, things, and
actions into complex articulation with one another” (2001, 85). I wish to highlight the
complex articulation of images—painted, audio-visual, or photographed—with one an-
other, hence the term “image economy.” The notion of economy is important because it
draws attention to the fact that these articulations depend on the logic of demand and
supply in the market.
3. In Ghana ethnicity certainly plays an important role in the politics of belonging
(Lentz and Nugent 2000); the point is that Pentecostalism crosscuts ethnicity.
4. Of course, the public spread of Pentecostalism does not occur at the expense of
churches but is organized by them. Though many Pentecostals do attend church, the
articulation of Pentecostal signs and symbols in public challenges the older forms of
Christian religiosity as being con¤ned to churches and the private sphere. Pentecostal-
ism’s spread into the public sphere raises questions concerning the maintenance of reli-
gious authority and the very nature of Pentecostal belief.
5. For instance, I witnessed and ¤lmed how the House of Faith Ministries Church,

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