jason price
This is why questions like, “WHO ARE YOU?” and “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HER?”, should not be understood as absurd, but achingly relevant. Typical answers such as, “I am her spiritual husband” and “I am trying to destroy her life” (either by preventing her from finishing school, or preventing her from getting married, or preventing her from having a child, or preventing her from getting a job, etc.) bring to light serious worldly afflictions, no matter that they are couched in a spiritual idiom. This is also why the commands commonly issued by pastors in the heat of deliverance – “OUT!!”, “GET OUT!!” and “LOSE HER!” – carry with them such import and immediacy. Most everyone who comes for deliverance is looking to be liberated from some kind of terrible burden. This is why, at the end of every deliverance, Pastor Jiya picks the person off the floor, stands her up straight, looks her dead in the eye and says “You are free.” It would be relatively easy, of course, to dismiss this kind of religious practice as performative, exploitative, regressive and/ or delusional. Many Malawians skeptical of charismatic Christianity do each day. But just as Hirschkind managed to write thoughtfully against dismissive readings of cassette sermons among Middle Eastern Muslims, I’d like to end by writing in favour of a more nuanced take on deliverance among charismatic Christians
then it must, as one popular Malawian televangelist is famous for saying, ‘go deeper’. To do that, I want to take seriously Hirschkind’s suggestion to “interrogate traditions in terms of continuities of disciplined sensibility and the practices by which these are created and revised across changing historical contexts” (2001: 641). Hirschkind argues that religious traditions are founded as much on the body as they are on belief. He suspects that conferring critical attention on something like collective kinaesthetic memory will “contribute to the important and ongoing task of rethinking the decidedly stubborn opposition between tradition and modernity” (2001: 624). I find this useful because it leads us away from standard questions like, ‘How does sound operate at a place like HOGEM?’ and towards more novel questions like, ‘Which traditional practices at HOGEM associated with the senses may have been enabled by modern conditions?’ The simple answer to that question is, of course, ‘spirit possession’ – one of those classic objects of anthropological attention and a staple among many African religious traditions. It is interesting to approach deliverance via spirit possession because it encourages us to consider how a more traditional form of religious practice, regularly associated with social solidarity in relatively classless societies and long shunned by many colonial and postcolonial governments, has re-emerged as an integral, disciplined sensibility within a modern global movement which emphasises individuality and material success. This thought alone muddles any easy conception of binaries such as tradition and modernity; although this is
half the battle, I still think we can try to ‘go deeper’.
When I approached Pastor Jiya and asked him about the connection between traditional forms of spirit possession and the deliverances at HOGEM, I was surprised to discover that he was eager to make a clear distinction between the two: “Those traditional cultural practices are a form of Satanism. What we do here is spiritual healing.” This made me wonder why it is important for HOGEM to distance itself so absolutely from traditional religious practices. I imagine it has something to do with what Hirschkind refers to as, ‘modern techniques in moral self-cultivation’, ones that correspond to the ‘conditions (political, moral, economic) that enable ethical forms of collective life’ (Hirschkind 2012). Pastor Jiya’s distinction works to assert a kind of modern identity engineered to give people a chance to survive (and thrive!) in a world where the cards seem to be stacked against them — stacked against them due to the logic and machinations of ‘neoliberal capitalism in its global manifestation’, whose ‘experiential contradictions’ I suspect HOGEM congregants feel almost every day of their lives. 2 This is where I think we can begin to appreciate how sensory experience can reveal (and play into) some of the ironies at work among our practical engagements with the world. 2 The full text reads “...the experiential contradiction at the core of neoliberal capitalism in its global manifestation: the fact that it appears to offer up vast, almost instantaneous riches to those who control its technologies, and, simultaneously, to threaten the very livelihood of those who do not” (Comaroff & Comaroff 2002: 782).
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at places like HOGEM, one which continues along the lines of sound.
Until now, I’ve suggested that sound is important at HOGEM because it facilitates certain forms of religious practice, especially deliverances. This is certainly the case, but it’s also pretty obvious, and if this essay is to have any conceptual merit
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