Article published In:
Circulating Signs and People: Politics, affect, ethnographyEdited by Daniel N. Silva
[Pragmatics and Society 6:2] 2015
► pp. 261–287
Edited by Daniel N. Silva
[Pragmatics and Society 6:2] 2015
► pp. 261–287
Flowing and framing
Language ideology, circulation, and authority in a Pentecostal Bible school
Experiential and mediatized, Pentecostal Christianity is one of the most successful cases of contemporary religious globalization. However, it has often grown and expanded transnationally without clear authoritative contours. That is the case in contemporary Ghana, where Pentecostal claims about charismatic empowerment have fed public anxieties concerning the fake and the occult. This article examines how Pentecostalism’s dysfunctional circulation is countered within seminaries, or Bible schools, by specific strategies of pastoral training. First, I revisit recent debates on Protestant language ideology in the anthropology of Christianity, and stress Pentecostalism’s affinity with notions of flow and saturation of speech by divine presence. Second, I move to data collected in the Anagkazo Bible and Ministry Training Center, and investigate this institution’s pedagogical framing of Pentecostalism’s otherwise erratic flow of speech and power according to two normative operations: Biblical figuration and the emic notion of transmission as ‘impartation’. I conclude by stressing how the metapragmatics of figuration and impartation in Anagkazo requires an understanding of religious circulation that exceeds the dominant scholarly focus on religion-as-mediation.
Keywords: meta-pragmatics, Ghana, language ideology, circulation, pedagogy, authority, Pentecostalism
References
Abreu, Maria José de
2009 “Breath, Media and the Making of Community Canção Nova, Brazil.” In Aesthetic Formations. Media, Religion and the Senses, ed. by Birgit Meyer, 161–182. New York: Macmillan. 
Agha, Asif
2011 “Meet Mediatization”. Language & Communication 311: 163–170.
Anderson, Allan
2010 “Varieties, Taxonomies, and Definitions.” In Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods, ed. by Allan Anderson, Michael Bergunder, Andre F. Droogers, and Cornelis van der Laan, 13–29. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Apter, Andrew
2005 The Pan-African Nation oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Asad, Talal
1993 Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam.
2001 “Reading a Modern Classic: W. C. Smith’s ‘The Meaning and End of Religion’.” History of Religions 40 (3): 205–222.
2006 “Response to Canton.” In Power of Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors, ed. by David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, 210–216. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Asamoah-Gyadu, Kwabena
2005 African Charismatics: Current Developments within Independent Indigenous Pentecostalism in Ghana. Leiden: Brill.
Auerbach, Erich
2003 [1946] Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail
1981 The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bateson, Gregory
1987 “The Model.” In Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred, ed. by Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson, 36–49. New York: Bantam Books.
Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs
2003 Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bialecki, Jon
2011 “No Caller ID for the Soul: Demonization, Charisms, and the Unstable Subject of Protestant Language Ideology.” Anthropological Quarterly 84 (3): 679–703.
Bialecki, Jon, and Eric Hoenes del Pinal
2011 “Introduction: Beyond Logos: Extensions of the Language Ideology Paradigm in the Study of Global Christianity(-ies).” Anthropological Quarterly 84 (3): 575–593.
Brahinsky, Josh
2012 “Pentecostal Body Logics: Cultivating a Modern Sensorium.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (2): 215–238.
2013 “Cultivating Discontinuity: Pentecostal Pedagogies of Yielding and Control.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 44 (4): 399–422.
Briggs, Charles
1998 “ ‘You’re a Liar – You’re Just Like a Woman’: Constructing Dominant Ideologies of Langage in Warao Men’s Gossip.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, ed. by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 229–255. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coleman, Simon
2006 “Materializing the Self: Words and Gifts in the Construction of Charismatic Protestant Identity.” In The Anthropology of Christianity, ed. by Fenella Cannell, 163–184. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
2009 “Transgressing the Self: Making Charismatic Saints.” Critical Inquiry 351: 417–39.
Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff
2000 “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12 (2): 291–343.
Csordas, Thomas
2001 Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement. New York: Palgrave.
Daswani, Girish
2013 “On Christianity and Ethics: Rupture as Ethical Practice in Ghanaian Pentecostalism.” American Ethnologist 40 (3): 467–479.
Dawson, John
2001 Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
De Certeau, Michel
1996 “Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias.” Representations 561: 29–47.
Derrida, Jacques
1988 “Signature Event Context.” In Limited Inc., ed. by Jacques Derrida, 1–24. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
de Vries, Hent
2001 “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Religious Studies”. In Religion and Media, ed. by H. de Vries and S. Weber, 4–42. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Duranti, Alessandro
2003 “Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology”. Current Anthropology 44 (3): 323–347.
Espírito Santo, Diana
2014 “Plasticidade e Pessoalidade no Espiritismo Crioulo Cubano.” Mana 20 (1): 63–93.
Engelke, Matthew
2007 A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Faubion, James
2011 An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Frei, Hans
1974 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Gal, Susan
1993 “Diversity and Contestation in Linguistic Ideologies: German Speakers in Hungary.” Language in Society 221: 337–359.
Gifford, Paul
2004 Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalizing African Economy. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Goffman, Erving
1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goodwin, Charles, and Alessandro Duranti
(eds) 1992 Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hanks, William F
1987 “Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice.” American Ethnologist 14 (4): 668–692.
1996 “Exorcism and the Description of Participant Roles.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 160–220. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harding, Susan
1987 “Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion.” American Ethnologist 141: 167–181.
2000 The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Hirschkind, Charles
2006 The Ethical Soundscape Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.
2011 “Media, Mediation, Religion”. Social Anthropology 19 (1): 90–97.
Keane, Webb
1997 “Religious Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology 261: 47–71.
2007 Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Latour, Bruno
1993 We have Never been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Lauterbach, Karen
2008 The Craft of Pastorship in Ghana and Beyond. Ph.D. thesis. Roskilde University (Denmark), Department of Society and Globalisation.
Lave, Jean
2011 Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lucy, John
(ed.) 1993 Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luhrmann, Tanya
2012 When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Knopf.
MacIntyre, Alasdair
1984 After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
1999 Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court.
Mahmood, Saba
2005 Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Marshall, Ruth
2009 Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mauss, Marcel
1973 “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2 (1): 70–88.
Mbembe, Achilles
2001 On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McLuhan, Marshall
1967 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mertz, Elizabeth
1998 “Linguistic Ideology and Praxis in a U.S. Law School Classroom.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, ed. by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 149–162. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meyer, Birgit
2004a “Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches.” Annual Review of Anthropology 331: 447–474.
2004b “’Praise the Lord’: Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere.” American Ethnologist 31 (1): 92–110.
2010 “There is a Spirit in that Image: Mass-produced Jesus Pictures and Protestant-Pentecostal Animation in Ghana.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (1): 100–130.
2011 “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology 19 (1): 23–29.
Peirce, Charles S
1955 Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover.
Reinhardt, Bruno
2013 “Tapping into the Anointing”: Pentecostal Pedagogy, Connectivity, and Power in Contemporary Ghana. Ph.D. thesis. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.
2014 “Soaking in Tapes: The Haptic Voice of Global Pentecostal Pedagogy in Ghana.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (2): 315–336.
Robbins, Joel
2004 “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 331: 117–143.
Rumsey, Alan
1990 “Wording, Meaning and Linguistic Ideology.” American Anthropologist 921: 346–361.
Schieffelin, Bambi, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity
(eds) 1998 Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Silverstein, Michael
1979 “Language Structures and Language Ideology.” In The Elements: A Parasession of Linguistic Units and Levels, ed. by Paul R. Clyne, William Hanks, and Carol Hofbauer, 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
1985 “Language and the Culture of Gender: At the Intersection of Structure, Usage, and Ideology.” In Semiotic Mediation, ed. by Elizabeth Mertz and Richard
Parmentier, 219–259. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press.
1993 “Metapragmatic Discourse and the Metapragmatic Function.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. by John Lucy, 33–58.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban
(eds) 1996 Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sharf, Robert
1998 “Experience.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. by Mark C. Taylor, 94–116. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shipley, Jesse
2009 “Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana.” Cultural Anthropology 24 (3): 523–552.
Urban, Greg
1996 “Entextualization, Replication, and Power.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 21–44. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Voloshinov, Valentin N
1973 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, L. Matejka and
I. Titunik (trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Warner, Michael
1990 The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Williams, Raymond
1977 Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woolard, Kathryn
1998 “Introduction: Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, ed. by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul
Kroskrity, 2–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wortham, Stanton
2008 “Linguistic Anthropology of Education.” Annual Review of Anthropology 371: 37–51.
Cited by
Cited by 6 other publications
Brison, Karen J.
2023. Fijians in Transnational Pentecostal Networks, 
Hovland, Ingie
2022. Value moves in multiple ways: Ethical values, the anthropology of Christianity, and an example of women and movement. Anthropological Theory 22:3 ► pp. 273 ff.
Huang, Shu-li
2017. The Ahmao (Miao) schism: the problem of spiritual agency in encounters between church and state in southwest China. Asian Ethnicity 18:2 ► pp. 218 ff.
Opas, Minna
2021. Praying, Prayer Ideologies and Christian Inter-denominational Relations in Indigenous Amazonia. Archives de sciences sociales des religions :194 ► pp. 53 ff.
Reinhardt, Bruno
2016. De epifania a método: a teopolítica do testemunho em um seminário pentecostal em Gana. Religião & Sociedade 36:2 ► pp. 44 ff.
Reinhardt, Bruno & Anne-Hélène Kerbiriou
2021. Les vertus de l’obéissance. Anthropologie et Sociétés 45:3 ► pp. 107 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.