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Birgit Meyer

Rosi Braidotti +4

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Papers

Mediação e Imediatismo: formas sensoriais, ideologias semióticas e a questão do meio

CAMPOS - Revista de Antropologia Social, 2017

Tomando como ponto de partida o paradoxo de que imediatismo não é anterior, mas antes um produto ... more Tomando como ponto de partida o paradoxo de que imediatismo não é anterior, mas antes um produto damediação, esse artigo argumenta que a negociação de tecnologias mediáticas recentes é um elemento-chave paraa transformação da religião. Invocada para autorizar a experiência de poderes espirituais como imediatos e reais, amídia tende a “desaparecer” ou se tornar “hiper-aparente” no ato da mediação. Argumento que entender a mídiacomo intrínseca à religião exige uma crítica fundamental das abordagens, tanto da religião quanto da mídia, quepropõem uma oposição entre mídia e imediatismo.

Comparison as critique

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2017

Comment on van der Veer, Peter. 2016. The value of comparison. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Religion as Mediation

Entangled Religions, 2020

Why and how is it productive to conceptualize religion as mediation? In this article, I 1) rehear... more Why and how is it productive to conceptualize religion as mediation? In this article, I 1) rehearse the intellectual trajectory of the move from studying the implications of the adoption of new mass media into religious practices to a broader idea of religion as a practice of mediation; 2) address some criticisms raised with regard to the concept of religion-as-mediation from my position in the interface of anthropology and religious studies; 3) discuss the evocation of a sense of transcendence through sensational forms, and 4) by way of an outlook, pinpoint how conceptualizing religion as mediation is useful to unpack religious plurality.

Afterword: Comparison in the Anthropological Study of Plural Religious Environments

Social Analysis, Mar 1, 2020

Introduction: Towards a Framework for the Study of Christian-Muslim Encounters in Africa

Africa, 2016

Ghana: Massenmedien, Demokratie und Religion - Die Special Effects der Prediger

Self-contained. Glamorous houses and modes of personhood in Ghanaian video-movies

ForumRethinking Euro-Anthropology

Social Anthropology, 2015

Afterword: Comparison in the Anthropological Study of Plural Religious Environments

Social Analysis, 2020

Key Terms in Material Religion, 2015

Towards a Joint Framework for the Study of Christians and Muslims in Africa: Response to J. D. Y. Peel

Africa, 2016

The main point of John Peel's intriguing critical intervention is to warn against what he see... more The main point of John Peel's intriguing critical intervention is to warn against what he sees as an overemphasis on similarities between Christianity and Islam. Making these religions look all too similar, he argues, may come at the expense of paying due attention to the distinctiveness of each of these religious traditions and hence to their intrinsic differences. He suggests an analogy between the stance taken by ‘somewhat left-wing and anti-establishment discourse’ to equalize Islam and Christianity under the label of fundamentalism on the one hand, and a strand of Africanist work on West Africa that pleads for the close similarities between these two religions to be acknowledged on the other. For the latter, he takes the article ‘Pentecostalism, Islam and culture: new religious movements in West Africa’ by Brian Larkin and myself (2006) as paradigmatic. For my part, it is difficult to see how the use of the notion of fundamentalism in current debates and the position ventur...

Iconic Religion in Urban Space

Material Religion, 2016

Picturing the Invisible

Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2015

An understanding of religion as a practice of mediation has great potential to open up new method... more An understanding of religion as a practice of mediation has great potential to open up new methods and theories for a critical study of religion. Leading beyond the privileged medium of the text, this understanding approaches religion as a multi-media phenomenon that mobilizes the full sensorium. The central point of this article is that forms of visual culture are a prime medium of religion, and studying them offers deep insights into the genesis of worlds of lived experience. Pictorial media streamline and sustain religious notions of the visible and the invisible and involve embodied practices of seeing that shape what and how people see. Discussing the implications of the “pictorial turn” for the study of religion, I argue that a more synthesized approach is needed that draws these fields together. The methodological and theoretical implications of this approach are exemplified by turning to my research on video and representations of the “spiritual” in Southern Ghana.

Heritage and the Sacred: Introduction

Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 2013

ABSTRACT Heritage formation involves some kind of sacralization, through which cultural forms are... more ABSTRACT Heritage formation involves some kind of sacralization, through which cultural forms are lifted up and set apart. But success is not guaranteed in the making of heritage, and the cultural forms that are singled out may well fail to persuade. Heritage formation is a complicated, contested political—aesthetic process that requires detailed scholarly explorations and comparative analysis. Which aesthetic practices are involved in profiling cultural forms as heritage? What are the politics of authentication that underpin the selection and framing of particular cultural forms? To which contestations does the sacralization of particular cultural forms—in particular, those derived from the sphere of religion—give rise? Which aesthetics of persuasion are invoked to render heritage sacred for its beholders? Calling attention to various facets of the relation between heritage and the sacred, this special issue offers detailed explorations of how form, style, and appearance seek to vest selected objects and performative practices with sacrality.

AGAWU, Kofi, African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, xx, 217 pp., ISBN 0521 148084 1 (hardback)

Journal of Religion in Africa, 1999

Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion

Journal for the Study of Religion, 2018

Social Analysis

Highlighting common threads in the pieces by Beekers, Kasmani and Mattes, and Dilger, this conclu... more Highlighting common threads in the pieces by Beekers, Kasmani and Mattes, and Dilger, this concluding essay reflects on the potential of comparison as conceptual innovation in the anthropological study of religious plurality. Asking how to develop innovative practices of comparison for the sake of grasping the dynamics of plural societies in the light of the articles in this collection, I argue that it is necessary to transcend the bifurcation of the study of religions, which was accentuated with the rise of the anthropologies of Islam and Christianity, in favor of a focus on the secular configuration as a whole, paying attention to power dynamics that assign different spaces for action to different religions (notwithstanding their equality in legal terms). The point of comparison, understood as a critical project geared toward conceptual innovation, is not only to discern so far overlooked, unexpected differences and similarities, but also to understand how these differences and si...

Comment on: "Researching Muslim Worlds: regions and disciplines" by Ulrike Freitag, Programmatic Text No. 6, 2013

Enlightening religion: Light and darkness in religious knowledge and knowledge about religion

This introduction elaborates how the relationship between religion and light can and should be ad... more This introduction elaborates how the relationship between religion and light can and should be addressed as a key theme for the critical study of religion. It synthesizes the principal arguments of the six articles collected in this special journal issue and locates them in a broader theoretical framework, focussing especially on the politics of knowledge production.

Mediação e Imediatismo: formas sensoriais, ideologias semióticas e a questão do meio

CAMPOS - Revista de Antropologia Social, 2017

Tomando como ponto de partida o paradoxo de que imediatismo não é anterior, mas antes um produto ... more Tomando como ponto de partida o paradoxo de que imediatismo não é anterior, mas antes um produto damediação, esse artigo argumenta que a negociação de tecnologias mediáticas recentes é um elemento-chave paraa transformação da religião. Invocada para autorizar a experiência de poderes espirituais como imediatos e reais, amídia tende a “desaparecer” ou se tornar “hiper-aparente” no ato da mediação. Argumento que entender a mídiacomo intrínseca à religião exige uma crítica fundamental das abordagens, tanto da religião quanto da mídia, quepropõem uma oposição entre mídia e imediatismo.

Comparison as critique

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2017

Comment on van der Veer, Peter. 2016. The value of comparison. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Religion as Mediation

Entangled Religions, 2020

Why and how is it productive to conceptualize religion as mediation? In this article, I 1) rehear... more Why and how is it productive to conceptualize religion as mediation? In this article, I 1) rehearse the intellectual trajectory of the move from studying the implications of the adoption of new mass media into religious practices to a broader idea of religion as a practice of mediation; 2) address some criticisms raised with regard to the concept of religion-as-mediation from my position in the interface of anthropology and religious studies; 3) discuss the evocation of a sense of transcendence through sensational forms, and 4) by way of an outlook, pinpoint how conceptualizing religion as mediation is useful to unpack religious plurality.

Afterword: Comparison in the Anthropological Study of Plural Religious Environments

Social Analysis, Mar 1, 2020

Introduction: Towards a Framework for the Study of Christian-Muslim Encounters in Africa

Africa, 2016

Ghana: Massenmedien, Demokratie und Religion - Die Special Effects der Prediger

Self-contained. Glamorous houses and modes of personhood in Ghanaian video-movies

ForumRethinking Euro-Anthropology

Social Anthropology, 2015

Afterword: Comparison in the Anthropological Study of Plural Religious Environments

Social Analysis, 2020

Key Terms in Material Religion, 2015

Towards a Joint Framework for the Study of Christians and Muslims in Africa: Response to J. D. Y. Peel

Africa, 2016

The main point of John Peel's intriguing critical intervention is to warn against what he see... more The main point of John Peel's intriguing critical intervention is to warn against what he sees as an overemphasis on similarities between Christianity and Islam. Making these religions look all too similar, he argues, may come at the expense of paying due attention to the distinctiveness of each of these religious traditions and hence to their intrinsic differences. He suggests an analogy between the stance taken by ‘somewhat left-wing and anti-establishment discourse’ to equalize Islam and Christianity under the label of fundamentalism on the one hand, and a strand of Africanist work on West Africa that pleads for the close similarities between these two religions to be acknowledged on the other. For the latter, he takes the article ‘Pentecostalism, Islam and culture: new religious movements in West Africa’ by Brian Larkin and myself (2006) as paradigmatic. For my part, it is difficult to see how the use of the notion of fundamentalism in current debates and the position ventur...

Iconic Religion in Urban Space

Material Religion, 2016

Picturing the Invisible

Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2015

An understanding of religion as a practice of mediation has great potential to open up new method... more An understanding of religion as a practice of mediation has great potential to open up new methods and theories for a critical study of religion. Leading beyond the privileged medium of the text, this understanding approaches religion as a multi-media phenomenon that mobilizes the full sensorium. The central point of this article is that forms of visual culture are a prime medium of religion, and studying them offers deep insights into the genesis of worlds of lived experience. Pictorial media streamline and sustain religious notions of the visible and the invisible and involve embodied practices of seeing that shape what and how people see. Discussing the implications of the “pictorial turn” for the study of religion, I argue that a more synthesized approach is needed that draws these fields together. The methodological and theoretical implications of this approach are exemplified by turning to my research on video and representations of the “spiritual” in Southern Ghana.

Heritage and the Sacred: Introduction

Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 2013

ABSTRACT Heritage formation involves some kind of sacralization, through which cultural forms are... more ABSTRACT Heritage formation involves some kind of sacralization, through which cultural forms are lifted up and set apart. But success is not guaranteed in the making of heritage, and the cultural forms that are singled out may well fail to persuade. Heritage formation is a complicated, contested political—aesthetic process that requires detailed scholarly explorations and comparative analysis. Which aesthetic practices are involved in profiling cultural forms as heritage? What are the politics of authentication that underpin the selection and framing of particular cultural forms? To which contestations does the sacralization of particular cultural forms—in particular, those derived from the sphere of religion—give rise? Which aesthetics of persuasion are invoked to render heritage sacred for its beholders? Calling attention to various facets of the relation between heritage and the sacred, this special issue offers detailed explorations of how form, style, and appearance seek to vest selected objects and performative practices with sacrality.

AGAWU, Kofi, African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, xx, 217 pp., ISBN 0521 148084 1 (hardback)

Journal of Religion in Africa, 1999

Frontier Zones and the Study of Religion

Journal for the Study of Religion, 2018

Social Analysis

Highlighting common threads in the pieces by Beekers, Kasmani and Mattes, and Dilger, this conclu... more Highlighting common threads in the pieces by Beekers, Kasmani and Mattes, and Dilger, this concluding essay reflects on the potential of comparison as conceptual innovation in the anthropological study of religious plurality. Asking how to develop innovative practices of comparison for the sake of grasping the dynamics of plural societies in the light of the articles in this collection, I argue that it is necessary to transcend the bifurcation of the study of religions, which was accentuated with the rise of the anthropologies of Islam and Christianity, in favor of a focus on the secular configuration as a whole, paying attention to power dynamics that assign different spaces for action to different religions (notwithstanding their equality in legal terms). The point of comparison, understood as a critical project geared toward conceptual innovation, is not only to discern so far overlooked, unexpected differences and similarities, but also to understand how these differences and si...

Comment on: "Researching Muslim Worlds: regions and disciplines" by Ulrike Freitag, Programmatic Text No. 6, 2013

Enlightening religion: Light and darkness in religious knowledge and knowledge about religion

This introduction elaborates how the relationship between religion and light can and should be ad... more This introduction elaborates how the relationship between religion and light can and should be addressed as a key theme for the critical study of religion. It synthesizes the principal arguments of the six articles collected in this special journal issue and locates them in a broader theoretical framework, focussing especially on the politics of knowledge production.