Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana by Birgit Meyer

Author:Birgit Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520287679
Publisher: University of California Press

EBSCOhost - printed on 12/8/2022 1:24 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

FIVE

Picturing the Occult

As a format of representation, “revelation” called for the fabrication of compelling pictures displaying “occult”—and by implication evil, ugly, violent, and erotic—matters that typify the “aesthetics of outrage” (Larkin 2008, 184) mobilized in a great deal of Nigerian and Ghanaian video movies. In Europe the term occult—from Latin occultus: hidden, concealed, secret—is usually associated with magic, alchemy, and astrology.1 Along with the spread of missionary Christianity since the mid-nineteenth century, the term came to be used across Africa to refer to secret magical practices and demonized spiritual forces. Terence Ranger certainly had a point in warning against the danger inherent in recent anthropological studies that conflate “the African occult into one sinister phenomenon” (2007, 274). Still, I do not agree with his critique of such studies—in particular of those in the framework of “occult economies” and “the modernity of witchcraft”—for inventing an “aggregated African occult.” For Ranger the notion of the occult is too generalizing and presentist to achieve insight into the modes through which various African societies grappled with questions of evil. Sharing his insistence on the importance of a historically grounded, ethnographically specific perspective, I think that it is the very historical process of aggregation—involving a recasting of specific spiritual entities under the banner of the occult—that requires detailed attention (see also Meyer 2009b; Bonhomme 2012; Geschiere 2013, 11–12).

In southern Ghana, occult is a generic term central to popular discourse. Belonging to a long-standing and broadly shared, cross-ethnic regime of visibility grounded in the distinction between the dimensions of the physical and the spiritual, as well as in a rigorous dualism between good and evil, it is employed to refer to the machinations of the “powers of darkness” that are to be dragged into the “light” of Christianity (as well as of Sufist Islam; see Pontzen 2014). As a generic term, occult cuts across the specific names of spirits and gods known to various ethnic groups. Thriving within popular Christianity and supported by popular literature and movies, it is part of a generalizing vocabulary that transcends, but at the same time contains, specific indigenous notions and terms to refer to invisible forces that are perceived as dangerous and uncanny. This vocabulary should not be dismissed as a problematic misrepresentation of a diverse set of locally grounded ideas but instead should be taken as an evolving “mode of speaking” (in the Saussurean sense of parole) that encompasses and cuts across cultural and religious specificities throughout Africa and the world at large. Ghanaian and Nigerian movies deploy this global mode of speaking, vesting it with pictures, and it is one of the main concerns of this book to unravel it.

How are we to represent and write about occult forces that are real to people in Africa but not necessarily to the anthropological researcher? Under the guiding phrase “occult economies,” over the past twenty years narratives about the occult have primarily been analyzed as metaphors, as

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