Spirits in Circulation: Indigenous Spirituality in Post-Christian Ghana

Abstract

Spirits in Circulation: Indigenous Spirituality in Post-Christian Ghana addresses the gestures of Ghana-based spirit mediums between shrines and Internet spaces amidst reawakened temporalities of enslavement, colonization and resistance. By working across given ethnic lines and international locales, I contrast the image of African traditional spiritualists (bokorwo and akomfo) as bounded to local worlds by pairing their adoption of digital technologies with the capacity to cultivate intimacies in spite of geographical and temporal distance. Drawing on an ethnography of three Ghana-based spiritualists, and the local and transnational communities that they engage, I move with their life stories, filming and writing across Ghana, Japan, Italy, and the US. The dissertation proposes to rethink the received imagination of African spirituality at the intersection of colonialism, capitalization, racialization, and mediatization. Amidst the so-called Pentecostalization of the public sphere, in which charismatic imagination appeared to have become hegemonic through mass mediatization and a discourse on individualization, I reflect on the re-emergence and circulation of spirits and ancestors. Suturing together temporalities of the Middle Passage with present day politics, these circulations illuminate processes of identification and economies of intimacies at the crossroad of personal healing and societal reckoning.