This post builds on the research article “Pentecostal Body Logics: Cultivating a Modern Sensorium,” which was published in the May 2012 issue of the Society’s peer-reviewed journal, Cultural Anthropology.
Editorial Footnotes
Cultural Anthropology has published a number of articles on sensory culture, including Brad Weiss’s “Making Pigs Local: Discerning the Sensory Character of Place” (2011), Eva Hayward’s “Fingeryeyes: Impressions of Cup Corals” (2010), and Nancy Rose Hunt’s “An Acoustic Register, Tenacious Images, and Congolese Scenes of Rape and Repetition” (2008).
Cultural Anthropology has also published articles on Pentecostalism. See for example, Jesse Weaver Shipley’s “Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana” (2009) and Rosalind Shaw’s “Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory in Postwar Sierra Leone” (2008).
Questions for Classroom Discussion
1. What is a sensorium? What about the senses is historically formed and cultivated in Pentecostal communities?
2. What are body logics and what are their role in Pentecostal conversion and commitment?
3. How does Brahinsky's own corporeal experience factor into his research, analysis, and writing?
4. What is the "negotiation with modernity" that Brahinsky describes? How are notions of modernity relevant to the the Pentecostal sensorium?
Related Readings
Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Howes, David. The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Keane, Webb. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Schmidt, Leigh. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.