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Chapter 3 explores the French Prophets’ system of beliefs against the backdrop of contemporary denominations in an attempt to understand their spiritual appeal to an English audience. It explores England’s long millenarian tradition before the Camisards found refuge in London. Their emphasis on religious experience (spirit possession, prophecy, gift of tongues, miracles, dreams and visions) over doctrinal boundaries enabled the French Prophets, and enthusiasts more generally, to appeal to all denominations alike. Their ecumenical ambition to reconcile Judaeo-Christian denominations into a Universal Church has been misunderstood as a form of sectarianism. This chapter argues on the contrary, that enthusiasm, as a religious experience, was ecumenical and irenic, that is the opposite of religious dissent.

This chapter begins with the claim that language ideologies stand in complex relationships to ideologies of material exchange. It argues that in Melanesia, contemporary changes in language ideology have been in important respects shaped by transformations in traditional ideologies of exchange. Among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, such linked changes have arisen in the wake of conversion to Christianity. Changes in linguistic and exchange ideologies have come to the fore in debates over the practice of charismatic Christian rituals of Holy Spirit possession. This chapter analyzes these rituals and the debates that surround them to show how these transformations have come about.

George Whitefield’s innovative doctrine of the Holy Spirit as an indwelling principle proved to be a perplexing issue for may Congregationalists. Part 3 tells the story of one man’s struggle to discern its presence in the body of a young Boston revival convert named Martha Robinson. Through a close inspection of physical signs and verbal utterances, Hartford magistrate Joseph Pitkin found that Robinson’s body had been alternately conscripted by Satan and the Holy Spirit. His surprising discovery positions the phenomenon of ecstatic Spirit possession at the heart of the Whitefieldian new birth experience. During the revivals of the 1740s, New Englanders learned to associate the descent of the Holy Spirit with exercised bodies, impulsive biblical texts, and unusual visionary phenomena.

In the West, photography and spirit, far from being opposites, have been seen as peculiarly analogous and adapted to one another. Since the beginning of spirit photography in the 1860s, the camera, photographers, spirits and their mediums have built up various alliances. In contrast, spirit mediums in Africa and other parts of the world have shunned photography and refused the presence of the camera during their séances. In my contribution, I will explore the negative relationship between spirits, spirit mediums and photography in Africa, in particular on the East African Coast. This negative relation is connected not only with the political and historical specificity of spirit mediums’ ambiguous position in relation to Islam and the postcolonial state but also with characteristics of the photographic medium itself - freezing, fixation, and serialization - that seem to endanger the auratic power of spirits. While photography has been refused, video technologies have appeared to be more suitable to mediate spiritual power. In fact, in locally produced videos photography and the reasons for its refusal themselves become part of the ways in which the work of spirits and their mediums is represented.Whereas they built up alliances with various technical medias as extensions and intensifications of the capabilities of their bodies and worked out new media “utopias”, they interdicted the doubling of their bodies in photographs. This refusal raises important theoretical questions about the often assumed “innocence” or “neutrality” of Western technical media and the epistemologies they carry within them. Obviously, the “visual programm” of photography (Flusser) that always gives something “more” to see and centers on transparency may clash with other visual regimes that attempt to mediate much more secrecy and concealment.

Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication. In order to invoke the transcendental, to make otherworldly beings and powers appear, trance mediums need to make dispositions and take great care in preparing a setting conducive to their work of mediation. Their equipment includes technical media, apparition and apparatus are linked through ritual techniques. Likewise, the discourses and the imaginary of trance mediumship powerfully anticipated and shaped technical media such as photography, cinema, the telephone, and television. Spirits and their mediums served as the media a priori for the ‘‘invention’’ of these technical media: spirits were able to ‘‘telesee’’ and ‘‘telehear’’ long before television and the telephone existed. Inquiry into trance mediumship, therefore, forms an interpretative key to understanding technical media, and vice versa.

In this chapter, Rosalind Morris makes comparative reference to African and Southeast Asian traditions of mediumship in order to ask how mediums and mediumship are responding to contemporary transformations in the communicational and cultural network underpinning globalization. In general, she focuses on three issues: 1) the (partial) displacement of a concept of power based in force by one centered on the pursuit of renown and recognition; 2) the valorization of technique which has come to dominate conceptions of the democratic as a phenomenon that mediumship both represents and enacts, even as it stages social justice as a non-generalizable good; 3) the fantasy of communication without mediation, internal to both mediumship and new economic discourses. In exploring these issues, she seeks to both specify the current tropes and metaphors with which mediumship must deal and to offer a theory of mediumship as a theater of alienation in which the otherwise often imperceptible metaphoricity of the new is recovered and disclosed in its materiality. This process, she argues, enables a recognition of what, in another moment, we might have termed the ideological nature of the metaphors (the market, transparency, the network, etc.) which otherwise dominate and constrain perception, far beyond the realm of those who seek the aid of mediums.

Chapter 1 traces the footsteps of the French Prophets from their origins in the Cévennes mountains in Languedoc to their arrival in London in the summer 1706. It identities the Camisards as a poorer Huguenot subculture animated by millenarian beliefs in prophecy and martyrdom. Unlike mainstream Huguenots, who abjured or fled in exile at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), the Camisards took up arms against their Catholic persecutors in 1702 and thus fought the last French war of religion under the alleged guidance of the Holy Spirit. While their rebellion had been largely crushed by 1705, three Camisards found refuge in England, where they soon started a new millenarian movement: ‘the French Prophets’.

Chapter 2 focuses on another trope that upsets the realist and rationalist discourse of slavery: spirit possession. Whereas existing scholarship stresses the postmodernist resonances of this trope, the chapter argues that Catholicism serves to frame—and even to facilitate—the antirealist effect that spirit possession has on two contemporary narratives of slavery. First is Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is one of the earliest examples of the genre and a novel rarely associated with either spirit possession or Catholicism. By highlighting where Jane’s narrative voice is possessed by other speakers, this chapter documents how the Catholic characters in the novel enable it to engage radically antirealist views about history without ultimately endorsing them. The second part of the chapter focuses on Leon Forrest’s critically acclaimed but insufficiently studied novel Two Wings to Veil My Face, which also figures storytelling as a kind of spirit possession. Despite its obvious skepticism towards organized religion, the novel depicts these spiritual intercessions as Catholic sacraments: rituals of eating and drinking that recall the Eucharist. Thus, Catholicism is implicated in the way the narrator remembers slavery and in the parts of his history that are “beyond understanding.”

Spirit possession is what anthropologists call a common “idiom of distress” in India. That is, anthropologists observe that spirit possession is a way of behaving that signals emotional trouble. Spirit possession in India often begins with intense distress to the afflicted. However, through negotiation and attention to its desires, possessing spirits may be transformed from malevolent to beneficent. Sumita is a devotee and long-term resident of the Balaji temple in Rajasthan, India. After her marriage, demands for dowry, domestic violence, and Sumita’s growing awareness of the destructive spirits living in the walls of her husband’s home, her in-laws expel her from their home. After numerous stays in publicly-funded psychiatric facilities, she is brought by her father to the temple of Balaji, where she begins to hear the voice of the deity. Sumita manages to eke out a marginal existence by passing on the divine revelations of Balaji to worshipers at the shrine. In this way, her spirit possession may participate in the construction of a valued social identity in which voices and visions are signs of the divine and not solely associated with a permanent, crippling illness.

The political claims made by a Dalit (ex-Untouchable) medium in central India lie at the heart of this paper. They encompass the political potentiality of manifestation, and the liberating possibility of certain regimes of visible evidence. This superabundance of the divine – made manifest among subalterns – is contrasted with a different – and high caste – idiom of authority that privileges the indexicality of speech. The role of printed images, and film, in Dalit goddess possession forces us to move beyond the assumption that there are pre-existing subjects, with attendant politics who instrumentally use images. As with ‘prophetic’ practices of photography which are also discussed, we are confronted with fluid networks in which blurred and uncertain subjects explore pathways (through the nexus of ritual, media and technics) in which visual representations help define certain political identifications and those emergent identifications in turn help define visual potentialities as images.

The paper investigates the characteristics of music as medium of social, religious and political messages. The music of the ganda baja village orchestras played by marginalised musicians represents local notions of the utterances of different goddesses in the Bora Sambar region of western Orissa. This ritual music is intrinsically linked to goddess embodiment and trance mediums. At the same time, ganda baja is deeply interrelated with the socio-cultural hierarchy of the caste system and with recent political transformation processes. The paper aims at analysing music as a crucial cultural medium of ritual and mass communication mediating sacred and social, individual and collective change and creativity.