The Disgust of Absence: Money and Moral Dilemmas in Ghanaian Pentecostal Churches At Home and Abroad
R. van Dijk
African Studies Centre, Leiden
1. Introduction
Ever since Mary Douglas voiced her notions of pollution, anthropology has explored the relationship between disgust and identification and how it produces difference. Cultural repertoires of disgust seem to be primarily about sustaining categorical separations between the self and an outer world, between one’s identity and that of others. Examples abound in anthropology of how disgust, and the twin concepts of contempt and abjection appear to create and maintain differences, for instance in terms of ethnic identities (for Africa see: Almagor 1987, Van Beek 1992, for a more general interpretation see McCaughan 2002). Disgust however, has a flip side; as it is a constant form of negotiation of connectivity of the person to a larger group, as well as an emotional mode through which connections between groups and between societies emerge. This must be given equal attention as the “function” of creating categorical separations. In today's world, people are perhaps more aware than ever before of how disgust from elsewhere has become part of their own emotions through the media, intercontinental travel and ICT, and create vicarious actions, thoughts and feelings across boundaries. In addition, disgust, contempt and abjection are also emotions that demonstrate disconnection, severance and an absence of sociality. It is this relation between disgust and the absence of sociality that this contribution aims to explore.
The way in which sympathy and antipathy are played out through disgust can be demonstrated by exploring how new Pentecostal churches originating from Ghana are negotiating the moral meaning of money and wealth. This discourse articulates connectivity to a larger world and a specific identity. Within these churches a gift economy has emerged whereby members donate extensively to the church and one another on important occasions. In these reciprocities, money is considered a dangerous matter as it circulates in a wider world engulfed in many powers and is touched by many hands with unknown intentions. Money represents a necessary connectivity to that world but requires ritual cleansing to become glorified as ‘sanctified blood’ that runs through the veins of Pentecostal communal life to produce a connectivity of a very different kind. While this ‘matter’ might cause peril, it is not considered a matter-out-of-place in Douglas’s terms, but creates social relations, a specific gift-economy and trajectories of status and prestige. Sometimes mockingly called a prosperity gospel, these Pentecostal groups attach great significance to the ritual and sanctified circulation of money within their organisations and the way it signals God’s benevolence to the firm believer.
Utter disgust emerges when money is conspicuously absent in such relations particularly in cases where some may not be able to fulfil their financial obligations. This is considered highly problematic as it tears open and destroys sociality, opens up a world of occult dangers, and produces in the believers unpleasant sensations akin to bodily recoil. In this sense disgust concerns absence, an absence which, as Derrida (see Rotman) already noted, becomes something of a presence; a situation which like when an arm or leg has been amputated reminds the onlooker of what should have been there but which now de-figures the body personal or the body social. While Douglas spoke of disgust as relating to matter-out-of-place, this absence represents non-matter-out-of place and relates repulsion and contempt to the imaginative capacities of the human mind.
This paper explores the disgust of absence and how it relates to a particular Pentecostal identity. It is based on research on Ghanaian Pentecostal groups in Ghana and the Netherlands.
2. Money, disgust and the Pentecostal ideology
The following case is a telling example of the three-way relationship between money, sociality and the disgust of absence within Pentecostal churches. The case relates to the ritual practice of ‘dedication’ as it is called within Ghanaian Pentecostal churches in the Netherlands. This ritual practice is the christianised form of what otherwise is known as the ‘outdooring’ of the newborn baby, and comprises its first social appearance in the company of its parents, elders and other kin, as well as the public proclamation of the name by which it will be known in the community. The way in which these Pentecostal dedications are celebrated differs in many aspects from the non-Christian outdooring and the way in which this ritual is performed in Pentecostal churches in Ghana.
Here we turn to the dedication of the newborn son of Mr and Mrs. Owusu, both members of the migrant community of Ghanaians in The Hague, the Netherlands and members of one of the 11 Ghanaian Pentecostal churches there. In the Rhema Church International, people arriving from different places gathered that Sunday morning for the dedication of this child and to hear his name being proclaimed by the leader. The church is packed with people as dedications are commonly considered a special time of festivity, not only for the parents, the family or the church, but also for the migrant community as a whole. People are beautifully dressed in expensive outfits, although the traditional and ceremonial dressing for men, the ntoma and the sandals, are rarely seen. Even more beautifully dressed are the parents of the infant. Attention is focused on the appearance of Mrs.Owusu who enters the church in a white dress. Her presence and the whiteness of her clothes signal the end of a three-month period of seclusion which is a period euphemistically called the time for ‘beautification’. Her appearance bears testimony to the fact that she has “done well” as one of the other ladies explained to me.
Her husband is also dressed in a white suit, a remarkable appearance as well, although he has not had an extended period of exclusion or ‘beautification’. Later the baby is brought into the congregation by one of the girls from the church and the wife of the pastor, and they too are all dressed in white. A group of kin and close friends take their seats behind them and the service commences. As usual there is a lot of singing and dancing, a sermon by the pastor-leader with intermittent prayer sessions and speaking in tongues (in Twi: kasaa foforoo). Then the infant is brought to the pastor who in simple words dedicates the child to God and proclaims the baby’s name by adding that it is a forceful name, a name that will make Satan shiver and shake. Immediately the ushers start to hand out white envelopes to the audience. The pastor announces that it is now time for ‘offering’ and that the baby must be welcomed into the community. All should contribute, bearing in mind that what will be given will be returned by God bountifully. The music, singing and dancing by a choir make for a lively atmosphere that should ensure that people give to the baby and his parents joyfully. People start digging in their pockets and take out notes (never coins !!) to put in the envelopes. Many write their names and even addresses on the envelopes and all are placed in the offering pots near the pulpit. The atmosphere becomes festive with dancing and giving, and people start cheering and laughing. When the offerings have been made, the pastor prays over the envelopes and begins speaking in tongues to ensure the presence of heavenly powers to bless and sanctify all that has been donated. Then, by way of expressing their gratitude, Mr. and Mrs. Owusu lead the concluding dance, a dance marked by the fact that it is the only time in church that husband and wife join hands, touch each other and lead the dance in unison. This is the moment all have been waiting for and a massive crowd pushes forward to encourage the couple in this subtle sign of affection that everybody just witnessed. All dance and jubilate, swarming around the couple in an enthusiastic display of communality.
The next day in Owusu’s house, however, little appeared to be left of the festivous atmosphere of the day. Instead, I met a couple upset by feelings of utter disgust. They had been busy opening the envelopes but this had become too much for them. With utter disbelief and a trembling voice Mr. Owusu explained he and his wife had been excited about opening the envelopes, only to discover that many appeared to contain nothing or next to nothing. His “belly” had become heavy, he lamented, and a deep-felt contempt of those who attended church “to do nothing” had settled in his mind. Mrs. Owusu was even not prepared to comment on the situation but the tone of her voice revealed much of the disgust she felt about the giving of empty envelopes. More than the anger or disbelief of not receiving money as such, it was not so much the fact that so many in their social environment had not been giving anything that produced these sentiments, but rather the giving of something that was empty that was responsible for provoking this shock. In other words, it became clear through this experience that in the gift relations in these Pentecostal churches people prefer to give an empty thing than to give nothing at all. And so the Owusu couple experienced for the first time - as this was their first child - a disgusting reverse side to the gifting economy and its reciprocal relations in which they had been investing for so long.
This disgust of absence – an absence which literally becomes a presence through the empty envelope – can only be understood from the perspective of Pentecostal gift relations, reciprocities and their ritual and ideological significance. There are three separate angles from which this complexity of a disgust of absence in the context of gifting can be approached. The first is that of the Pentecostal gift economy which indicates a dialectic between these Pentecostal churches’ reliance and emphasis on gifts of money within their circles (to the church and its leadership, to the functioning of the churches’ many activities relating to their welfare associations and to the internal relations between members) and their suspicions of gifts. Gifts are mistrusted within Pentecostal circles for the powers that might be imbued in the gift (the object, the money or anything else) as gifts are always personalized and never alienated.
A second is that of the Pentecostal churches’ location in a migration setting whereby there are expectations of the extent to which these churches may act as communities of support, as formations for the provisioning of social security and as social groups in which dependencies can exist on the basis of reciprocities. This disgust of absence may be explored in the way it ruptured such expectations of sociality in a situation where this might have been important.
A third angle of analysis is formed by the way the opposite of disgust in the experience of absence exists in the Pentecostal rhetoric of the sublime of absence. In the Pentecostal ideology of protection of and deliverance from evil forces, the idea of the “power in the blood”, i.e. being “covered by the blood of Jesus” is a crucial feeling of superiority derived from a Saviour whose absence can be felt to be present. This absence is to be understood as representing the sublime precisely because it relates to a view of the world, of one’s environment and one’s relations from a perspective that allows a different sense or perhaps a heightened sense of reality. The idea of “covering by the blood” as making the presence felt of a superior heavenly power creates a panoptical experience of all other “principalities” as the Pentecostal pastors say, being “down under the earth”, being inferior and being kept at a distance.
These three angles of exploration come together in the way Pentecostalism as a popular form of Christianity has found its way from Ghana into a global form of exchange and a transnational mode of settlement. The movement of Ghanaian-led Pentecostal churches from Ghana to other parts of the world such as the Netherlands has not only captured the attention of an increasing number of academics studying the phenomenon, but has also captured the imagination of Ghanaians at home and abroad. There is a sense in which these transnational churches as institutions seem to be able to do what individual persons increasingly find difficult to achieve, namely the conquering of what Meyer and Geschiere ( ) have called the ‘closing of flows’ that a globalizing world appears to lead to. Whereas globalization as a phenomenon is seemingly marked by an intensification of flows of people, objects and ideas, the reality of the lived-in world of the ordinary Ghanaian migrant, certainly hoping to travel to or stay in the Netherlands, is such that obstructions, boundaries and controls are the basic predicaments he or she will meet. Hence the successful establishment of many off-shoots or satellites from the rapidly expanding field of Pentecostal churches in Ghana in the West is in itself experienced by those at home and abroad as something of a sublime miracle. As I have demonstrated in a number of articles on the subject, the pursuit by many of the current Pentecostal churches to find access to a global world is remarkable. Many of these Pentecostal churches naming themselves ‘global’ or ‘international’ have managed to do so and opened satellite congregations in cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg and London[1]. Pentecostalism feeds into the ambition of many young urbanites in Ghana to participate in intercontinental labour migration. Communities of Ghanaian migrants can be found in a range of Western European countries and in the US (Nimako 1993, Ter Haar 1994, 1998, Van Dijk 1997). Close links are maintained with Ghana and the Pentecostal churches contribute to a circulatory movement as they also connect with international Pentecostal circles, creating an extensive exchange of people and materials to and from Ghana and elsewhere. Some Pentecostal churches founded in the diaspora have opened branches in Ghana a serial migration of these institutions has evolved. Pentecostalism in Ghana rapidly became a transnational phenomenon and has formed a moral and physical geography producing a cultural interpenetration and flow which no longer perceives of Ghana as the only place of its origin; in a sense Ghana has been decentered in the way in which it has become one of the locations of emplacement Ghanaian Pentecostalism being no longer the exclusive location of such.