Sensational Movies by Birgit Meyer - Paper - University of California Press

Reviews

"A thoughtful and theoretically powerful study, culminating two decades of fieldwork and movie-watching, of mediatization and materialization. . . . An important contribution to the anthropology of religion, of popular media, of invented tradition, and of the cultural formation of the senses and experience."
— Anthropology Review Database

"A rich account... the most sustained and theoretically sophisticated treatment of Christian popular culture in Africa to emerge to date and an important contribution to studies of religion and media."
— American Ethnologist

"A fascinating and engaged ethnography of a crucial period in the Ghanaian film world."
— Marginalia

"...will be regarded as both foundational and pioneering across multiple disciplines for years to come... it is how [Meyer] evaluates and hypothesizes the development of this cultural movement that places her work at the forefront of interdisciplinary research in Africa."
— Material Religion

"Meyer has assembled a theoretically complex, well-written and valuable contribution to religious and media studies in contemporary Africa, accessible to both novices in the field and to veterans seeking new ideas and ways of engaging with media and religious studies research."
— Anthropology Southern Africa

“Combining extensive ethnographic work with careful description of the videos and their circulation and reception, Meyer offers readers a magisterial account of how market, state, industry, religion, and visual media intermingle. The result is an embodied, socially situated phenomenology of cinematic experience that builds on years of Meyer’s work and will shape the conversation among scholars for years to come.”—David Morgan, Professor of Religious Studies, Duke University

“Drawing together research on religion and media in a strikingly original way, Meyer argues that the image repertoire of Pentecostalism is central to the emergence of Ghanaian film. But more than this, she shows how popular cinema is key to how Pentecostalism goes public and becomes part of the everyday lives of religious subjects. This is a groundbreaking book that opens up fundamentally new questions about film, aesthetics, and the sensational life of images in contemporary Africa.”—Brian Larkin, Barnard College, Columbia University

Sensational Movies

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Sensational Movies

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews