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<p>This dissertation examines the recent influx of Pentecostal-charismatic churches
into the Northern Region of Ghana, a rural, underdeveloped region whose predominantly
Muslim population has increasingly become the target of evangelistic efforts undertaken
by Christians from the south. Based on ethnographic and archival research, my study
considers the locus of this incursion as a densely layered zone of anxieties and emergences,
desires and contestations, in which the elaboration of novel horizons of sensibility
and experience is refracted through the vicissitudes of the region's social, economic,
religious, and political history. I argue that the churches' impassioned campaign
to "take back the north for the Lord" - a campaign whose exemplary medium is the evangelistic
crusade in which "signs and wonders" are mobilized as particularly potent technologies
of conversion - demarcates a complex field of intervention animated by a plurality
of forces irreducible to those of strictly religious provenance. An ethos of progress
and success fostered by the country's development apparatus; the longstanding prejudices
surrounding northerners and "the north" in the Ghanaian national imaginary; the specter
of a Muslim threat that surfaces in a post-9/11 world and perpetuates amidst a global
war on terror - these are among the contingencies that have come together to render
this encounter possible. Yet, far from simply overlaying these historical-political
logics with the veneer of Christian discourse, my work charts the dissemination of
a faith whereby, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, converts are anointed
with a power to conceive themselves and, by extension, the world as nothing less than
a totally "new creation." I contend that such practices of salvation, so characteristic
of Pentecostalism's proliferation across the continent as a whole, are being recast
in ways both subtle and sensational by their transposition into the allegedly pathological
space of northern Ghana - as are, I suggest, the lives of the men and women who inhabit
it.</p>
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