2022 Volume 86 Issue 4 Pages 635-653
This article focuses on spirit possession during deliverance Masses of a Pentecostal-Charismatic church in the Southern part of the Republic of Benin, shedding light on the entanglements between affect, imagination and memory. Pentecostal Charismatic churches in sub-Saharan Africa are characterized by a strong tendency to demonize witches and other local spiritual entities. Research has pointed out that the idiom of the demonic that Charismatic churches propose is fundamental in providing the local imagination with new tools for understanding political and economic change. Yet, this paper posits the imagination as an embodied constituent of realities and aims at clarifying the conditions and processes through which it works, in correspondence with affects and memory. I argue that the practice of fighting demons and witches in the church elicits the emergence of the reality of such spirits as particular ‘things' or subjects through experiences of possession grounded in affects, enskilment, memories and the imagination, thus opening up new possibilities for spirits to create new realities.
