Religious infrastructuring in Ghana: the aesthetics and politics of infrastructural augmentation in Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity and the Indigenous Religious Tradition

Abstract

ABSTRACT This contribution explores the ‘infrastructuring’ of religious sites and practices in Ghana’s Ashanti region, particularly in Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian (PCC) churches and Indigenous Religious Traditions (IRTs). By ‘infrastructuring’, I mean the purposeful complexification and augmentation of infrastructural arrangements encompassing both material (physical) and immaterial (organisational, communicative) dimensions. The first part explores a PCC case study, Prophet Boateng’s Power Chapel Worldwide (PCWW), investigating the aesthetic, economic, and political implications of infrastructuring Pentecostalism. The second part, which is a novel addition to the discourse, focuses on the emergence and expansion of heavily infrastructured IRT shrines and practices through the case of Kↄmfoↄ Oforiwaa’s shrine. I argue that the aesthetic operations performed by religiously configured buildings can help generate assemblages of people, aspirations, and meanings constituting more comprehensive economic and political processes.