The Noise Silence Makes

Secularity and Ghana's Drum Wars

Mariam Goshadze (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

216 Seiten

2025
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-2819-2 (ISBN)

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For generations, the Ga community in Accra, Ghana, has enforced an annual citywide ban on noisemaking during an important religious festival. In the 1990s and 2000s, this “ban on drumming” became a point of conflict between the Ga people and the newly popular Pentecostal/Charismatic churches, which refused to subdue their loud worship during the ban. Although the Ghanaian state constitutionally and institutionally grants superior status to Christianity and Islam, it ruled in favor of the Ga community, which emphasized its “cultural” rather than religious rights. In The Noise Silence Makes, Mariam Goshadze traces the history of noise regulation in Accra, showing how the Ga people have adopted colonial mechanisms of noise control to counter Pentecostal/Charismatic dominance over Accra’s soundscape. Goshadze shows how the drumming ban represents a reversal of the top-down model of noise regulation and illuminates the reality of Ghanaian secularity, in which the state unofficially collaborates with indigenous religious authorities to control sound. In so doing, Goshadze counters the tendency to push African “traditional religions” to the margins, demonstrating that they are instrumental players in contemporary African urbanity.

Mariam Goshadze is Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion at Leipzig University.

A Note on Orthography ix
A Note on Pronunciation xi
Introduction: Altered Ontologies and Reversed Paradigms 1
1. Jumping on the Anti-Noise Bandwagon: Drumming Permits for Accra’s Residents 25
2. Winds of Change: The Ban on Drumming Enters the Public Sphere 46
3. The Power of Sound: Cross-World Sonic Theologies 69
4. When the Deities Visit: Translating Religion into the Language of the Secular 87
5. Sacred Acoustic Inspectors: The Ghanian State and Noise Abatement during the HƆMƆWƆ Festival 108
6. Let Us Offer Thanks for the Nation of Ghana: Hɔmɔwɔ as a Civil Ceremony of Thanksgiving 133
Conclusion: Layered Epistemologies of Contemporary Accra 153
Acknowledgments 159
Glossary 161
Notes 163
References 177
Index 193

Erscheinungsdatum	11.04.2025
Reihe/Serie	Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People
Zusatzinfo	10 illustrations
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	572 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-4780-2819-X / 147802819X
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-2819-2 / 9781478028192
Zustand	Neuware