Brian Goldstone
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Year: 5 ABD
Chair:
Charles Piot
Research Interests:
subjectivity and ethical formation; the politics of indigeneity and belonging; political theology; secularity/secularism; political theory; history of anthropology; history and philosophy of science; violence; Christianity; Islam; West Africa
- Dissertation Title:
- Crusading Faith: Scenes from the Charismatic Encounter in Northern Ghana
- Representative Publications
(More Publications)
- B. Goldstone. "Critique of Abysmal Reasoning." Theory & Event vol. 11 no. 2 (2008).
- B. Goldstone. "Violence and the Profane: Islamism, Liberal Democracy, and the Limits of Secular Discipline." Anthropological Quarterly vol. 80 no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 207-37.
- B. Goldstone. ""On Democratic Secularism"." Borderlands vol. 5 no. 2 (2006).
- B. Goldstone. "Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools: Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge." Anthropological Quarterly vol. 79 no. 1 (Winter, 2006): 159-64.
Chair: My dissertation investigates the incursion in recent years of Pentecostal-charismatic churches into the Northern Region of Ghana – a rural, predominantly Muslim area considered by many to be an exception to Ghana's self-characterization as a peaceful, prosperous, and indeed Christian nation.
The concerns of my project are threefold: 1) to examine the figure of "the North" in the Ghanaian national imaginary, the images and histories it draws on and the various projects, including evangelization, it is able to mobilize; 2) to register the ways in which charismatic concepts and practices (such as signs and wonders, prophecy, conversion, spiritual warfare, discipleship, soul winning) are modified and undone as they endeavor to inhabit this terrain; 3) and, finally, to inquire into the implications of this encounter for an interrogation of Ghanaian secularity, which I have begun to conceptualize in terms of a tension, made especially visible in this region, between tolerance and religious freedom (including the freedom to evangelize and convert the
nonbeliever).
Above all, my project seeks to elucidate the modes of self-styling and sensibility as well as the political, religious, and aesthetic forms that are activated and foreclosed as this brand of
Christianity moves into hitherto "unreached" and, from its vantage, highly perilous landscapes.
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