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Lagos Spiritual Warfare and Travelling Spirits

Keywords:LagosCommunities

A Transnational Multi-Sense Journey from Lagos to the Diaspora

The research project focuses on the impact of the visual and material world of Pentecostalism in urban spaces of Lagos. The aim of the project is to look at how regimes of emotions and sensations led by Pentecostal and Charismatic churches contribute to the transformation and re-articulation of Lagos into a city of spiritual warfare. The research also analyzes how the Pentecostal material world is re-interpreted and reinvented by diaspora-communities in Italy where the Catholic Church dominates religious and aesthetic spaces of public and private life.

The aim of the project is to highlight the economy of images and sensorial regimes of Nigerian Pentecostalism from Lagos to the Diaspora in Italy. The Italian context and the challenge within its religious arena provides the framework within which African Pentecostal churches struggle for definition, recognition of their socio-religious authority and for the integration of their aesthetic in a catholic dominated visual and material world. The methodology combines ethnography and cultural studies with photography.