Materialities of Faith and Technologies of the Holy Ghost in Southern Appalachia
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Until the Stones Cry Out: Materialities of Faith and Technologies of the Holy Ghost in Southern Appalachia Anderson Blanton Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Anderson Blanton All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Until the Stones Cry Out: Materialities of Faith and Technologies of the Holy Ghost in Southern Appalachia Anderson Blanton Until the Stones Cry Out: Materialities of Faith and Technologies of the Holy Ghost in Southern Appalachia is an ethnography of the often unrecognized infrastructures that have sustained Charismatic practices of healing and performances of faith since the mid-twentieth century. My research demonstrates that the broadcasting of healing prayer over the radio, the circulation of curative faith cloths through the postal system, and the architecture of massive canvas revival tents are not merely passive instrumentalities for the transmission of a discretely self-contained religious content, but affect, most fundamentally, the way ritual practices such as intercessory prayer and faith healing are experienced and understood by Charismatic communities within the United States. Moving comparatively between ethnographic and archival evidence, this work explores the objects and technologies that provide the material underpinnings for Pentecostal performances of faith, prayer and the miraculous. On the rhetorical side of these charismatic phenomena, this ethnology examines inspired preaching styles and performances of religious testimony in order to track the appearance and circulation of so-called Holy Ghost power within spaces of ecstatic and enthusiastic worship. Table of Contents Introduction: Hittin’ the Prayer Bones, p. 1 Chapter 1: Appalachian Radio Prayers: The Prosthesis of the Holy Ghost and the Drive to Tactility, p. 19 Chapter 2: Prayer Cloths and the Texture of Faith, p. 58 A Coincidence Recalled Up On Schoolhouse Hill, p. 59 Devotional Density and the Rosary Bead, p. 70 Cutting of the Prayer Cloth, p. 75 The Infrastructure of Healing or: The Architecture of Cloth, p. 80 The Flow of Fabric and the Contagiousness of the Sacred, p. 84 Hanky-Panky of the Voice, p. 87 Silent Voice: Pantomime, p. 94 Ectoplasmic Textile Tongues or: The Spiritualist Prayer Cloth, p. 97 The Prayer Cloth Testimony of Sister Francis, p. 102 An Apotropaic Device, p. 108 The Sound of the Mechanism: Materialized Prayer, p. 112 Mentioning the Prayer Cloth, p. 119 Sacred Automaticity: Prayer Cloths, Machines, Accidents, p.121 Excursus: Holy Ghost Bumps, p. 135 Chapter 3: The Anointed Poetics of Breath, p. 143 i The Sacred Belly Laugh, p. 152 Contagious Laughter and the Force of Narrativity, p. 155 “Floppin’ Fish,” p. 156 “Runnin’ In the Spirit,” p. 158 “Heavy Set Woman,” p. 160 “Holy Ghost Lingerin’” p, 162 “The Story of the Smile,” p. 163 The Anointed Laughter of Sister Julie, p. 168 Sister June’s Bulldog Preachin’, p.171 Gandy Dancin’, p. 177 Brother Pearl’s Preaching, p.186 Chapter 4: Standin’ In the Gap: The Materialities of Prayer, p.196 The Prosthesis of Prayer or: The Apparatus of Faith, p.225 The “Laying on of Hands” in and Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p.228 Altar Call (If You Ain’t Blas-ah-phemed the Holy Ghost), p.243 Sermons, p.246 Bibliography, p. 276 ii Table of Figures Figure 1: The Circulation of Ethnographic Material, p. 11 Figure 2: Radio Station Coverage Map, p. 18 Figure 3: Illustration of the “Point of Contact” from the Healing Treatise, p. 41 Figure 4: Iconic Images of the Famous Healer, p. 43 Figure 5: Hanky-Panky, 1886, p. 96 Figure 6: Ectoplasmic Materialization, p. 101 Figure 7: Advertisement from the Red Ash Coal Company, circa 1900, p. 124 Figure 8: Prayer Cloths, p. 134-35 iii Belief never subsists on its own, but always emerges through a community of the expectant faithful. This work, as well, was only written through the guidance and support of many individuals and institutions. I am grateful to Kevin “Bossman” Grogg and his family for allowing me to live on their beautiful farm in the mountains of southern West Virginia. The many months spent there have facilitated both my research and my imagination. Many thanks as well to Bill McAllister and the Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellows Program at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University for funding several site visits in conjunction with my Materiality of Religious Presence research project. Likewise, the commentary of Brian Larkin and Allen Shelton during presentations of several early chapter drafts proved invaluable as I continued the process of writing. The teaching of Marilyn Ivy and Michael Taussig, two of my dissertation committee members in the Department of Anthropology, has provided a constant source of inspiration to explore the precarious boundaries of perception and subjectivity. My attempts to hear the sound of the sacred have been most influenced by my advisor, John Pemberton, and his guidance resonates throughout Until the Stones Cry Out. Without the consummate advice and encouragement of my brothers Ben, Ward, and Tommy, this whole project as a graduate student would have been impossible. Alas, I do not have enough breath to voice all the thanks due to my mother and father, who always had faith in me. iv Until the Stones Cry Out is dedicated to Sister Dorothy and Brother Aldie Allen, Sister Sally, and all the congregation members of the Jackson Memorial Hour Broadcast. You gave me the inspiration to write v 1 Introduction: Hittin’ the Prayer Bones “Hittin’ the prayer bones” is a phrase invoked in charismatic Christian worship spaces throughout southern Appalachia. Evoking a long history of Christian penitential exercises, this phrase viscerally describes the importunate act of falling down upon one’s knees in the performance of prayer. Hittin’ the prayer bones is thus a percussive genuflection that literally sounds an embodied technique of divine communication. Even before the mouth begins to give voice to a prayer, the body itself, in a sudden coincidence with an external object, opens a communicative space between the sacred and the everyday. In this moment of collision between the penitential bone and the wooden floorboard, the curative efficacy and miraculous power of the Holy Ghost is materialized within the charismatic milieu. In this way, the miraculous appearance of the Holy Ghost, a seemingly intangible and ethereal entity, can never be fully abstracted from this striking sound unleashed between the subject and the object in the performance of divine communication. The percussive noise released through this technique of the body-in-prayer also resonates with the rapid, disjointed hand claps that pierce the entangled voices in the performance of communal prayer, and the bony knuckles of an elder Brother or Sister as they rap the wooden podium to mimic “God knockin’ on that heart’s door” during the altar call of the worship service. 2 The sound of the bone is not only used as a crucial embodied metaphor of prayer within spaces inundated with “Holy Ghost’n’par” [power], but the rattling sound of those dry bleached bones in the valley becomes a sermonic touchstone to describe the enlivening potentiality of the Spirit in a world where the living waters of charisma have dried up. While scanning the airwaves of southern Appalachia on any given weekend, one is sure to tune in to a disembodied radio voice speaking of those dry bones and the quickening power to come: Ever-body that can, stand up an’ help us, Sister Jackson wants “These Bones.” These bones are definitely gonna rise again. You know, I thank so much about Elisha. An’ they went out thar an’ buried him. An’ then how they come by ta bury a man [chuckles under his breath] Happened ta lay’em down right on Elisha’s bones. When they saw a troop of men comin’ along. [audience response: Amen!] Kindly scared’em, they dropped’em on Elisha’s bones, An’ at man sat straight up! [Hallelujah! Clapping of hands] “There’s somethin’ alive in here!” [visceral, vehement voice, energetic,] [Whoo!] Ya know one day after awhile, The Lord’s gonna step out on tha clouds a’glory. They gonna be allotta dead bones gonna raise up. Ah’ praise God, I tell ya what [congregation member cries out, Whoop-Glory!] They’s somethin’ alive gonna come outta there! I don’t know what its gonna be, But somethin’s commin’ outta tha grave, The grave is not gonna hold. [That’s right. Yes!] [Immediately after the Brother’s final words, a song begins, sung with the accompaniment of guitar, tambourine, piano and rhythmic clapping] These Bones Well my God decided to make’em a man These bones gonna rise again With a little bit of mud and a little bit of sand Yea these bones gonna rise again 3 My God decided to make a woman too Yea these bones gonna rise again Well my God knows just what to do Said these bones gonna rise again And well I know it, indeed I know it I know it, these bones gonna rise again The resonance of the bone extends to another recurrent motif within the charismatic space of worship, the performative description and evocation of suffering and corporeal break-down in a world of sin. Here visceral accounts of gnarled arthritic joints, perpetual invocations of hip and knee replacements, broken bones, bones held together with steel frames and metallic screws, and the cancerous gnawing of the marrow fill the worship space with stories of pain and suffering in a world of bodies “got down.”1 The preeminent performance in these charismatic communities is thus a communal hittin’ of the prayer bones that instantiates the miraculous healing power of the Holy Ghost into the participants’ ailing bodies and everyday experiences.