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Beyond Occult Economies: Akan spirits, New York Idols and Detroit automobiles

Parish

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Abstract

While it has been extensively recorded how the West African occult economy allows for a metanarrative critique of modernity, this article analyzes a convergence between witchcraft discourses and the capitalist market, looking through the local lens of Akan spirit shrines in New York City. Rather than being in awe of the “mysterious workings” of the marketplace, Akan occult practices fully engage with American mass production and neoliberal orthodoxy. In this process, the American automobile, the object par excellence of the American dream, embracing an ideology of escapism and individualism, has become, I argue, a local symbol against the extravagant consumerism worshipped in New York and at more established shrines. Young shrine priests, I explain, hold up as an alternative beacon of opportunity an age of Detroit automotive production in order to spiritually manufacture a different type of industrialism—the (re)cycling by Akan shrines of the iconic Pontiac automobile.

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 21, 2015
Publication Date Oct 20, 2015
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal HAU : Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Print ISSN 2049-1115
Publisher HAU Society for Ethnographic Theory
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 5
Issue 2
Pages 101-120
DOI https://doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.009
Keywords Akan spirit shrines, cosmology, capitalism, witchcraft, automotive
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.009

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