You Can Be a Citizen of Mars
Token of Passports’ Rituals, Overseas Travels, and Ghana’s Neo-Pentecostal Spaces
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3933447 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dorcas Dennis (0000-0003-1169-3706, Philosophy and Religion Department, University of North Carolina (UNC) Wilmington, NC USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1-37 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-21 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Religion in Africa (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-4200 • E-ISSN: 1570-0666 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/15700666-12340328 |
| OpenAlex | W4406680737 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 41 |
This paper examines how a local Ghanaian Pentecostal church mediates global mobility and structural immigration barriers for alienated persons through ritual performance. Imperial alienating immigration processes for 'undesired' persons on the move to the Global North engender a religious ritual performance designed to confront the alienating structures, negotiate imposed dominant labels, and reconstruct belonging. In the ritual process, passports become sacred tools for mediating travel, while prophecies reveal travel constraints and future events. The ritual empowers and emboldens participants to pursue their travels as an orchestrated success program divinely prepared for them. The ritualization of travel is a symbolic performance of contestations of imperial travel barriers and alienations. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork at the Power Cathedral in Kumasi, popular for its innovative 'Token of Passports' (ToP) rituals, the article offers an account of the phenomenon in Ghana's Pentecostal space to show how local religions mediate mobility for alienated groups
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Ethnography · Immigration · Negotiation · Phenomenon · Political science · Power (physics) · Ritualization · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Religion, Society, and Development
Religions and migrations – old and new
International Review of Mission
Mission to “Set the Captives Free”
Slave Culture
The Sage Handbook of International Migration
Weapons of the Weak
Ghana's New Christianity, New Edition
Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance
A theory of migration
How Pentecostalism Emerged as a form of Resistance to Racial Oppression in the US
Calling upon the Sacred
Towards a Functional Christology Among AICs in Ghana
Fireballs in Our Midst”
African Charismatics
International migration, remittances and development
The journal of community psychology
Mental health and discrimination among migrants from Africa
Constructing Homes, Building Relationships
Development as Freedom
Rituals of Resistance
Migration in West Africa
Cosmologies of Credit
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Researching Mobility Barriers
On moving across
Hau
From Camp To Encompassment
Remittances and morality
Sacred remittances
Blackness as Burden? The Lived Experience of Black Africans in Australia
Ritual as an Instrument of Political Resistance in Rural Japan
The Ritual Process
Ritual
Cultural Pragmatics
Crossing Mexico
The Modernity Bluff
Bourdieu on Religion
Feminizing Patriarchy
Religiosity and Migration Aspirations among Mexican Youth
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |