In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

nine School of Deliverance: Healing, Exorcism, and Male Spirit Possession in the Ghanaian Presbyterian Diaspora Adam Mohr The political and social changes associated with globalization in the last two decades have resulted in radical shifts in the circulation of people, religious institutions, and healing practitioners between Africa and the African-born immigrants in the U.S. In particular, the large-scale immigration of Ghanaian Christians to the U.S. has led to the formation of a network of Ghanaian Presbyterian churches in North America. This network of churches has attempted to reproduce healing practices established at the Grace Deliverance Center in Ghana—the primary religious healing center of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana—through an annual healing and deliverance workshop held in New York. This school of deliverance is the principal mechanism by which the practices of deliverance—meant to free a person from illness or misfortune emanating from Satan—are taught to members of the Presbyterian Church’s Prayer Teams, which are sub-church organizations responsible for the health and welfare of their congregations. This essay addresses the attempts to reproduce religious healing across space and, in particular, the transformations that are necessarily contained within this process. In the U.S., Ghanaian women have increased earning capacities due to opportunities within the traditionally feminized health care industry. Ghanaian men frequently earn less money than their wives and have less control over their marriages and marital resources. Thus, the traditional power dynamic between men and women has become inverted within Ghanaian marriages in the U.S., resulting in a parallel transformation within gendered patterns of spirit possession. Among Ghanaian Presbyterians in the U.S., there is a high incidence of male spirit possession compared to its relative absence in Ghana, where spirit possession is limited to women.1 Many Ghanaian Presbyterian men become spirit-possessed as a religious response to their social marginalization in the U.S., thereby transforming Ghanaian masculinity in both the material and spiritual realms. 242 ADAM MoHR Ghanaian Immigration and the Ghanaian Christian Landscape in the U.S. In the last 20 years there has been a significant increase in the number of African immigrants in the U.S. The U.S. Census estimates that by 2007 there were 1.4 million African-born immigrants residing in the country, compared to only 364,000 in 1990.2 The number of African permanent residents admitted into the U.S. almost doubled from 66,422 in 2004 to 117,430 in 2006.3 Ghanaians comprise a large percentage of the total number of African immigrants. Between 2003 and 2006 the number of Ghanaians gaining permanent residency in the U.S. more than doubled.4 In 2006, Ghana ranked fourth among African countries in its number of U.S. permanent residencies, after Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Egypt. But Ghana is only the twelfth most populous African state, while Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Egypt are numbers three, one, and two, respectively, in terms of population.5 Therefore, a much larger percentage of the population of Ghana is immigrating to the U.S. than from any of the three largest African states. Economic conditions in Ghana have fostered this large-scale emigration, beginning in the 1960s when the Ghanaian economy began to rapidly decline. With continued economic deterioration—such as low crop prices and high inflation—the pattern of large-scale emigration continued into the 1970s. The economic conditions only deteriorated further throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, particularly due to the 1983 implementation of structural adjustment programs sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While the economy began stabilizing by the turn of the twenty-first century, the pattern of large-scale Ghanaian emigration continued,6 resulting in remittances sent from migrants back to Ghana that are now calculated in billions of U.S. dollars.7 This emigration pattern from Ghana to the U.S. has been enabled by immigration policies in the U.S. and Europe. Three immigration policies led to large-scale immigration to the U.S. by Africans, and by Ghanaians in particular. First, the 1965 U.S. Immigration Reform Act abolished country-of-origin quotas that had favored European immigrants, which increased opportunities for African immigration. Second, the Diversity Visa Program as part of the 1990 U.S. Immigration Act offered much greater opportunity to Africans. Third, the increased restrictions on immigration to Western Europe beginning in the 1980s, particularly between Africans and their former European colonizers, have led the U.S. to become...

Share