Pype's evocative study makes a most valuable contribution to the scholarship of African new religious movements and media. She connects the study of African Pentecostalism, media and the contemporary urban world of the 'Afropolis' of Kinshasa in a superb ethnography. The book is analytically nuanced, theoretically grounded and beautifully written.
Anthropology Southern Africa Pype's ... Read morestudy is particularly ethnographically rich while raising some very cutting-edge questions about popular culture, mediation, gender and age, and the relation between modernity and 'tradition.' - [It] is a valuable examination of Christianity, media, and modernity in one contemporary society, with great application across religions and societies - [and] an important addition to the understanding of vernacular religion and the construction of modern selves, especially in circumstances of rapid social change and the disorientations caused by it.
Anthropology Review Database Readers learn of the dynamic processes through which people cope with vicissitudes, often dramatized by mesmerizing music and embodied through dance - [Pype's] compelling study joins important work by scholars of contemporary African media - while introducing one of the continent's less well-known yet greatest cities. Highly recommended.
Choice Theoretically literate, based on superb ethnography, this book provides one of the best studies of television we have yet in African studies - [that] promises to open up a new field of analysis and define the standards for how this research is to be conducted - a landmark that will make a significant contribution to some of the main fields in African studies and anthropology.
Brian Larkin, Columbia University [A] tour de force. This very elegantly and evocatively written ethnography of Congolese television drama is a path-breaking example of what it means to conduct and construct a thick description of a culture of media production.
Debra Spitulnik Vidali, Emory University This book is beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated, nuanced in its analysis and empirically rich. Given that so much has already been written on African Pentecostalism, coming up with something original and new to say on the topic is quite a challenge, but Pype pulls it off and deserves a lot of credit for that.
Martin Lindhardt, University of Copenhagen The author deserves great praise for the original way in which she moves her analysis beyond a mere observation of African Pentecostalism. This ethnographically grounded book not only captures the heterogeneity that marks Kinshasa in a beautiful way, but it also innovatively combines three currently burgeoning fields within anthropology: the anthropology of urban settings, the anthropology of youth, and the anthropology of media.
Filip De Boeck, University of Leuven Show Less