Redemptive materialism: consumption practices in contemporary African Pentecostalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine Pentecostal adherents in Ghana to derive a concept of how adherent religious beliefs are reconciled to valorise contemporary consumer pursuits. Based on over ten years of ethnographic inquiry, we suggest the analytical notion of ‘redemptive materialism’ that references some pragmatic processes and practices of contemporary religious consumption – dream-making, legitimisation and moral translation – in a manner that allows adherents to transform experiences of lack into avenues of hope for material abundance. We intend redemptive materialism to speak to how various elements work together to shape how we live, the way we think as well, our consumer tastes, our capacity to pray, the nature of our prayers, and the way religious tutelage instructs our values (Wuthnow, 1995: 15). Future studies are invited to explore the possibilities that abound for religion to embrace seemingly antithetical elements of human existence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".