Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper moves beyond the center of the theocratic class of the Nigerian Pentecostal circle to explore a marginal Onitsha-based prophet named Chukwuemeka Ohanaemere Odumeje, who claimed the spotlight of Pentecostal theatrics in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and seems to have sustained it by centering himself in popular imagination. I combine a textual analysis of many snippets of media (which are now part of popular culture) and a semiotic analysis of signs and signifiers within both specialized literature in Nigerian Pentecostalism and African popular culture—to examine this imbrication of Pentecostal performativity and popular imagination. I highlight disrupting and dwelling to index resistance or alignment within established Pentecostal performativity and its imbrication with popular culture. Specifically, I use Abimbola Adelakun’s idea of Pentecostal performativity to argue that Odumeje both disrupts and dwells within established Pentecostal performative practices, deploys digital media and popular culture referents in ways that place him in popular imagination, where his sacred spectacle mixes with the quotidian on social media to make him an “incredible pastor.” Together, I show that not only does social media complicate and create room for debating Pentecostal theology, as Adelakun aptly argued, but that by turning our gaze away from politics and Pentecostalism and toward Pentecostal performativity and popular culture, we can extend and recast the field of religion and cultural studies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".