ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how religious diversity is encountered and negotiated through the urban soundscape. Critical of the dominant tendency in western thought to privilege sight over hearing, historians, human geographers, and social scientists have explored the ways in which 'soundscapes' or 'sonic geographies' generate shared senses of space and acoustic communities, structure identities and power relations, and are transformed by negotiations between different groups and developments in audio technology. Sound, with its material and immaterial dimensions, appears as a powerful mediator between the visible and the invisible city, and is central to the power struggles in present-day Accra. The chapter shows how religious spatial strategies of sound and silence are bound up with the unseen forces of the 'invisible city' as much as with the politics of visible presence. Charismatic groups' loud establishment of public presence leads to irritation all year round: many Accra residents resent being confronted with charismatics' sonic and doctrinal aggression.
