Abstract
Until the Stones Cry Out: Materialities of Faith and Technologies of the Holy Ghost in Southern Appalachia is an ethnography of the often unrecognized infrastructures that have sustained Charismatic practices of healing and performances of faith since the mid-twentieth century. My research demonstrates that the broadcasting of healing prayer over the radio, the circulation of curative faith cloths through the postal system, and the architecture of massive canvas revival tents are not merely passive instrumentalities for the transmission of a discretely self-contained religious content, but affect, most fundamentally, the way ritual practices such as intercessory prayer and faith healing are experienced and understood by Charismatic communities within the United States. Moving comparatively between ethnographic and archival evidence, this work explores the objects and technologies that provide the material underpinnings for Pentecostal performances of faith, prayer and the miraculous. On the rhetorical side of these charismatic phenomena, this ethnology examines inspired preaching styles and performances of religious testimony in order to track the appearance and circulation of so-called Holy Ghost power within spaces of ecstatic and enthusiastic worship.
