Page 10 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Series Editor’s Preface

R/C/C is a series devoted to publishing work that
addresses religion’s centrality in a wide range of settings and debates, both
contemporary and historical, and that critically engages the category of
“religion” itself. This series is conceived as a place where readers will be
invited to explore how “religion”—whether embodied in texts, practices,
communities, and ideologies—intersects with social and political interests,
institutions, and identities.
Aesthetic Formations goes to the very heart of these questions. The
book is the culmination of several years of intensive ethnographic field-
work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing on
the question of technological mediation in the consolidation, transmis-
sion, and transformation of religion. Each chapter of the book invites
readers into worlds where media—cinema, television and video, radio,
audio cassettes, and the Internet—provide, not merely modes of represen-
tation for religious ideas, but spaces where religious communities make
their homes and articulate themselves. But the notion of mediation is
more capacious yet in Aesthetic Formations and so what counts as media
expands beyond the conventional modalities (film, television, etc.) into
the body itself as a space of mediation. Indeed, religion is reframed by the
authors of this book, not undertood as an object of representation but
rather as mediation itself.
Reading Aesthetic Formations can be a dizzying experience as images
and sounds overwhelm the reader from all sides: televisions blare, radios
blast, cinematic images flash across the screen. The book produces a sort of

religious vertigo as the reader is transported from one scene of spiritual
fervor to the next. Religious worlds overlap and compete for adherents,
both using conventional media in new formats as a strategy of outreach but
also offering themselves up as more effective modes of mediation for spirits
and the divine. The cacophony and visual overload of Aesthetic Formations
achieves a sort of mimetic charge, moving beyond reportage and analysis
and toward a different kind of ethnographic representation.