Page 13 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

xii Preface

Brazil and Afrikania in Ghana, on Pentecostal churches and the Catholic
Charismatic Renewal in Brazil, Venezuela and Ghana, on Islamic move-
ments in Northern Nigeria, and on the global Raelian Movement, as well
as the migration of religious repertoires into the sphere of entertainment—
radio on the Caribbean Island of Sint Maarten, and film in Bangladesh
and South India. The volume is based on a long-term cooperation of 10
researchers and myself in the framework of a research program titled
Modern Mass Media, Religion and the Imagination of Communities. Different
Postcolonial Trajectories in West Africa, South Asia, Brazil and the Caribbean,
which took place at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research at
the University of Amsterdam between 2000 and 2006 and has been gen-
erously sponsored by The Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research
(NWO) and the University of Amsterdam in the framework of a PIONIER
grant.
Situated at the core of our research, this volume addresses the role of
religion and new and old media in the emergence and sustenance of new
kinds of communities or formations, which generate particular notions of
self and others, modes of religious experience, and of being and acting in
the world. In the first chapter, I present, by way of introduction, my per-
spective on the religion-media-community nexus, which I developed in
the context of our intense collaboration, during the course of which I have
been able to visit most of the research venues. The volume is organized into
three parts, each of which addresses key aspects of the central theme: the
question of boundary politics in the formation of religious subjectivities
and communities (Part 1), the implications of the presence of religion in
the public realm for the relation between the religious and the secular
(Part 2), and the paradoxical relation between mediation and immediacy
(Part 3). Each of these parts contains a set of chapters from the researchers
who have been cooperating in our program: Maria José de Abreu; Marleen
de Witte; Francio Guadeloupe; Lotte Hoek; Stephen Hughes; Brian
Larkin; Carly Machado; Martijn Oosterbaan; Rafael Sánchez; and Mattijs
van de Port.
Anthropological research is usually understood to be a quite individual
endeavor. This is grounded in anthropologists’ particular methodology

and attitude regarding knowledge production, in that anthropologists view
themselves as the key research “instrument.” As ethnography is necessarily
embedded in intersubjective encounters between researchers and their
interlocutors that generate unexpected findings, amazement, and fascina-
tion, anthropologists tend to be suspicious of carrying out research within
conceptual and methodological straitjackets that already presuppose and
guide certain outcomes. This has consequences for the way in which a
research program, such as the one on which this volume is based, takes