Page 31 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

16 Birgit Meyer

revealing the whereabouts of the “powers of darkness,” which include
demonized indigenous gods and spirits, as well as witchcraft and occult
forces such as mermaids and Indian spirits. Although most spectators were
fully aware that certain spectacular supernatural apparitions were pro-
duced by computer-designed special effects, they did not dismiss these
images as fake or make-believe, stating rather that “technology shows what
is there.” A similar conclusion can be drawn regarding the visualization of
gods in Tamil cinema in the 1930s. Stephen Hughes shows that the genres
of the mythological and devotional were inscribed in ongoing processes of
remediation through which the appearance of gods on screens was framed
as a unique transcendental experience (Chapter 4, see also Hughes 2005;
Vasudevan 2005). Such intersections between religion and film offer pow-
erful evidence for the mobilization of media technologies in inducing belief
via—and even in—cinematic or televised images. In this way technology
becomes part of a broader project of “make-believe” in which belief is
vested in the image, and not an invisible beyond (De Certeau 1984, 186–187).
Or, as Derrida put it succinctly, “There is no need any more to believe, one
can see. But seeing is always organized by a technical structure that sup-
poses the appeal to faith” (2001, 63). Importantly, such religious media-
tions in the sphere of entertainment are relevant to politics of belonging.
While Hughes shows that the projection of mythologicals and devotionals
was central to the articulation of new religious agendas in the public sphere,
Francio Guadeloupe (Chapter 6) focuses on the ways in which popular
radio DJs in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten mobilize Christian rep-
ertoires in invoking an inclusive politics of belonging that goes against
local, exclusivist, and xenophobic articulations of identity. Even though
these “sonic architects” and their listeners are not staunch, churchgoing
Christians, they mobilize Christian language so as to bring into being a
more encompassing Caribbean community and identity.
Still, certainly in the sphere of entertainment, the relation between reli-
gion and the sphere of media need not be as smooth as the examples of
Ghanaian videos and Tamil cinema suggest. For instance, in Bangladesh
(Hoek in this volume; Hoek 2008) popular film and the visibility it lends
to women, who are “unveiled” down to appearing nude in pornographic

scenes, is heavily contested. Here the public appearance of women, which
was unleashed by their incorporation into paid industrial labor, is subject
to a moral debate launched by members of the middle class, in which visi-
bility and obscenity appear as closely related. Lotte Hoek shows how
women in the film industry negotiate religious and social constraints on
their public presence by staying aloof from the filmic image of the nude
woman that depicts their bodies and speaks through their voices. The fact
that this filmic image is created by dubbing, in that the takes of one actress