Page 34 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction 19

rituals. Instead, he urged Muslims to read and understand the Hadith and
the Qur’an by themselves, instead of relying on Sufi sheiks’ mediations.
This implied a rationalization of Islam as well as an intensification of reli-
gious experience. In this way, Islam was embedded and rearticulated
within in a secularizing project that remained, however, messy and replete
with paradoxes. Similarly, Stephen Hughes (Chapter 4) points out how in
early Tamil cinema in the 1930s, mythologicals and devotionals became
central to debates about the emergent categories of secular and religious,
which ultimately proved impossible to disentangle. In so doing, Hughes
gives historical relief to current debates about the contribution of televised
versions of the Mahabharatha and Ramayana to the rise of Hindu religious
nationalism, and the reconfiguration of the relation between religion and
politics in India (Mankekar 1999; Rajagopal 2001; see also Dwyer 2006).
While the chapters by Larkin and Hughes address the historical ante-
cedents of the complicated relation between media, religion, politics and
entertainment, other contributions concentrate on settings characterized
by a salient public articulation of religion and the appeal to religious forms
in contemporary public culture. The boundaries between religious and
secular, and religion, politics and entertainment have become ever more
difficult to draw, and this impinges on the manner in which people are
addressed and bonds are formed. In Ghana, the spectacular rise of
Pentecostal churches as a public force would have been unthinkable with-
out the retreat of the state from dominating the public sphere in the early
1990s in the wake of the adoption of a democratic constitution. This
implied not only a Pentecostal hegemony in public culture, but also made
politicians tap into Pentecostal resources so as to appeal to these Christian
constituencies (Meyer 2004a; de Witte in this volume, de Witte 2008). In
Brazil, the CCR and the new Pentecostal Churches that are in search of
publicity and credibility make deliberate use of mass media which had
become commercialized already in the period of dictatorship, yet were dis-
missed by Liberation Theology as being indebted to American cultural
and political imperialism (de Abreu in this volume). The public presence of
this kind of inspirited religion, which easily embraces television and the
modalities of stardom, in Ghana, Brazil, Venezuela and elsewhere, signals

overlaps in the styles that are deployed in religion, politics, and the sphere
of entertainment in addressing people and in processes of binding. An
instance of ultimate overlap is the example of Caribbean DJs who use
Christianity as a suitable public language to express and claim common-
alities (Guadeloupe in this volume), even though people are quite critical
about Christian religion per se. All these examples pinpoint the tremen-
dous capacity of especially Christianity, as a world religion par excellence,
to spread out and leave its mark in the public sphere, thereby affecting all