Page 39 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

24 Birgit Meyer

between Candomblé, as a religion predicated on secrecy, and the public
realm (Mattijs van de Port, Chapter 1), the chronic instability of the
boundary between being born again and moving out into the world in a
favela in Rio de Janeiro (Martijn Oosterbaan, Chapter 2), and the per-
sonal strategies adopted by Bangladeshi film actresses to retain a distinc-
tion between personal identity and cinematic image (Lotte Hoek,
Chapter 3). Part 2 focuses on how the articulation of “Religion in the
Public Realm” questions the possibility of maintaining stable distinctions
between secular and religious. While Stephen Hughes (Chapter 4) locates
the emergence of film as a new medium that is easily appropriated to visu-
alize the gods in the interface of emergent debates of colonial modernity,
and Brian Larkin (Chapter 5) discusses to what extent the transmission of
tafsir via the radio is part of a project of modernizing Islam, Francio
Guadeloupe (Chapter 6) introduces the setting of Sint Maarten, in which
religious affiliation is downplayed, yet Christian forms circulate all the
more and are key to encompassing politics of belonging. Part 3 is devoted
to various instances that involve the complicated “Mediation of
Immediacy,” as in the case of the CCR studied by Maria José de Abreu
(Chapter 7), the Afrikania Movement and the ICGC researched by
Marleen de Witte (Chapter 8), the Raelian Movement that stands central
in Chapter 9 by Carly Machado, and finally Rafael Sánchez’ chapter
(Chapter 10) on the elective affinities between Pentecostalism and politics
in Venezuela.

Notes

I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Mattijs van de Port, Jeremy Stolow, and
Jojada Verrips for their critical questions, stimulating comments, and constructive
suggestions on earlier versions of this text, and Harriet Impey for her perceptive
editing.
1. The key proposition of the initial program proposal was that the relationship
between the postcolonial nation-state, media, and religion has been signifi-

cantly reconfigured since the mid-1990s, and has entailed the emergence of a
new public sphere characterized by a blurring of neat, modernist distinctions
between public and private, religion and politics, debate and entertainment.
The main concern of the program, as formulated in the original proposal, was
to chart the emergence of such new arenas in concrete locations on the basis of
thorough empirical investigations, and at the same time, to question and
rethink the rather normative, Western concepts that are usually employed as
analytical tools. Seeking to appreciate cultural particularities and yet to yield
generalizable analyses, the program proposal made a plea for detailed historical