Page 85 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

70 Martijn Oosterbaan

religious practices, yet incorporate many of their popular beliefs, practices,
tokens, and symbols. For example, it uses the term descarrego, originally used
in Afro-Brazilian religious movements, for their deliverance services. See also
Mariano (2004).
12. I approach the “separation” of evangelical identities according to Judith
Butler’s work ([1990] 1999) in which she describes gender identity as the
appearance of substance, which is the result of the performance of certain styl-
ized acts (173–180). For a discussion on the relation between religion, media,
style, and embodiment see also Meyer 2006a.
13. Some of the works on the relation between Christianity and media that have
inspired me greatly are McDannell 1995, Meyer 2003a, Morgan 1998,
Schofield Clark 2003.
14. This type of religious “occupation” of space links up well with the work of
Danièle Hervieu-Léger (2002) who argues for new approaches to religious
territoriality in modernity: the territorial modalities of the communalization
of religion; the geopolitics of the religious; and religious symbolizations of
space.
15. See also the work of Marleen de Witte who argues that becoming a born-again
Christian involves two modes of knowledge acquirement: a symbolic mode of
gaining representational knowledge and a mimetic mode of gaining embod-
ied knowledge (de Witte 2005, 6).
16. As writers such as Nicholas Garnham (1992, 365) or Roger Silverstone (2002,
763) have so eloquently argued, the intricate confirmation of the “reality” of
mass media in everyday life and vice versa is clearly not reserved for Brazilian
evangelicals.
17. Andrew Tolson describes the media technique of montage in the following
manner: “. . . as a type of syntagmatic structure, montage works through jux-
taposition. These juxtapositions may be emphasizing conceptual similarities
or contrasts . . . but the crucial point is that the connections between the signs
in a montage structure are implicit, not explicit. A montage therefore involves
the reader/viewer in an active process of working out the logic (if any) implicit
in the interconnections” (1996, 38).
18. Birgit Meyer (2003a) discusses such a form of purification through montage
within the domain of the film.