Page 101 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

84 David Chidester

the proliferation of cultural meanings within a conventional economic
framework, the cultural meanings of “economy” have dramatically expanded
within recent cultural theory to such an extent that they cannot be so easily
contained.
Religion, mediating the transcendent and the sacred, ostensibly situated
beyond or apart from these economic considerations, is intimately
embedded in the symbolic and material economy of media, culture, and
social relations. Though institutionalized as a separate domain in modern
social arrangements, religion is a key word, or focusing lens, for directing
our attention to productions, circulations, and contestations of transcendent
claims and sacralizing practices that operate within any network of social
relations. For the study of media and culture, this broader understanding
of religion is crucial. It allows us to explore not only the ways in which
religion, organized within distinct religious institutions, relates to media
but the ways in which religion, as mythic traces of transcendence, ritualized
practices of sacralization, and orientations in sacred time and space, might
permeate or animate a cultural field. This broader but also rigorously
theorized understanding of religion, which recognizes religion as mediation
and media as incorporating discursive and ritualized practices of religion,
fits the broader understanding of “economy” that has emerged in cultural
analysis.
Pierre Bourdieu wanted to develop a “political economy of religion”
that would advance “the full potential of the materialist analysis of religion
without destroying the properly symbolic character of the phenomenon”
(Bourdieu 1990: 36). The study of religion and media, however, necessarily
requires us to attend to the dynamics of symbolic and material mediations
within any economy that I call the “political economy of the sacred.”

Expanding economy

In academic analysis and ordinary language, the key word economy
continues on its long history of expansion to incorporate and encompass
more and more of human life. In Greco-Roman antiquity, the term had a
relatively small focus, referring to the management of a household. During
the eighteenth century, however, with the rise of modern states, the term was
redeployed to refer to the management of resources and the accumulation
of wealth within a larger collectivity that Adam Smith called “the great body
of the people.” Economy, in this sense, was political economy, the power
relations within which a society “arranges to allocate scare resources with a
view toward satisfying certain needs and not others” (A. Smith 1776: 161).
Within this expanding scope, the political economy of capitalism could
be described as a system for the production, distribution, exchange, and