Page 110 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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the fetishism of commodities, which must also include commodified media
productions, has often been cited as the engine that drives this apparent
stability of values by transposing human relations into exchange relations
amongst objects. Howeveer, the very notion of the fetish, which arose in
the intercultural and interreligious trading relations of seventeenth-century
West Africa, was originally invoked by Europeans to signal the absence of
any stable system of value for mediating exchange relations among people
of different religions (Pietz 1985). As the term developed in Europe during
the nineteenth century, it was turned back on the instability of values in the
capitalist economy by Marx and the sexual economy by Freud, signaling for
both a gap within the reality of modernity.
Though Marx and Freud worked against religion, they identified an
economy of desire, alienated and perverse desire perhaps, but with profound
religious resonance. Every religious form of life has a logic of desire. For
example, the Christian economy outlined in Dante’s Divina Commedia
was based on directing desire toward God and away from the world. The
Bardo Thodol of Tibetan Buddhism was based on eliminating desire. In both
cases, however, sin was defined as perverted desire (Chidester 2002: 141–2;
214). Electronic media, as multisensory, self-involving mediations of desire,
are engaged in a kind of religious work by mediating the gaps between
contemporary economic relations that are based on the manipulation of
desire and the desire for sacred values.
Second, electronic media are engaged in building symbolic capital
by mediating transformations of economic scarcity into sacred surplus.
In Destination Earth, the finite and nonrenewable geological resource of
petroleum is revealed as an infinitely available surplus. However, scarcity
can be transformed into surplus only through the spirit of free-market
capitalism. In that spirit of capitalism, a scarce resource becomes miraculously
transformed into a sacred abundance of unlimited wealth and power.
As anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff have observed, religious life
all over the world, struggling to adapt to globalizing capitalism, has been
drawn into “occult economies,” economic beliefs and practices based on
the expectation of abundant wealth from mysterious sources (Comaroff and
Comaroff 1999; 2000). During the twentieth century, cargo movements
in Melanesia, which developed myths, rituals, and spiritual preparations
for the miraculous arrival of wealth, anticipated this development under
conditions of colonial oppression. Now, in a global economy, where the
locations of production are dispersed and the rituals of consumption seem
to add value (McCracken 1988: 84–8), many people find themselves in a
cargo situation.
If cargo movements provide a precedent, we must recall that they went
through three basic stages in trying to access the sacred surplus. First, when