Page 12 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Preface

All books describing themselves as lexicons of key words must trace their
origins back to Raymond Williams’s exceptional book, Keywords: A Vocabulary
of Culture and Society, the first edition of which appeared in 1976. This book
is no exception, for at least two reasons. First, key words are words that do
important cultural work. Not every word has done so. One of these forms of
work is to limn and organize a new structure of consciousness, a pervasive
and shared way of thinking and feeling. Williams was drawn to a growing
number of words that captured pivotal changes in English following the
Second World War. For him, compiling a vocabulary of keywords was not a
philological exercise akin to the production and raison d’être of the Oxford
English Dictionary. It was the purpose of certain old words and new in his own
historical moment that mattered to Williams. Key Words in Religion, Media and
Culture seeks to capture an important and recent turn in the social analysis,
historical study, and humanistic interpretation of religion as media.
Second, Williams’s approach to the problem is also echoed here. He
began by assembling a list of words that adhered in a cluster from which
his project gradually expanded to a much larger group of words. In the
present case, that core cluster consists of three words: religion, media,
and culture. But the rest of the words were anything but an afterthought.
Saying what religion, media, and culture have come to mean in the last two
or three decades among scholars deeply engaged in studying the religious
significance of media as practices, artifacts, and the product of various
audiences, publics, and institutions has not only been the impulse behind this
book but—more important—the dominant activity of a worldwide number
of writers, scholars, and media practitioners. In other words, the rest of the
terms considered here have served scholars as a primary means of defining
the core terminology of media, religion, and culture.
A number of volumes have been inspired by Williams’s Keywords. They
may be said to form a genre that consists of assembling critical terms that
serve as the primary conceptual tools of an entire discourse. Key words are
the nomenclature that comprise a field of inquiry, which is significant both