Page 132 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Media 115

nurture within a mediated social environment that provides us not only with
the practical necessities for physical survival and growth but with resources
of symbols and practices for building insight, meaning, and coherence
in human understanding. We are not simply autonomous, independent
individuals—we are first and foremost mediated beings. Our physical, social,
and verbal environments are inseparable.
Significant development in rethinking media as culture took place within
Britain during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through the work of
Stuart Hall. Hall broke from the established understandings of culture as
the epitome of elite Enlightenment civilization and began looking at culture
as people’s everyday lives, redressing earlier elite views with studies of
the cultures of the working classes. Influenced by the critical perspectives
of Marxism, Hall conceptualized the dynamics of culture as conflicts or
struggles between forces of domination and subordination. Other cultural
approaches have emphasized more the dynamics of consensus and how
groups who share a similar language and interests work together to build
meaning within the larger system. In the United States, James Carey, for
instance, argued for approaching the study of media from the perspective of
how media serve as ritual performances for maintaining the integration of
culture (Carey 1989).
Approaches to thinking about media as culture depart from earlier
anthropological understandings of culture as something relatively fixed,
identifiable, and stable that is simply handed down and reproduced from
one generation to the next. Rather, human cultures are seen as diverse,
relatively fluid, dynamic associations that are constantly being modified and
reconstructed through ongoing challenge, contest, and negotiation between
different power centers that form and reform in institutions, groups,
subgroups, and individuals. Patterns of mediation can be important markers
in the formation and identity of cultural and subcultural groups, providing
the cultural web or framework on which interaction occurs.
The concept of media as culture likewise challenges the view of religious
cultures as stable, reified structures of meaning embodied in hierarchies
or structures that have evolved in a “natural” or ordained process of
development. The coherence of religious cultures and subcultures is
constantly being negotiated and built through communicative, cultural,
material, and political interests that work in an ongoing movement toward
both stabilization and change.
The view of media as culture also challenges the perception that the
nature of religiosity in a society is best understood through the lens of its
authorized expressions. The opinions of the institutional religious elite are
seen as just one opinion among many, gaining greater power in many cases
through their domination of the processes of mediation within the religion