Page 14 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Preface xiii

are even more engaged by the study of media, a wide range of academic
scholarship has explored the subject. Anthropology, cultural studies, media
studies, visual and material culture, film studies, and religious studies are
among the next generation of disciplines drawn to the study of media and
religion. The new paradigm that this book articulates has described itself
under a triad of terms: religion, media, and culture. What the third term
means will be considered in detail in the Introduction here and in several
of the Key Word essays. For the time being, it is important to say that the
religion, media, and culture approach is not limited to the tendency to focus
on journalism and communication policy, which is the legacy of the older
practice. The aim here is not to dismiss or ignore them but to expand the
remit and to change some key assumptions about what “religion” and “media”
are in academic study. The difference turns on the third term, culture. The
dominant approach taken here is constructivist in nature.
The Culturalist turn that began in the 1970s has led scholars to frame
the study of religion and media in terms that decenter religion and media
from traditional, institutionally dominated definitions, refocusing on the
intersection of institutions, authorities, and production with popular practices,
circulation, and reception. The intent has been to bring the study of religion
and media into productive conversation with the study of culture—indeed,
to see both religion and media as culture, or even religion as mediation.
This has meant questioning the uniform treatment of media as technologies
controlled by cultural producers. In that paradigm, media are instruments
for converting ideas or intentions into mass-produced forms for mass
dissemination. This assumption regards media as forms of representation,
ways of coding or symbolizing aims for the purpose of broadcasting them.
It is patterned on an anachronistic view of the human person as a soul or
anima generating ideas, a self-moving force that instrumentalizes the world
around it for the sake of communicating its will or intentions. The result is a
dualist split between form and content, soul and body that regards culture as
a symbol system manipulated by producers or communicators. The direction
of communication is fundamentally unilateral, a transmission from sender to
receiver. Culture is the set of symbols that register concepts, ideas or feelings
generating from the interior of human beings.
Such a conceptualization of culture fails to grasp its dynamic, dialectical
character, the host of discontinuities, multiplicities, impurities, paradoxes,
and contradictions that actually comprise the life-worlds of everyday
existence. Moreover, culture is not simply the apparatus that builds people’s
worlds for them, as the expression of their desires, or the desires of the
technocratic state or the military-industrial complex or global corporate
capitalism. Culture is people constructing their lives from what these larger
entities provide but also resisting them, changing them, hating, regulating,