Page 157 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

140 Pamela E. Klassen

conditions of capital, colonialism, and state regulation that have made
possible media production in religious arenas.
Drawing from Marx’s critiques of class domination without fully acceding
to Marxist historical determinism, cultural historians of early modern Europe
were particularly innovative in drawing together religion, media, and practice.
Searching for a way to make the study of popular culture and everyday life
a viable field brought cultural historians face to face with the constraining
effects of media upon their sources—texts written by the literate, dominant
classes were largely the only media durable enough to last for 400 years (cf.
Goody 2000). What could texts from an inquisition really tell one about a
peasant tried for witchcraft? When studying largely oral cultures, via what
media could a scholar access her sources? Instead of abandoning the study of
“ordinary” people, historians such as Carlo Ginsburg read against the grain
of such texts as records of Catholic inquisitions to find the beginnings of a
path for the study of the largely “undocumented” people of early modern
Europe. Ginsburg was particularly reflexive about his sources as media:

The almanacs, the songsters, the books of piety, the lives of the saints,
the entire pamphlet literature that constituted the book trade, today
appear static, inert, and unchanging to us. But how were they read by the
public of the day? To what extent did the prevalently oral culture of those
readers interject itself in the use of the text, modifying it, reworking it,
perhaps to the point of changing its very essence?
(Ginsburg 1980: xxii)

While Ginsburg and other historians were finding ways to critically
and creatively tease submerged practices out of the media—the texts and
images—on which their scholarship depended, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
was emerging with a theory of practice stemming from his ethnographic
work in colonial (and revolutionary) Algeria. Bourdieu articulated a dense
theory of practice that grappled with the theoretical significance of the
habits and minutiae of daily life. Bourdieu’s definition of practice had none
of the precision of Marx’s “human sensuous activity.” Instead, he argued
that practice could largely be understood only negatively, by what it was
not. Practice could not be abstracted outside of the pace and physicality of
lived time, as scientific reasoning might be; practice could not be pinned
down by academic analysis, because once it was recognized, it would lose
its defining characteristics as a taken-for-granted, habitual common sense
(Bourdieu 1990a: 82–3).
For Bourdieu, the concept of practice was intimately tied to his
understanding of habitus, the taken-for-granted aspects of being an embodied
person who can operate according to the “rules of the game” in a particular