Page 160 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Practice 143

an important role as a concept that called scholars away from doctrinal and
official discourses of religions, states, and elites, and toward the “everyday”
actions, movements, and sensations of “ordinary” people. This reorientation
from a focus on large-scale social, economic, and political structures or
superstructures to the action and agency of people living within (or against)
those structures has done much to transform what scholars of religion take
to be legitimate, or even viable, topics of study. However, the optimistic
democratization of sources and stories promised by practice theory also calls
for caution, as anthropologist Sherry Ortner has suggested: “To say that
society and history are products of human action is true, but only in a certain
ironic sense. They are rarely the products the actors themselves set out to
make” (Ortner 1994: 401; see also Asad 1993). Analyses of religion and
media underscore Ortner’s point, especially when considering the rapid and
often unintended social and political transformations that media technologies
have effected in the past century; who knew in Marx’s day that in 2007
taking communion, being wed, and attending a Bible study in an Anglican
cathedral would all be possible as an “avatar” in Second Life, a virtual world
accessed only by computer? (http://slangcath.wordpress.com/).

The effects of practice

Many twentieth-century theories of practice were particularly attentive to
textual practices, both in terms of those groups they studied and their own
practices as scholars making use of sources. More recent approaches to the
study of media and religion have had to come to terms with an even wider
array of communicative possibilities, as digital media continually transform
the ways in which people engage with one another and the “real” and
“virtual” worlds around them, while older media, such as books and radio,
hang on as popular modes of communication. Practice theories have led
scholars to pay attention to the kinds of communication made possible
and circumvented by particular forms of technology while keeping them
from thinking of communication technologies as only a matter of scientific
innovation (e.g., Hilmes 1997: xiii). As a mode of analysis concerned both
with the conditions of material production and with the social relations
and cultural contexts in which mediated communication happens, practice
opens up a very fruitful path for thinking about conundrums of religion
and media. For example, why have almost all the cinemas in Accra, Ghana
been bought by Pentecostal churches, which now hold their services on
their stages and show their own, in-house films on their screens? (Meyer
and Moors 2006).
One of the most promising directions in the practice-oriented analysis
of religion and media is Birgit Meyer’s articulation of “sensational forms”