Page 161 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

144 Pamela E. Klassen

that encompassed both the “official” paths to religious experience and those
routes that are less orthodox:

Sensational forms, in my understanding, are relatively fixed, authorized
modes of invoking, and organizing access to the transcendental, thereby
creating and sustaining links between religious practitioners in the context
of particular religious organizations…the notion of ‘sensational form’
can also be applied to the ways in which material religious objects—such
as images, books, or buildings—address and involve beholders. Thus,
reciting a holy book as the Quran, praying in front of an icon, or dancing
around the manifestation of a spirit are also sensational forms through
which religious practitioners are made to experience the presence and
power of the transcendental.
(Meyer 2006: 9)

Meyer asserts that religion itself is “a practice of mediation that organizes
the relationship between experiencing subjects and the transcendental via
particular sensational forms” (Meyer 2006: 18; italics added). As a practice,
religion as mediation must be situated both in the embodied lives of its
practitioners and in the wider networks of power and authority—from local
evangelists to capitalist systems—that structure their lives.
Rooting her analysis in attention to feelings, aesthetics, and power, Meyer
argues that while sensational forms sacralize certain kinds of media—in her
Ghanaian Pentecostal example she discusses “televised miracle sessions”—
they also “mediate, and thus produce, the transcendental and make it sense-
able” (Meyer 2006: 14). Meyer wants the concept of sensational forms to
draw scholars’ attention to the ways in which particular media are given
authority in particular traditions to mediate what practitioners experience as
the transcendental. She thus wants her concept to bring out the way in which
media—whether books, videos, radio, email—are given particular kinds of
spiritual virtuosity as paths of divine transmission in particular traditions but
also to situate how power, authority, and aesthetics shape the experience
(and practices) of people engaged in religious traditions.
Meyer’s concept of religion as a “practice of mediation” effected
through sensational forms is aptly reflected in Leigh Schmidt’s discussion
of the role of hearing or “practices of listening” in Enlightenment debates
about religious experience (see also Hirschkind 2006). Venturing through
stories of Enlightenment debunkers of religious oracles to the testimonies
of spiritualist mediums who conveyed the voices of the spirits through
levitating trumpets, Schmidt argued that new technologies made possible
both of these approaches to “hearing”. Enlightenment debunkers used
acoustic technology as “a useful means of exposing the absences in the