Page 188 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Religion 171

“coevelness” that recognizes “cotemporality as the condition for truly
dialectical confrontations between persons as well as societies” (Fabian
1983: 164). Formal theories of religion tend to hinder the study of religion
from the ground up. They often make us more distant from than intimate
with the subjects we study.
Examples of religious people literally doing their work on the ground,
such as Hmong shamans in hospital parking lots and Christian Goths in dusty
festival campsites, are new hybrid forms of religious expression. Religious
heterotopia—these other and unexpected places—are a new religious frontier:
festivals, teenage Internet communities, city streets, hospital parking lots,
roadside shrines, home altars, and bodily practices. Scholars are not only
looking in different places for religion but religious men and women today
are likely to carry on with their beliefs and practices in their homes and back
yards as well as in churches and temples. Muslim punks pulling out their
prayer rugs, Days of the Dead altars, chants of “Hare Krishna” on stage,
and roadside shrines are not the primitive relics of obsolete religions. Like
online teenage witches, they are ancient traditions adapting to and shaping
an Internet generation. By bringing together Christian right-to-life Goths,
Krishna hard-core animal rights activists, and Muslim rappers, I want to
challenge assumptions about religion and popular media. Important religious
trends begin at the margins, in other spaces, and in larger, more recognizable
religious institutions. Clearly, expressions of religious commitment and
religious questioning are evident in daily life and bodily practice, including
the production and consumption of music, television, material culture, and
the news. Attention to lived religion, religion in the streets, and material
religion requires first looking around in ordinary and unexpected places
to recognize the plural religious landscape and the importance of what is
happening out there.