Page 19 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

2 Introduction

has encouraged scholars to look for religious legacies in consumption and
the marketplace (Anderson 1991; Campbell 1987).
Media scholarship over the second half of the twentieth century relied
heavily on the theoretical as well as substantive fieldwork by leading scholars
in many other countries, including Latin America, Israel, Canada, and
Australia. Canadians Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan dominated the field
during the 1950s and 1960s (Innis 1950, 1951; McLuhan 1964). Whereas
prominent accounts of mass media such as those advanced by the Frankfurt
School at one end of the political spectrum or the critical pronouncements of
conservatives such as Ernst van den Haag, at the other, regarded mass media
as a menace to democracy, McLuhan celebrated new media as progressive
steps in the liberation of consciousness. New media disrupted existing
forms of spatial and bureaucratic organization, serving to revolutionize
the storage and use of information as well as the social arrangements that
invested media with power. Though he was widely criticized for promoting
a technologically determinist understanding of media, McLuhan infused
new energy in the historical imagination of the social impact of media. If he
has not been followed by a school or movement, his influence is nevertheless
widely discernible, especially as regards the bedazzlement of media scholars
by new media and the tendency to celebrate them for their expansion
of personal agency, a process regarded by McLuhan and many since as
inherently secularizing. One of the exceptions to this generalization is the
work of the Latin American scholar, Jesús Martin-Barbero, which will be
discussed below (Martín-Barbero 1987, 1993).
From the 1990s to the present, the study of religion and media in Europe,
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North and South America, Asia, and Africa has steadily increased. Since
the mid-1990s, an academic book series, an international journal, and a
series of biennial international conferences have fueled interest and served
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as important forums for continued research and discussion. A number of
useful collections of essays of diverse subjects have appeared since the mid-
1990s under the general rubric of “media and religion,” serving especially
to advance theoretical and methodological considerations of the field. In
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addition to these, other recent collections of historical studies and influential
monographs and essays have contributed to the preliminary formation of
media and religion as an academic field of research.

The culturalist approach

If a single moment in scholarship can be said to have birthed a new way of
thinking about the relationship between communication and religion, it may
be an essay published in 1975 by James W. Carey, “A Cultural Approach
to Communication” (Carey 1975, 1989). Here Carey differentiated two