Page 195 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

178 Dorothea E. Schulz

(between) them. By its very nature, religion renders palpable and perceptible
that which eludes human cognition and thus mediates between what can
be physically and sensually known and verified on one side and the meta-
physical on the other. In this sense, religion always entails a range of
materials and techniques to which we refer as media and relies on specialists
holding authority in questions relating to the proper use of technologies of
mediation. Religious traditions, to persist, need to be constantly translated
or “trans-mediated” into new material form and practice (Plate 2003; Meyer
and Moors 2006: 7). It is therefore useful to explore from a historical angle
how individual media intervene as means in processes of communication,
how they help to reproduce or rework existing “channels,” by generating
opportunities for religious practitioners to engage in spiritual and religious
experience. Rather than assuming that the adoption of new media effect
clear-cut shifts from one mode of religious mediation to another, their
repercussions should be seen as being more fragmentary and unsystematic
in nature, affecting particular messages and practices and engendering new
conflicts over authority, proper religious practice and experience (Meyer
and Moors 2006; Schulz 2006, 2007).
Depending on what venues of communication with the transcendental a
particular religious tradition privileges, its teachings and objectives are often
articulated and promoted through the interlocking of various media and
media practices. Some religious traditions privilege media that are external to
the body. In others, the body itself becomes the primary means of mediating
the world of the transcendental. Yet most religious traditions encompass and
embrace a combination of different media, techniques, and understandings
of communicating with the transcendent world.
Religious traditions importantly shape the ways in which media are
represented and acknowledged as actual “channels” of conveying a
message, experience, or mediating between this world and the realm of the
transcendental (Meyer 2005). This is evident, for instance, in how religious
traditions define what modes of sound production and sensation generate
genuine or “true” religious experience and how these modes relate to, and
possibly interlock with, other modes of sensation. In Islam, reciting and
listening to God’s word has conventionally constituted the orthopractic form
of submitting to God’s will (Larkin 2001), defined among other things by its
complementary relationship to reading and writing as modalities of worship.
In Christian history, there has been a stronger tendency toward seeing as the
authentic and authenticating form of religious experience.
Religious traditions not only differ in how they organize the aural-
oral mediation of religion; they interlock in various and changing ways
with regionally and culturally specific hierarchies of perception, that is,
of definitions of which sensory impressions provide the most reliable and