Page 20 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Introduction 3

alternative conceptions of communication, the “transmission” and the
“ritual” views, and pointed out that each was rooted in religious origins.
He urged scholars to attend to the latter model as the “cultural approach to
communication” because it regarded the purpose of communication “not
in the transmission of intelligent information but in the construction and
maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a
control and container for human action” (Carey 1989: 18–19). This cultural
view of communication deeply informs the present book and the scholarly
efforts in which its essays broadly participate. 7
The role of media as practices and forms of meaning making in the
construction of a meaningful world characterizes much of the interest of
scholars engaged in the study of religious uses of media over the last three
decades. By contrast, the transmission model tends to regard human beings as
passive receivers of media influences, which direct them to vote, consume, or
behave as the transmitter of the media wishes. Scholarship that has stressed
this model when studying religion has often been the work of those with
ties to religious organizations, which have wanted to know better how to
use media to convey religious messages or affect the behavior of believers.
But the cultural and humanistic side of the study of media does not wish to
lose sight of the human being as a moral agent, as a being capable of choice
and concerted effort directed by ideals, reason, feelings, and imagination.
To be sure, all of these unfold within environments of strongly assertive,
sometimes quite coercive social forces that often appear to leave little room
for choice or chance. However, many scholars have noted the place for
resistance and its power to carve out alternative or countercultural forms
of identity in the popular reception of media. The cultural approach to the
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study of the religious significance of media and mediated practices therefore
proceeds without prescriptive assumptions about what religion properly is
or how people ought to use or interpret media.
In an essay published in 1980, Stuart Hall offered a reflection on the
historiography of cultural studies, focusing on the work of Raymond
Williams, in which he found formulated two different emphases in the
definition of culture (Hall 1980). The first was “the sum of the available
descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect [on] their
common experiences” (1980: 59). The second, Hall summarized as “those
patterns of organization, those characteristic forms of human energy which
can be discovered as revealing themselves…within or underlying all social
practices” (60). For Hall, cultural studies does right to engage both emphases
in “the dialectic between social being and social consciousness” (63). Culture,
in other words, is both: the meanings that are embodied in the practices. Or,
to push their dialectical relation to the logical end: culture is the meanings and
the practices that produce one another in the three-fold dialectical process