Page 204 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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Technology

Jeremy Stolow

Religion versus technology
Religion and technology
Religion as technology

The popular melodramatic comedy film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, recounts
a series of adventures ensuing from the fateful encounter between a Kalahari
Bushman, Xi, and an empty Coca-Cola bottle discarded from a passing
airplane (Uys 1980). In the film, Xi and his fellow Bushmen are depicted as
prelapsarian “noble savages,” blissfully ignorant of the vast, technologically
advanced world that lies beyond the Kalahari’s borders, who marvel in
their discovery of the bottle as a “gift from the gods.” Over time, however,
the presence of this strange foreign object foments unprecedented social
problems for the Bushmen—envy, greed, and even violence—leading Xi to
embark on a mission to take the bottle, now named “the evil thing,” to “the
end of the earth,” where he plans to cast it back to the gods. In the course
of his travels, Xi is exposed to an even wilder, and hitherto unimaginable,
world of industrial cityscapes and mass-mediated consumer lifestyles,
evincing a cosmic state of affairs for which the title of the film offers the
most plausible explanation. Paternalistic and racially charged politics of
representation notwithstanding, The Gods Must Be Crazy resonated deeply
with international audiences (in the United States, for instance, it broke
all existing records as the biggest foreign box-office hit). One reason for
its success was that the film presented a powerful allegory about the place
of technology within the religious imagination and also about the “cosmic
destiny” of the technologically mediated modernity with which the film’s
audience was all too familiar. Indeed, how else ought one to characterize a
universe replete with such things as genetically engineered “Frankenfoods,”
invasive computer surveillance systems, and industrial mega-projects that
threaten the planetary ecosystem, if not as a world created by “crazy,” if not
merciless, impotent—or perhaps even now-deceased—gods?