Page 205 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

188 Jeremy Stolow

Religion versus technology

The narrative of The Gods Must Be Crazy also presents a popular but ultimately
specious way of thinking about technology and religion as two inherently
distinct, even incommensurable, types of relationships between humans and
the cosmic order. In the first case, technology typically refers to the order of
things that are “supposed to work,” and the failure of any given technology to
do so is usually attributed to problems of misapplication or errors of design.
Religion, for its part, is often defined as precisely that which is not supposed
to work, at least to the extent that actions and perceptions falling under its
rubric are assumed not to produce any objectively measurable effects within
the natural order. So, returning to The Gods Must Be Crazy, one might locate
the “real” Coca-Cola bottle on a spatiotemporal plenum regulated by the
known laws of physics and also within its traceable, interconnected systems
of production (such as sugar refineries and bottling plants), distribution,
consumption, and disposal: even the haphazard act of disposal out the
window of an airplane. The Coke bottle that was apprehended by the
Kalahari Bushmen, conversely, would seem to be the product of a quid pro
quo: a substitution of rational and empirically confirmable relationships for
“enchanted” ones, transforming the once-mundane bottle into an object of
wonder and veneration or a tool for the performance of ritual and magic. Of
course, any serious examination of the iconography of Coca-Cola bottles,
or their ritual uses among so-called non-primitives—such as in advertising,
home decoration, or museum collections—would make it somewhat harder
to see where the Bushmen’s magico-religious worldview ends and the modern
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secular imagination begins. This in turn invites us to reflect further on the
taken-for-granted division between the natural and supernatural order of
things and thereby to rethink our use of the term technology with respect to
both religious and nonreligious regimes of thought and action.
Broadly speaking, technologies are pragmatic and productive forms of
mediation between human subjects and their environments, including the
constructed environments of social life and even the environment of our own
bodies. As the anthropologist Alfred Gell reminds us, technology consists
not only of the artifacts employed as tools but of the kinds of knowledge
that make possible their invention, design, and use. In this sense, the term
technology refers to all the material and social relationships “which make
it socially necessary to produce, distribute and consume goods and services
using ‘technical’ processes” (Gell 1988: 6). This would include what Gell
calls technologies of production (by which we secure the “stuff” we think we
need: food, shelter, clothing, communication networks, and other material
manufactures), technologies of reproduction (such as kinship systems, bodily
techniques, and other means whereby we domestic ourselves and all the