Page 21 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture
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4 Introduction
described by sociologist Peter Berger as externalization, objectivation, and
internalization (Berger 1969: 4). This means that culturalism regards culture
not simply as the effect of human activity but as the constructive activity that
makes social reality. Culture is what people do to negotiate their relationship
to natural, social, and economic realities. Cultural studies is the academic
inquiry into this interaction of everyday life, especially in the form of class,
race, gender, and sexuality as it has been practiced since Hall’s founding
work.
Shaped as it was by British Marxist thought, cultural studies has almost
entirely ignored religion. More recently, however, culturalism in the study
of media and religion may be defined as the humanistic form of study that
stresses the constructive role of culture in the investigation of religion and
media, or anything else for that matter. Always seeking to temper any form
of biological, historical, economic, or technological determinism as the
basis for cultural interpretation, the culturalist approach seeks to integrate
human agency with material factors that condition choice, preference,
and disposition. Culturalism regards meaning making as shaped by social
conditions such as class and prevailing institutions but not determined by
them. Aspects of human identity as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity
condition but do not prescribe experience, and they do so themselves as
cultural constructions, not as biological determinants. The aim is not the
study of mechanistic social forces that construct the world for individual
agents but rather the interaction of social forces and individuals in the
construction and maintenance of life-worlds, where phenomena at both the
macro- and microscales combine to shape an ecology in which people live
and interpret the world around them.
Carey’s delineation of the “cultural approach” was carefully studied
and presented for consideration by a key figure in the study of religion and
media, Robert White, who contributed instructive literature reviews during
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the 1980s and 1990s to the journal Communication Research Trends. In his
assessment of Carey’s work, White rightly pointed to the anthropological
debt of Carey, primarily to Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner. Carey
read Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures just after it appeared (1973) and
wrote a long review essay on it, arguing for its relevance to the study of
communication (Carey 1975a). Of special importance to Carey was the
anthropologist’s claim that understanding something as vast and detailed as
culture could be done profitably by studying a ritual. The whole lies encoded
within the part. It was a matter “of making large claims from small matters:
studying particular rituals, poems, plays, conversations, songs, dances,
theories, and myths and gingerly reaching out to the full relations within a
culture or a total way of life” (Carey 1975a: 190).This approach was able to
recognize the communicative significance of individual cultural artifacts and