Page 21 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture
P. 21

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
                                                                        9
             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
   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26