Page 215 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

15

Text

Isabel Hofmeyr

Transnational textual circulation
Translation
Can religious texts be translated?
The Pilgrim’s Progress
The Pilgrim’s Progress in Africa

In the religious sphere, texts are tasked with onerous responsibilities.
Whether prayers, hymns, or incantations, all must cross the forbidding
barrier separating the living and the dead in an attempt to beguile the gods
and ancestors to whom they are addressed. Texts traveling in the reverse
direction must likewise convince believers that they are sacred messages.
Religious texts hence pose in extreme form the key methodological issues
that confront any form of textual analysis. How do texts create meaning?
How do they manage to address their audiences? What happens to texts as
they cross time and space?
Indeed, communication theorists maintain that religious texts provide
the model for mass media that address those who are not present: “all
communication via media of transmission or recording…is ultimately
undistinguishable from communication with the dead” (Peters 1999: 176).
However, what do we mean by text? In the field of media studies, text is
a cornerstone concept, particularly of the culturalist wing of the discipline.
Understood as a configuration of signs on which the viewer, hearer, or
auditor confers significance, text has become a flexible concept that can as
well be applied to a newspaper story as a shopping mall (Hanks 1989). In
this sense, a religious text would be multidimensional involving all aspects
of a spiritual event like its architecture, choreography, clothing, use of voice,
song, sacrifices, and the like.
Other definitions of text are narrower and single out the element of print
or writing. David Morgan provides one definition: “A text is something
written, published, stored, read silently or aloud, purchased and shared,
traded, displayed. It is cited, edited, rewritten, compared with other texts,
and taught” (2005: 89). For the purposes of this chapter, we use this