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definition but extend it to include spoken language. A text would hence be a
configuration of verbal signs recognized as having coherence and addressivity
by its users.
With regard to the analysis of texts, the scholarly study of both religion and
media has prompted a dazzling array of literary and textual methodologies.
Scriptural hermeneutics constitutes one of the oldest Western traditions of
textual scholarship. English literary studies as a discipline emerged in the
mid-nineteenth century and since then has been formulating methods for
how best to interpret texts. Over the last half-century, media, cultural, and
literary studies have prompted and formed part of the linguistic turn of the
humanities and social sciences, which has sought to analyze the multivalent
nature of discourse and textuality. In Barthes’s memorable phrasing, texts
are objects of “shimmering depth,” “vast cultural spaces through which our
person…is only one passage.” Texts are filled with the elusive “rustle of
language” (1989: 31).
These rich legacies of textual analysis are well known and have produced
evermore ingenious ways of interpreting oral or written texts (or both).
Yet, some of these approaches tend to assume that a text is self-evident.
They seldom ask the prior question of how a text comes to be defined as
such. Addressing this question requires an engagement with questions of
readership, reception, audiences, and publics.
This is a crowded field. Media studies has a long tradition of studying
audiences. Earlier models of the “silver bullet” text piercing the consciousness
of the passive viewer-reader have given way to ideas of the active reader-
viewer wherein consumption of a text is simultaneously its production.
Put differently, any reading of a text generates a new text. An allied body
of scholarship on the public sphere has asked broader questions about the
notions of social solidarity that may emerge from the shared consumption of
particular texts and discourses (Warner 2002).
The anthropology of religion is also relevant. This body of scholarship
asks questions about how words and objects must be aligned in religious
ceremonies for these words to acquire spiritual significance (Keane 2007;
Engelke 2007). As Webb Keane demonstrates, in Sumba, Indonesia, for the
ancestors to pay attention to an intercessory ritual, a sacrifice of a particular
animal must be accompanied by a recognized set of rhetorical forms uttered
by a particular person. Likewise, a Catholic communion minimally requires a
consecrated host to be accompanied by certain verbal formulas pronounced
by a priest.
Histories and ethnographies of reading have equally illuminated questions
of religious textual community and how, through endless repetition,
religious texts come to assume authority and canonicity. Whether Bible
reading groups among South Africa’s black poor (West 1999) or a yeshiva in