Page 22 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture
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Introduction  5

             practices, and thereby endorsed the cultural studies model of investigating
             communication.
               Geertz also offered a definition of religion that was friendly to humanistic
             study  because  it  stressed  the  importance  of  interpretation.  In  his  widely
             read  account  of  “thick  description,”  in  which  he  contended  that  culture
             consisted of the webs of significance spun by humanity, Geertz asserted that
             the analysis of culture was not “an experimental science in search of law
             but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973: 5). Applied
             to the study of religion, this meant that meaning was what religion did for
             its adherents, who needed it as an antidote to the threat of chaos, anomie,
             or lack of meaning posed by a universe that did not behave as a cosmos, or
             universal order. Religion, therefore, is a system of symbols that provides its
             believers with a coherent understanding or valuation of life, a meaningful,
             ordered world in which interaction and interdependence are enabled. For
             Geertz and Carey, religion was a shared, communal, intelligible way of life.
             It was about meaning making, a project of culture rather than society: that
             is, a cultural system of symbols that consisted of a people’s ethos and world
             view, each of which Geertz explained as “the tone, character, and quality of
             their life” and “the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are,
             their most comprehensive ideas of order” (Geertz 1973: 89). To this, Carey
             added the insights of Victor Turner’s anthropological study of ritual in order
             to stress the importance of practice in the definition of religion. Human
             beings make their worlds through the things they do, such as pilgrimage and
             a variety of other forms of ritual behavior. Turner and Geertz provided the
             example and intellectual warrant to apply the study of mass communication
             to religion, shifting from the heavily quantitative study of transmission to
             the qualitative investigation of cultural forms of meaning making.
               However,  the  culturalist  study  of  religion  and  media  did  not  happen
             in a robust way for another decade or so, when White’s articles began to
             appear and younger scholars began to think culturally about the religious
             significance of media. Significant works by Stewart Hoover (1988) and Jesús
             Martín-Barbero  (1987)  represent  two  of  the  earliest  book-length  studies
             to turn the corner on the transmission model. Hoover framed his study of
             televangelism with the concept of “religious consciousness,” since he wished
             to understand how television as medium had changed American religion.
             Consciousness  became  the  register  for  his  investigation.  Though  it  may
             seem inherently inchoate and elusive as a matrix for measuring a medium’s
             impact, consciousness allowed Hoover to draw on recent anthropological
             theorizations of culture that stressed meaning making as the fundamental
             activity of religion. Furthermore, the term allowed him to avoid the sectarian
             influences of Protestant Christianity in framing his study, as “consciousness”
             readily captured the current spirituality of New Age and Eastern thought
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