Page 22 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture
P. 22
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