Page 24 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Introduction 7

in which media take a part. This allows him to direct attention to media
as forms of emancipation no less than as tools of oppression and social
control. Media operate as a site in which different agents, communities, and
institutions interact. In the utopian terms of Marxist liberation theology,
Martín-Barbero speaks of this entire process as the “resacralization” of a
world secularized by modernity. “I am suggesting,” he writes in a later essay,
“that we should look for the processes of re-enchantment in the continuing
experience of ritual in communitarian celebration and in the other ways that
the media bring people together” (Martín-Barbero 1997: 108).
This is very much the direction in which a great deal of study has gone
since the 1990s. The media are not delivery devices but the generation of
experiences, forms of shared consciousness, communion, or community that
allow people to assemble meanings that articulate and extend their relations
to one another (Shepherd and Rothenbuhler 2001). In fact, this is the way
in which media have always performed, but now their operation is not
controlled or interpreted by religious organizations but studied as cultural
phenomena by social analysts.
Though Geertz’s definition of religion was the most widely cited and
affirmed approach to the humanistic study of religion in the last quarter
of the twentieth century, it has attracted a number of critiques, some of
which are quite important to consider for their implications for the study of
media and religion. One of these is an essay by Talal Asad in his Genealogies
of Religion (1993), in which he argues that the search for an essence of
religion leads to its insulation as a cultural phenomenon from its actual
formation within the social, economic, and political domains of power (Asad
10
1993: 27–54). Geertz’s notion of religion as a cultural system, he claims,
promotes this isolation of religion as a self-contained, autonomous domain
of human activity. The quest for a single, universal definition of religion
can only ignore the social and historical aspects of human experience and
does so, Asad argues, in response to the liberal Christian anxiety about the
crisis of biblical authority. With the edifice of the Christian faith straining
under the attack of historical-critical methods of studying the sacred text,
formerly understood to be fully inspired by the deity and therefore the
only true religion, Victorian thinkers reasoned that Christianity need not
be undermined by scholarship nor bothered by its faulty claim to exclusive
truth if the focus of study were not its truth but the way in which all religions
responded to the core or essence of religion as most Europeans felt it was
most perfectly manifest in Christianity. This allowed them to organize all
religions in various taxonomies, usually organized chronologically and with
the help of a progressive march from the primitive toward the monotheistic.
Beliefs became the focus of the anthropological study of religion in the
nineteenth century as local variations on a universal essence. Geertz, Asad