Page 25 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

8 Introduction

points out, inherited the idea and plied it in his universal definition of
religion: “Geertz’s treatment of religious belief, which lies at the core of
his conception of religion, is a modern, privatized Christian one because
and to the extent that it emphasizes the priority of belief as a state of mind
rather than as constituting activity in the world” (Asad 1993: 47). Instead
of analyzing religion as a cultural system of symbols that act on the psychic
state of one’s beliefs, Asad urges analysts of religion to integrate it with the
study of the social exercise of power. It is not symbols alone that construct
religious dispositions, as he discussed in the case of St. Augustine’s willingness
to discipline heretics with the heavy hand of state-enforced authority, but
power in all of the forms that shaped Augustine’s experience, such as imperial
and ecclesiastical laws, such religious sanctions as death, damnation, and
penance, and such rewards as salvation and good repute (Asad 1993: 35). By
drawing out the stark difference between medieval Christianity and latter-
day liberal Protestantism, Asad makes the point very clearly that Christianity
is not a single essence but historically constructed as part of a matrix of social
forces.
Recent work on religion and media has not defined religion as a discrete
and universal essence but has regarded religion as fundamentally mediated, as
a form of mediation that does not isolate belief but examines its articulation
within such social processes as consumption, cohort formation, political
resistance, transnationalism, postcolonial nationalism, and globalization
(Meyer 2006a; Hoover 2006; Stolow 2006; Armbrust 2006; Morgan 2005:
220–55). This has meant looking at ways in which the self dissolves in and
emerges from mediated practice as unstable, discontinuous, and processual,
flowing locally and globally into extended communities and articulated in a
great variety of practices. Symbols are in flux and do not crystallize into fixed
formations of belief. The constructive action of media receives appropriate
attention as scholars move from former preoccupation with firmly defined
religious profession of beliefs to practice-centered study of religion as media.
Martín-Barbero directed his remarks to the power of the electronic church
in Latin America to create a site that was able to reinfuse the modern world
with the sacred by recognizing television’s ability to visualize “the integrating

myths of our societies” (Martín-Barbero 1997: 111). He cited sports events
and rock concerts as further examples of mythic resources aptly mediated by
television and successfully generating communities among viewers. A very
influential study by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz argued for the power of
television to facilitate such unifying or centralizing effects by televising “epic
contexts of politics and sports, charismatic missions, and the rites of passage of
the great—what we call Contests, Conquests, and Coronations” (Dayan and
Katz 1994: 332). Televised media events are not identical to their contents,
though that is often the illusion they exert. A media event is experienced