Page 33 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

16 Introduction

Another cluster of key words revolves around embodiment and sensation
(aesthetics, image, soundscape). This represents a distinctive direction of
recent research in media and religion, the result of interdisciplinary study by
anthropologists, film scholars, and art historians. The body has yet to receive
its due as one of the most fundamental registers in the cultural analysis of
media, and this is due largely to the lack of methodological resources in the
study of media to date. To this end, four scholars trained in appropriate
disciplines explore the various ways in which the senses function in media
practices as ingredients in the ways of knowing and feeling that interact with
media to create their immediacy and effect. Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips
revisit the modern word aesthetics, first coined in 1735 to designate the study
of how poetry operates as a form of sensuous cognition. They urge scholars of
media and religion to go beyond the question of art as visual representation
to the body itself. The implications for inquiry are considerable: How do we
study the body’s experience, sensation and intuitions, feelings and moods as
a principal aspect of the process of mediation? And how does the body enter
into the construction of private and public experience and the creation of
meaning? David Morgan develops a parallel account of seeing, understanding
the image not merely in terms of symbolic forms of representation, that is, as
iconography, but as cultural and biological operations that are grounded in
the human face, where image meets body. The fear of images arises in just this
corporeal registration of visual representation. And this fear has an august
history that is deeply invested in the history of ideas about representation.
Dorothea E. Schulz investigates the other dominant bodily medium of
communication—sound—by framing it spatially as soundscape. This enables
her to think productively of the power of sound to construct public spaces
but also to study how religion is embodied and felt by believers, becoming a
powerful form of sensation and thereby materializing the study of mediated
communities.
The key words religion, media, practice, and culture are located throughout
the warp and woof of the book, each serving to articulate and interpret
the direction of the field over the last fifteen to twenty years. The study
of religion, as Sarah Pike demonstrates, has shifted from an emphasis on
institutions, creeds and the biographies of influential leaders to the stories
and practices of groups and individuals who commonly appropriate materials
from rival groups and from the past to fashion new narratives. They freely
engage in commerce and marketing to position themselves to competitive
advantage and make avid use of both new technologies and traditional forms
of material and visual culture. Peter Horsfield surveys the dynamic nature of
media in recent studies, articulating several influential models for the study
and experience of media. In doing so, he is able to demonstrate how the term
is a key to understanding lived religion as a set of material practices, as a