Page 42 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Aesthetics 25

to charismatic televised preaching, from mass-produced lithographs and
photographs that induce a sense of spiritual presence to the emergence of
sacred sites in cyberspace.
At first sight, such media and religion may appear to belong to two
different ontological realms: one of crude materiality and technology, the
other a higher order of the divine or transcendental. Facing the adoption of
new media into religious traditions, however, scholars have come to realize
that this view itself is highly problematic. The very assumption of a divide
between religion and media stems from a dematerialized and disembodied
understanding of religion. Indeed, in consonance with the divides sketched
above, in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, modern religion came
to be regarded in terms of an opposition between spirit and matter, inner
belief and outward behavior (Asad 1993; Keane 2007). For a long time,
questions of representation and interpretation, geared toward understanding
inner beliefs and underlying meanings, have held a privileged position.
Pondering the nexus of religion and media has yielded an understanding
of religion as a practice of mediation (De Vries 2001; Meyer 2006; Stolow
2005) to which media are intrinsic. In this understanding, media form the
necessary condition for achieving a linkage between people and the realm
of the invisible: that is, the province of the divine or transcendental. Taking
mediation as a departure point also implies that media are taken seriously as
material forms through which the senses and bodies of religious practitioners
are tuned and addressed. In this way, in the field of religion and media,
alternative approaches that have emerged transcend the disembodiment and
dematerialization of modern religion and pay due attention to aesthetics,
recapturing the broad Aristotelian sense.
For instance, in his analysis of the relation between images of Jesus and
their beholders in the context of American popular Protestantism, David
Morgan (1998) advocated a more contextualized, embodied understanding
of religious aesthetics. Highlighting the affective power of images, Morgan
stresses the corporeal immediacy through which Jesus pictures achieve a
compelling presence, rather than featuring as mere depictions. Christopher
Pinney’s (2004) exploration of the ways in which central Indian villagers
relate to mass-produced lithographs of deities takes this alternative approach
of aesthetics further still. Situating these “photos of the gods” in a bodily
praxis of worship—“a poetry of the body”—through which images get “what
they want” (Mitchell 2005a), Pinney shows how in Hindu image practices,
the experience of the effect and efficacy of the image on the part of the
worshipper accounts for its power. Stressing that a neo-Kantian aesthetic
approach (as outlined above) is geared too much toward the disinterested
bodiless beholder to grasp images’ appeal and perceived efficacy, Pinney
coins the alternative term corpothetics. With this term, he seeks to recapture