Page 45 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

28 Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips

appeal of these forms lies in the specific ways through which they affect their
beholders via the senses and the body.
Second, as already intimated, sensational forms address and form people’s
bodies and senses in distinct ways. Morgan has shown that religious images
are embedded in a specific didactics of vision that entails particular “looking
acts” (1998: 8), while Hirschkind (2006) has emphasized that listening is a
practice that is far removed from mere “hearing” in that it depends on the
genesis of specific dispositions and sensibilities. In both instances, piety is
achieved via a sustained work on the body and the senses that mobilizes the
eye and the ear. Liz James has analyzed the Byzantine church as a “space
that appeals to all the senses,” “a space that places the body and the body’s
relation to the spiritual at the centre of its display” (2004: 504). Showing that
the material and sensual intersect in achieving the spiritual, she highlights
the centrality of “lower senses” such as smell, touch, and taste to Byzantine
religiosity. That it would be mistaken to exempt texts from having a sensory
appeal is clarified by Jeremy Stolow’s (2007a) analysis of how Jewish text
books (sold via the Internet) are made to embody a sense of gravity that seeks
to anchor readers in a tactile, rather than a merely intellectual, relationship
with the text. In all these examples, the sensorium and the body are shown to
be key sites for shaping religious subjectivities, in which personal inclinations
and shared sensational forms merge into a distinct habitus.
Third, the bodily and sensory modes that are implied in forming religious
subjects are also key to invoking and affirming links among them. In this
sense, aesthetics is also central to the making of religious communities that
thrive on a shared aesthetic style (Maffesoli 1996; Meyer 2004; Morgan
2007). Inducing as well as expressing shared moods, a shared religious
style—materializing in, for example, collective prayer, a shared corpus of
songs, images, and modes of looking, symbols and rituals, but also a similar
clothing style and material culture—makes people feel at home. Sharing
a common aesthetic style via a common religious affiliation generates not
only feelings of togetherness but speaks to and mirrors particular moods
and sentiments. Such experiences of sharing also modulate people into a
particular, common appearance and thus underpin a collective religious
identity, which becomes a gestalt. Shared religious aesthetics may also play a
key role in vesting hitherto secular spaces with religious power, as shown by
Allen and Mary Roberts’ (2003) analysis of the sacralization of urban Senegal
that occurs through the omnipresence of images of the Sufi Saint Sheikh
Amadou Bamba in public space. The role of aesthetics in the formation of
shared religious identities and their public appearance will certainly require
more attention in the future.