Page 69 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

52 Johanna Sumiala

Appadurai’s insight is on imagination as a social practice. For Appadurai,
imagination serves thus as a catalyst for unfulfilled participatory needs
and desires, but it also has an ability to establish controversial imaginaries
powerful enough to shape and reshape social relationships. This calls for
the analysis of imaginal linkages and connections with the spectator and the
image activated potentially in the social and cultural practice of looking.

Circulating religious associations

The imaginary or imaginal associations that spectators make are heavily
drawn—either consciously or unconsciously—from memories, which
are culturally, socially and historically conditioned (see e.g. Burke 2001).
Especially interesting are associations of religious connections. In the story
line of AG, it was an acknowledged fact that both tortured men were Muslim
and that the images were taken by U.S. soldiers, representing a nation of
strong Christian inheritance and influence.
The analysis of religious traces in the AG images shows that they both
are filled with many religious references that are culturally and historically
grounded. In the image of a hooded Muslim man called Jabar, one can see
references to public executions. There are explicit visual signs of the death
penalty and the use of electric shock (still in use as one means of execution
in the United States). As a historical, cultural, and/or political institution,
public execution is found in all three religious traditions: Islam, Judaism,
and Christianity. In all of them, the victim can figure as an innocent martyr,
sacrificed for the sins of the others; or as an evil enemy deserving destruction,
as the shape of the hood in the first image recalls the robes used by the Ku
Klux Klan during ritual lynching or execution of African Americans as what
4
might be called, according to the KKK’s racist ideology, race-criminals. In the
other image a naked man standing before the camera and covered with dirt
and filth resembles representations of Christ on the cross or being scourged
by Roman soldiers. The humiliated Muslim prisoners may appear to some
viewers to echo the Christian visual tradition by occupying a subject position
similar to the innocent and unjustly mistreated Jesus, who was abused and
then executed in a state of abjection and bodily violation (cf. Sontag 2003:
40-46).
Media historian Jean Seaton discerns an explicit linkage between media
and Christian conventions of regarding suffering. I call this type of gaze
emphatic. Seaton states:

[C]hristianity did provide a vehicle for relating to, and expressing, what
could be called the interests of suffering. This has had an enduring impact.