Page 87 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

70 Angela Zito

What can a concept as weak and baggy, as ambiguous and conflicted, as
“culture” possibly offer a new field beset by enough of its own problems?
As scholars began taking up the study of religion and media in tandem in
the 1970s, they were burdened by the attitude illustrated above by Lincoln:
that, in modernity, religion and “the media” (as a secular institution of civil
society) were in conflict. And behold, the very object of their epic struggle
was over the role of arbiter of culture as a quintessential value in modernity.
Yet the last decade has seen early scholarship on “religion and media,” which
had assumed that the domains of “religion” and “media” were in collision
and competition, give way, somewhat ironically, to an understanding of the
two in terms of a larger frame, usually glossed as “culture.” The difficulty
becomes apparent: are we speaking of culture as the discursively and
historically specific object of fraught struggle in human communities or
culture as designating an object of critical method and analysis? 1
The world today is bound in a matrix of very complex media whose
infrastructure allows ever more complex global interconnections. At the same
time, religious life has a larger admitted public presence than ever before in
modernity. The discourses of individualism, utility, and scientific rationality
that Carey points out in the excerpt above as dominating communications
studies, crowding out a version of “culture” associated with meaning and
religion, are, if anything, stronger than they were in 1975, the year of his
seminal essay. In this quick discussion of “culture,” I deal with “several distinct
and incompatible systems of thought,” as Williams notes in what must be the
primordial example of a “Key Words” volume. To glean something useful
from this reframing of religion and media in cultural terms, I propose that
we must understand cultural analysis itself through several phases: culture as
meaning, culture beyond meaning as practice, and finally, culture in terms of
“mediation.” We might also see something interesting, something new, in the
very invisible and unrepresentable at the edge of “meaning,” the secret that
religious practitioners seem constantly to imagine themselves verging on as
they seek to mediate their worlds (Meyer 2006)—something that presents a
sense of limit even as it opens, organizes, and politicizes the senses in specific
ways for specific, collective life-worlds.

Religion and media

As religion and media were brought into simultaneous view (from the fifties
through the seventies), they were, according to Stewart Hoover, construed
in conflictual opposition as a “dualism,” each half of which was considered
to be “coherent, transhistorical, unchanging…independent and potentially
acting independently upon one another” (Hoover 2006: 8). Lincoln notes
that this perception had its grounding in precisely the version of post-