Page 88 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Culture 71

Enlightenment history in what Jeremy Stolow calls a “powerful myth
about social modernization,” one that credits print media especially with
the “disembedding of religion from public life and its relocation within
the private walls of bourgeois domesticity, or the interior, silent universe
of individual readers” (Stolow 2005: 122). Hoover has written that this
historical moment has given way, empirically, to a world wherein media
and religion are drawing ever nearer in terms of functions: “[T]hey occupy
the same spaces, serve many of the same purposes, and invigorate the same
practices in modernity” (Hoover 2006: 9; see also Hoover and Clark
2002: 3).
Regardless of whether one invests in this version of the historical
Enlightenment rearrangement of culture, there remains the problem of the
implicit theory grounding such dualistic approaches as analysis. Stolow links
this powerful “myth” of Enlightenment culture to Jürgen Habermas’s work
on the public sphere and rightly reminds us that, though the secularization
thesis that religion will gradually disappear before various aspects of modern
rationality has lost its explanatory cachet, its corollary—that modern
media are inevitably agents of secularization—still carries on. In the zero-
sum game notion that mass media compromised and diluted religion, we
see religion privileged as an ideal matter of belief, paralleling the notion of
“culture” as mental, meaningful, circulation of ideas. The implicit theoretical
underpinning at work is a Parsonian isolation of culture (as meaning) from
society (as function; Parsons 1966). Thus, it is not obvious that a recognition
of the empirical shift in the relations of religion and media as domains of
social life that increasingly interpenetrate in the world (Hoover’s point,
and well taken) will automatically push forward new theorization past this
notion of culture-as-meaning.
In fact, James Carey’s famous critique of 1975 staged an early inter-
vention that, though pioneering for its time, called for exactly such
inclusion of the dimension of meaning. He rightly accused communications
theory of reproducing an account that was strictly functionalist, what he
called a “transmission” view of communication: individualist, utilitarian,
instrumental. In his prescient article “Communication as Culture,” Carey
proposed instead that communication should be seen anew in a “ritual”
mode, one that privileges “symbolic” production. In considering modes of
theorizing culture relevant to our studies in religion and media, I begin from
that point, a moment indebted—as Carey himself notes—to Clifford Geertz
and an earlier version of cultural anthropology that emphasized culture as
meaning (1975: 35).