Page 90 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Culture 73

Geertz’s most lasting contribution for our purposes in thinking of the
nexus of religion and media comes through his emphasis on the symbol as
the materially and publicly available means of discerning thinking and the
workings of mind. As he says, “Cultural acts, the construction, apprehension,
and utilization of symbolic forms, are social events like any other; they are
as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture” (1973: 91). Symbols
were (and are) media that are susceptible to semiotic analysis and decoding.
They form structures that in turn structure consciousness (Swidler 2001:
75–6). This approach clearly opens up a world of possibility for studying
religious media: those material artifacts including things and performances of
all sorts. It presents them as crying out for interpretation, for a hermeneutics
(Masuzawa 1998: 79–82). Geertz’s attention to the aesthetic dimension of
human activity—which he seems to have wanted to rescue from consideration
merely by literary and art historical scholars—led him, however, to slight
dimensions of social life imbricated in politics and power, and for this he
came under increasing attack.
Indeed, the 1970s also saw the beginnings of the critique of the
hermeneutics of culture as meaning read as though it were a text. This
critique proceeded in at least two interrelated directions: from within literary
studies, attack was mounted on structuralism and semiotics as too fetishizing
of the interior of textual meaning—as though it were given once and for all
and thus was ahistorical. Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production
appeared in English in 1978 (having been published in French in 1966).
Because of Macherey’s close ties with the Marxist cultural theorist Althusser,
his critique opened up “culture” to even closer susceptibility to study as
“ideology” and thus to questions of power and politics. From another angle,
this overemphasis on “interiority” and the decoding of meaning was felt to
lead to neglect of analyzing the processes of the production themselves of
the text or artifact or ritual—for understanding the material, institutional,
or indeed “social” production of these symbols that had come to loom so
large in the landscape of the human sciences as to have hijacked the entirety
of “culture” as an analytic. Both angles of critique were affected by Marxist
scholarship on ideological production. 4
Talal Asad has twice critiqued Geetz’s work on the religious as symbolic
(1983, 1993). In the first essay, Asad faults Geertz for neglecting religion
and power

in the sense in which power constructs religious ideology, establishes the
preconditions for distinctive kinds of religious personalities, authorizes
specifiable religious practices and utterances, produces religiously defined
knowledge.
(1983: 237)