Page 91 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

74 Angela Zito

It is not only Geertz’s attempt to construct a “universal, a-historical
definition of religion” that annoys Asad; his very definition of culture seems
to Asad to suggest a “distanced spectator-role” for those living within it as
they “use symbols” to “develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward
life.” This leads to imagining a cultural form like religion as isolated from
“material conditions and social activities” and reduced to consciousness (1983:
238–9). Asad instead proposes that we break down the (false) distinction
between technical and expressive action (1983: 251) so key to the version of
“culture-as-meaning” to which James Carey invited communications study.
Asad regrets that:

Religion itself is rarely approached in terms of “technical action”—the
disciplining of the body, of speech, which is used to produce religion in its
variety. Such disciplines are preconditions for specific forms of thought and
action, but they must be taught and learnt, and are therefore themselves
dependent on a range of social institutions and material conditions.
(1983: 251)

Wrapped up in that statement is a new approach to culture, growing out
of the post-structuralist critique, that is, that culture must be approached as
process and not as thing; that it is produced through the social organization
of material life, in time, and through human efforts; that this is all
accomplished through the agency of persons whose very subjectivities are
one of the products of this process. In short, that cultural life is conducted
through “practice,” another idea with a Marxist pedigree.

Culture (and religion, and media) as practice

If the first round of the critique of meaning, which cast it as ideological
production, emphasized the “ideological,” this round raced toward
“production.” By the time Asad’s second critique of Geertz appears in
1993, in his Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and the Reasons of Power in
Christianity and Islam, the “practice turn” in theory had overtaken the old
paradigm. As Asad puts it:

…the formation of what we have here called “symbols” (complexes,
concepts) is conditioned by the social relations in which the growing child
is involved in which other symbols (speech and significant movements) are
crucial. The conditions (discursive and nondiscursive) that explain how
symbols come to be constructed, and how some of them are established as
natural or authoritative as opposed to others, then become an important
object of anthropological inquiry.
(1993: 31)