Page 93 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

76 Angela Zito

The orientation to practice theory in religious studies also lined up with
a growing interest in embodiment, a trend whose first era culminated with
the publication in 1989 of the three volume collection in the Zone series,
Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Feher et al. 1989). 7
In media studies, Nick Couldry has recently called openly for “Theorising
Media as Practice,” finding it necessary to demand a project to “decentre
media research from the study of media texts or production structures
(important though these are) and to redirect it on the study of the open-
ended range of practices focused directly or indirectly on media” (2004:
117). By now, this wish to move a field away from such dualisms as text-
structure should seem quite familiar. That Coudry published this piece in
the journal of Social Semiotics is telling. He feels that a turn to practice will
encourage focus on “what people are doing in relation to media across a
whole range of situations and contexts” (2004: 119). He rehearses, as we
have here, the promise of rescue from an “older notion of culture as internal
ideas or meanings” but draws our attention to the routine and unconscious
dimension of practice, its embeddedness in discursive systems that regulate
the do-able, and the fact that certain practices anchor others, creating a
hierarchy. 8
Coming as it did at the end of a thirty-year period in the social sciences of
devotion to structure and symbol as the centerpiece of cultural analysis, the
new emphasis on practice allowed a less reified, more dynamic understanding
of social life as produced in time. Humans engage as social actors, become
persons, in the materiality of communication itself, a ceaseless process
of linguistic and physical labor that produces themselves and the world
in simultaneity. They become subjects in those socially material worlds
through the forms of language and gesture—a process intimately connected
to how bodies have been imagined and lived (Zito and Barlow 1994: 9).
This approach even more importantly moves cultural theory to a frontal
engagement with subjectivity and personhood, one moment in the process of
“mediation” in the theoretically most expansive sense of that term. It allows
more sustained and theoretically informed attention to other moments such
as reification and objectification itself.

Culture as mediation

As analysts of culture have restlessly propounded theories ranging from
functioning holism, to culture as specifically about meaning and from
there to culture as practice, the fields of religious and media studies have
likewise been shaped by insights that have benefited from cultural theory’s
peregrinations. The study of religion has critiqued belief as a starting point,
widening the field of inquiry beyond texts and beyond the elites who have