Page 96 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Culture 79

Some examples

Two projects show what can be accomplished by situating the nexus of
religion and media within the field of culture as mediation: the work of Faye
Ginsburg and other anthropologists of media, and Birgit Meyer’s project in
Ghana on Pentecostal uses of media technologies.
Cultural anthropologists have done the most to theorize media studies
as culture closest to the terms I am after here. Deborah Spitulnick (1993),
Sarah Dickey (1997), and especially Faye Ginsburg (1999) have founded the
field of “ethnography of culture and media.” Ginsburg’s goal has been:

To resituate ethnographic film as part of a continuum of representational
practices [which] aligns our project with a more general revision in a
number of fields…that are concerned with the contested and complex
nature of cultural production.
(1999: 295)

Key to their contribution to media studies is the insight that media, in their
modern, mass forms such as newspapers, film, television, radio, are themselves
important cultural artifacts—not transparent utilitarian representations of
other aspects of social life but important moments of mediation that actually
impact the very life they are commenting on.

If we recognize the cinematic or video text as a mediating object—as
we might look at a ritual or a commodity—then its formal qualities
cannot be considered apart from the complex contexts of production and
interpretation that shape its construction.
(Ginsburg 1999: 296) 10

Ginsburg places actors at the center of the politics of media engagement—
including the producers and consumers, as well as the analysts who wish to
understand their forms of self-fashioning. Thus, choosing the emphasis of
the analysis, deciding where one’s analytic intervention should be staged, is
now more than ever part and parcel of cultural analysis.

One can see a trajectory in the theorizing of the relationship between
culture and media over the last half century as the objectification of the
category of culture becomes ever more widespread and the observer
becomes increasingly implicated as a participant.
(1999: 313)