Page 97 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

80 Angela Zito

Ginsburg’s own project on indigenous media as it has enabled the formation
of new forms of community and subjectivity provides a fine example of
such intervention. Her essay, “Re-thinking the ‘Voice of God’ in Indigenous
Australia: Secrecy, Exposure and the Efficacy of Media,” analyzes the shift
in documenting (on film and then video) that has occurred in aborigine
communities in post-war Australia. This work moved from the hands of
outsiders who captured native religious life “on film primarily as texts for
Anglo-Euro consumption and study” to aboriginal activists’ own media-
making activities (2005: 193). She analyzes the filming of the important
Walpiri fire ceremony on several occasions: the first film by anthropologist
Roger Sandall in 1977 was viewed by Walpiri male elders and “unexpectedly
re-signified and actively appropriated as authoritative” (2005: 194). The
elders decided to perform the ceremony again, filming it themselves. It
was then shot a third time, in 1991. Each of these films circulated in fits
and starts, moving in and out of visibility. In contradistinction to Euro-
American expectations of informational transparency and flow, the Walpiri
are compelled to balance need for religious ritual secrecy with authoritative
transmission of cultural knowledge.
Because Ginsburg so carefully and flexibly follows several moments of
mediation, charting the agencies at work through the moments of practices
of objectification in film of other cultural practices like ritual, she can show
“that moving image media technologies carry within them contradictory
potentialities…” and raise “key questions for us regarding religion, media,
and the public sphere, and offer a cautionary tale regarding the profound
ethnocentrism that too often blinds the ways in which we understand media
and its relationship to collective religious expression” (2005: 200–1).
Birgit Meyer’s ongoing work in Ghana likewise approaches culture (and
religion) as practices of mediation in the broad sense I am encouraging.
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In her early fieldwork among Ewe Pentecostalists, she noted how their
appropriation of Christianity depended heavily on the mediating figure
of the Devil. His centrality paradoxically allows for the ongoing tangible
presence of Ewe traditional gods and spirits, now considered demonic but
existent and formidable nonetheless (Meyer 1999, 2005, 2006a). In her
later work on Pentecostalist videos that intersect with the rising market for
entertainment and broadcast media, wide open since state monopoly was
relaxed, she writes of

taking as a point of departure an understanding of religion as a practice of
mediation, creating and maintaining links between religious practitioners
as well as between them and the invisible, inaudible, untouchable, or
simply, spiritual world which forms the center of religious attention.
This realm is constructed by mediation, yet—and here lies the power of