Page 104 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Articulating culture in the media age 93

engagement” with media also determines, in important ways, the extents
and limits of what we are able to learn in the field context.
We will make some assumptions about these interviews. First, the
assumption of constructivism will have us looking at these interviews
themselves in context, and seeing them as fluid and mobile negotiations of
the various elements and resources that constitute them. Second, rooted in
the pragmatist and Interactionist assumptions we discussed earlier, we will
think of these interviews as purposive. Interactionism would have us
expect people to want to make meaningful senses of themselves and their
world, and the concrete mode by which they will do this is a self-represen-
tation. This is, of course, consistent with what we have seen earlier about
the self in late modernity. The project of constructing an ideal self will be a
motivating factor in the lives, experiences, and representations of people in
their daily lives, and it is through narratives of self that they tell themselves
and others how this is working out.
We should not underplay the extent to which these narratives are about
ideals and what is aspired to. In his germinal work, Sources of the Self,
Charles Taylor put it this way:

To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity
is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the
frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case
what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I
endorse or oppose. 28
And, as we have seen, it is through representations of these ideals that we
both confirm and endorse them for ourselves, and share that self with
others.
The idea that we know and share identity through representation is
familiar from the theory of the pragmatist/Interactionist of Erving
Goffman. In his Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 29 he laid out a
“dramaturgical” theory of social interaction. By this he meant that we
engage in social life self-consciously and reflexively, and that we are aware
of what our language and actions symbolize about who we are, and we
consciously engage in presentations that reflect that knowledge. This is, of
course, consistent with the more fundamental Interactionist ideas about
socialization and social learning, which hold that it is through a self-
conscious role-taking that we come to know our proper place in the social
and cultural order. 30 Goffman’s dramaturgic perspective, like Ricoeur’s
ideas, suggests that this self-conscious representation is something that we
engage in more or less continuously, that it is one of the essential elements
of our social lives and of our human-ness.
What I want to suggest, then, is that within these interviews we can
detect self-narratives. 31 This draws on the pragmatist/Interactionist idea