Page 106 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Articulating culture in the media age 95

of a kind, lodged in space and time, as well as an account of expectations
about the future. As Ricoeur would say, the lodgment in space and time
integrates into the narrative a range of social and material factors that are
socially and culturally significant. They seek to represent coherence,
binding together sometimes distinct and contradictory elements into what
the informant would like to see as a seamless whole. As Ricoeur claims,
they necessarily encompass aspirations toward normative ideals. As a
project of social representation, they are rooted in subjective ideas about
norms and values, and about what is socially desirable and in what
contexts. Finally, they are an opportunity to make a certain kind of repre-
sentation, one that is focused on accountability in a location between “the
personal” and “the public.” These representations are the ones that these
informants chose to make in a context where some kind of normative
authority (in the form of a university-based researcher) is “listening.”
Thus, what we see in our transcripts is what these informants are willing
to say or want to say in that context. Which contradictions they choose to
address, to ignore, and to resolve in that context is significant. It is valu-
able information.
For us as observers, interpreters, and researchers, these narratives
should provide insights into a number of different things. First, as we
discussed in the last chapter, one of the most important ways we expect the
media to contribute to individuals’ religious and spiritual identities is
through mediated provision of symbols and resources. These narratives
can therefore be expected to contain evidence of that “symbolic inven-
tory,” seen from the perspective of the individuals and groups in the media
audience. Further, they can help us understand how the media symbols and
resources are or are not embedded in the overall symbolic environment out
of which meanings are made.
Second, these narratives should contain evidence of the ways that indi-
viduals negotiate with those symbols and resources, what they think of
them, how they use them, and how they construct worlds of meaning out
of them. They can also tell us how those resources are articulated, under-
stood, and used by particular people in particular locations.
Third, they should provide some evidence of actual practice or behavior,
but we should expect that they will also represent attempts to integrate
practice into the larger context of social and cultural relations. As I
suggested earlier, it is far less important to understand actual behavior or
to chart the distance between belief and behavior or self-description and
behavior than it is to understand why claims about behavior make sense at
certain times and in certain contexts.
Fourth, these narratives should be a kind of unobtrusive measure of
whatever contradictions informants perceive between belief and behavior,
between contrasting beliefs, and between various claims on their time,
attention, beliefs, and values. Fifth, they should also provide a kind of