Page 27 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

16 What this book could be about

distinction between “transmission” and “ritual” understandings of
communication. The transmission model, he suggested, had inordinately
blinded media scholars to the more subtle and profound ways in which
communication is integrated into the fabric of daily life. Using the term
“ritual” almost metaphorically 58 Carey called for a “ritual” view of
communication that would understand it in this more organic, culturally
rooted way. Carey’s article, and indeed a good deal of his writing, is seen
as an important bridge between an emergent culturally oriented media
scholarship in the US, and an earlier, and in ways more substantive, schol-
arly tradition in Europe, particularly in Britain. This so-called “Cultural
Studies” approach to media scholarship has found a number of expres-
sions on both sides of the Atlantic, but can be typified in both contexts by
certain specific theoretical and methodological directions.
Theoretically, Cultural Studies has been rooted in a concern with culture
as a lived context, and has been primarily concerned with materialist and
substantive consequences of that context. This is significant in that it
contrasts Cultural Studies with approaches that have seen “culture”
primarily in terms of its products, and have applied normative categories to
those products. For example, it is still common to think of “high culture”
(the elite arts – painting, sculpture, “legitimate” theater, classical music,
even some films) in contradistinction to “low” or “popular” culture (televi-
sion, popular music, cheap novels, etc.). Cultural Studies shifts the terms of
the debate. It asks the “where” question I raised earlier, and sees culture
anthropologically, as it is practiced and experienced. Linked with an
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emerging literature on media in the field of anthropology this allows for a
very different role for media – seeing them as integrated into life rather than
60
in their potential influence on life. It is still possible to theorize an ideolog-
ical role for the media in such cultural terms, and this debate is not settled
within culturally oriented scholarship. Some scholars stress the autonomy
of media audiences, focusing on the ways they make meaning out of media
texts and experiences. Others focus on the ideological formations found
within those texts and experiences, looking at ways in which those forma-
tions are either determinative or contested by audiences. 61
Methodologically, the “culturalist turn” in media studies has taken
scholarship in more anthropological directions as well. Whereas the so-
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called “dominant paradigm” in media social science has been rooted in
positivism and its preferred methods of deduction, testing, and quantitative
empiricism, culturalist media scholarship has turned toward qualitative and
descriptive methodologies. Culturalist scholars tend to employ more
humanistic, ethnographic, observational, and interpretive methods. Case
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studies and focus groups are more common than surveys with generalizable
samples. These “qualitative” methods are more appropriate (and more
appropriate for the inquiry we will undertake here) for a number of
reasons. First, they do not presume a causal relationship between media-as-