Page 32 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

What this book could be about 21

know this way. The central motif of the book, then, is accounting for,
recounting, and interpreting these narratives of the self, of family (broadly
defined), and social relations, and attempting to see where we can go and
what we can do with that information and those interpretations.
This strategy is rooted in an implied limitation of such descriptive, qual-
itative work, 81 namely that we can only know the accounts people
construct of themselves and that they are willing or able to share in the
contexts where we encounter them. I hold that it is possible to see, through
these “presented identities,” how those identities are 1) modulated by or
inflected with religious impulses and meanings, and 2) so modulated or
inflected through or with reference to media experience and practice. I will
discuss the methodological extents and limits of this approach in more
detail in later chapters. I will argue, further, that these constructions have
significance beyond the particular intervention of an interview or observa-
tion, and that they are important in relation to other questions,
approaches, and methods as well.
As I have said, some of the claims that have been made about the rela-
tionship of media to religion are rather large, grand, and epochal in
nature. There are some practical reasons that support the field-theoretical
approach I am outlining here, particularly when we think about these
things in relationship to the “larger” questions addressed by others. An
important one is the fact that we can never actually know very much
definitively about some of those larger questions, anyway. The whole ques-
tion of whether media technologies have come to fundamentally alter our
perceptual and social capacities, or whether, historically, cultures can be
defined by their media, can’t be answered because we don’t have a
“parallel universe” without media to which we can compare this one. In
the industrialized West, for all practical purposes, no one does not have
media, and those who might not are so different in other ways so as to
make empirical comparison problematic. Many opportunities to conduct
panel-like studies of societies “before” and “after” television (in South
Africa, where it was introduced rather late, for example, or in Fiji) were
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largely missed. So, what we have instead are the faint tracings of the more
gradual introduction of media into the context of daily, domestic life, trac-
ings that are probably more amenable to the kind of close descriptive
analysis proposed here than to some other approaches.
Another argument for going to the field, to the context of media recep-
tion, is the obvious one that it is accessible. There is, of course, a large and
important scholarly and conceptual legacy that addresses itself to this kind
of study, one that I acknowledge and will refer to at important points
along the way.
The field material I will discuss comes from a larger and more compre-
hensive set of studies. The accounts in later chapters were developed out of
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studies undertaken by a team of researchers working collaboratively. This