Page 33 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

22 What this book could be about

collaboration involves methodology and theory as well as the more prac-
tical aspects of conducting the field research and getting the interviews and
observations done. A good deal of the insight I will share here was thus
developed collaboratively, too, and I will endeavor to credit my colleagues
as I go along, both for their fieldwork and for their insights and ideas. The
larger project is devoted to understanding meaning-making in the media
age, of which religious meaning-making is thought to be a central compo-
nent. We wanted, throughout our studies, to model an approach to social
and cultural analysis that gives religion its due in a way that much
previous work in media studies (and in interpretive sociology, for that
matter) has not. A description of this project and its methodology appears
as the Appendix of this book.
Before I conclude, it is important to say a few things about the central
themes of this discussion: religion and media. It is conventional in a work
such as this to begin with a definition of terms, and these are, of course,
the big terms here. I intend my working definitions to become clearer as
we proceed through the book, but there are a few things I should say at
this point. First is my definition of “religion.” Do I mean the specific reli-
gions of the West, of monotheism? Do I mean the established religions in
other contexts? Do I mean “new” or “emerging” religions? Do I mean the
received traditions of those religions? Do I mean “traditional” religions
such as those studied by anthropologists “over there”? Do I mean explicit
or implicit religious practice? Do I mean those things that are sometimes
called “quasi-religions”? “Religion” as a label has lately become problem-
atic. Do I mean “spirituality” or “transcendence,” terms that are more
current? Do I mean “effervescence” (a term from Durkheim), or do I
mean the kind of religion William James (and, more recently, Charles
Taylor) wrote of? Do I mean “substantive” or “functional” religion (terms
from Peter Berger)? Do I mean a “sacred canopy” or a “golden bough,” or
“bliss,” or the numinous, or the axis mundi? Do I mean more mundane,
“religion-like” practices, or the “dry rituals” of religion decried in many
critiques of late modern bourgeois culture? Do I mean “the Madonna” or
Madonna?
Well, I guess I mean all of these things, and this is not an intellectual
dodge. There is, of course, a danger in claiming so many things as “reli-
gious,” that it becomes a meaningless category. On one level, it is
important for a project such as this one to open itself to the varieties of
religious, and quasi-religious, and implicitly religious, experiences as they
are expressed and experienced by the people with whom we will talk. One
of the advantages of such interventions is that we can come to understand
how they are defining these things in personal contexts where those defini-
tions are undoubtedly changing along with the definitions in the larger
culture. It is important, also, to be able to account for the ways those defi-
nitions and understandings are interacting with such resources as media.