Page 14 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

nations of community geared toward and framed by the nation-state, in the era
of the network society imagined communities are no longer con¤ned to the ter-
ritorial and conceptual space of the nation but are also formed in arenas both
wider and narrower than the nation-state. No longer considering the nation-
state the privileged space for the imagination of identity, scholars have started
to investigate the critical role electronic media play in the imagination and con-
stitution of new links between people and the emergence of fresh arenas of
public debate.
While the nexus of electronic media and the crisis of the nation-state has
been a key focus of debate for some time (e.g., Anderson 1991; Appadurai 1996;
Armbrust 2000; Castells 1996–98; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002;
Morley and Robins 1995; Shohat and Stam 2003), the role of religion in the
transformation of the public sphere now also receives increased attention. 1
Alongside research on American “televangelism” (e.g., Alexander 1997; Bruce
1990; Harding 1994, 2000; Hoover 1988) and attempts to recon¤gure the rela-
tionship between religion and media in the West (e.g., Arthur 1993; Hoover and
Lundby 1995; Stout and Buddenbaum 1996), there is a substantial, growing
body of scholarly work on the global rise of religious movements such as po-
litical Islam, Hindu nationalism, and Pentecostalism. Anthropologists and other
scholars increasingly engage in ethnographic studies of the articulation of re-
ligious movements in (and their contribution to) the transformation of state-
society relationships in postcolonial contexts. 2
Seeking to further our understanding of the multiple relationships between
religion, media, and the public sphere in the context of postcolonial societies,
this volume is divided into three parts. The ¤rst explores how religious dis-
courses, practices, and forms of organization change as new media are adopted.
The second investigates how the presence of mediated religion transforms the
public sphere and is played out in the new politics of difference. The main con-
cern of the third part is to analyze how the blurred boundary between religion
and entertainment, facilitated by forces of commercialization, offers new pos-
sibilities for the proliferation of religion while also addressing questions about
the limits of religious representations. To avoid the pitfall of reproducing or
misapplying taken-for-granted concepts based on experiences in the West, the
essays combine empirical studies with grounded theories. All chapters address
the key issue of the public presence of mediated religion and explore it in rela-
tion to debates about the crisis of the postcolonial state, the proliferation of
electronic media, and the rise of network society, as well as the place and role
of religion in contemporary societies.

Religion and/in the Public Sphere
In recent years the notion of the public sphere has often been invoked
as an alternative to the concept of civil society, which is critiqued for ascribing
Western assumptions of proper state-society relations to postcolonial contexts. 3
The idea of the public sphere, which originates from Jürgen Habermas’s pio-

Introduction 3