Page 15 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

neering work on the genesis and demise of the bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit in Euro-
pean societies (1990 [1962], 1989), can help anthropologists understand the
emergence of new arenas of debate that are not fully controlled by the post-
colonial nation-state and generate shared ideas, sentiments, and moods among
people who do not necessarily have the same cultural or ethnic background
(e.g., Barber 1997; Eickelman and Anderson 1999; Meyer 2004a; Probst 1998,
1999). In this, mass media appear to be essential, because around the media
evolve alternative notions and possibilities of the public and of what it means
to be a person or part of an audience. The point here is not to employ the notion
of the public sphere as a universal notion but rather to use it as a starting point
in order to develop a more suitable framework for an analysis of the complicated
politics of identity in the information age.
Many criticisms have been leveled at Habermas’s notion of the public sphere.
The concept has been shown to be too normative and universalistic, making
use of generalizations based on particular historical developments in England,
France, and Germany; to be geared toward an understanding of rationality that
excludes other possible registers of critique; and to fail to scrutinize the politics
of access to and exclusion from the public (Calhoun 1992; Warner 1992). More-
over, it idealizes the initial stage of the classic public sphere by suggesting that
it is constituted beyond the realm of the economy and invokes an emotional
nostalgia because of its dilution through the forces of commodi¤cation (Han-
sen 1991; Negt and Kluge 1972). Yet the debates inspired by Habermas’s work
highlight a number of issues helpful to our understanding of the new condi-
tions in which selves and communities are imagined and the politics of identity
to which these imaginations give rise. Such debates point to the importance of
the media in facilitating new politics of belonging, which are at times separate
from and dif¤cult to co-opt by the nation-state. They underline the crucial rele-
vance of the capitalist economy for carving out a separate sphere of critique and
aesthetic expression, and also highlight the complicated and dynamic relation-
ship between the spheres of intimacy, the private and the public, implying both
the making public of the intimate and private, and the privatization of the pub-
lic. These issues and themes generate productive questions for ethnographic ex-
plorations of the changing relationship between state, economy, religion, and
society, the erosion of boundaries between these domains, and the new arenas
in which new links between hitherto unconnected people are imagined and
forged.
One issue requiring special attention concerns the presence of religion in the
public sphere. Habermas (1990 [1962], 67, 163) saw the emergence of the public
sphere and the public decline of religion as dependent on each other. He re-
garded religion as privatized, stating that religious convictions emerge in public
debate only as opinions and thus have to engage with other (non-religiously in-
formed) opinions in line with agreed-upon, rational discursive rules. Although
“secularization theory” has come in for severe criticisms (e.g., Asad 2003; Casa-
nova 1994; Martin 1978; van der Veer 1994, 1995), the decline of religion in the
public sphere continues to be largely taken for granted as an intrinsic feature of

4 Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors