Page 18 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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characterized by the absence of media. Yet anthropology has a long-standing
intellectual tradition of studying media. The seminal works of Jack Goody and
others explore how the introduction of literacy, as a new media technology,
changed existing modes of oral communication and instigated social change.
While Goody (1977) asserted, contra Marshall McLuhan, that the message can-
not be reduced to the medium, he emphasized the need to investigate changes
stemming from the adoption of new technologies in the system of human com-
munication, because these technologies have great implications for the content
as well as the social relations through which communication is organized. Al-
though the question of how the mass media impinge on communication in the
era of the “information age” is important, as argued above, Goody’s work re-
minds us that the question should be addressed from a historical perspective
5
(see also chapters 1, 3, and 5). Focusing speci¤cally on the development of
Muslim publics, Eickelman and Salvatore (2004) also employ a strong histori-
cal perspective in their volume, including a section on the historical emergence
of publics in the Ottoman Empire. There evidently is a need to shift from a
presentist focus on the mass media and their reception as such to a focus on
broader, historical processes of mediation, that is, on how the media operate as
intermediaries in processes of communication, af¤rming existing links and cre-
ating new ones between people and expressive forms.
If practices of mediation, rather than the (mass) media per se, are taken as a
point of departure, it appears that there is nothing entirely new about the link
between religion and the media. This may be obvious with regard to so-called
book religions such as Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, but it also pertains to
other religions that, for instance, employ diviners or spirit mediums in order to
contact and know the will of the gods. For, by de¤nition, religions, in one way
or the other, claim to mediate the transcendental, spiritual, or supernatural and
make these accessible for believers (e.g., Derrida and Vattimo 1998; de Vries
2001; van der Veer 1999). Indeed, “for religious traditions to continue through
history they must be translated, or better, transmediated, put in a new form”
(Plate 2003, 6; see also Babb 1995). Therefore it is most fruitful, as a starting
point, to view religion as a practice of mediation (see also chapter 14). Religion,
we argue, cannot be analyzed outside the forms and practices of mediation that
de¤ne it. This means that the current adoption of electronic and digital media
by Islam, Evangelical Christianity, and Judaism—the religions that are central
in this section—should not be regarded as an anachronistic combination of
matters held to belong to different domains, namely, religion and technology. 6
Rather, the point is to explore how the transition from one mode of mediation
to another, implying the adoption of new mass media technologies, recon¤gures
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a particular practice of religious mediation. This raises certain questions: How
does the adoption of the media as cassettes, TV, mass-reproduced tracts, or ra-
dio impinge on existing modes of religious mediation? What happens to the
message when cast through new mass media or broadcast through new, trans-
national channels of communication? Which con®icts and problems do these
transitions evoke, and to what extent are religious leaders able to control the new

Introduction 7