Page 23 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Rather than employing the notion of a uni¤ed public sphere, some have argued
that it is more productive to imagine it as a proliferation of publics, as a con-
tested terrain that ought to be thought of in terms of its multiplicity or diversity
(a notion employed in Eickelman and Anderson 1999; see also Calhoun 1992;
Fraser 1992). Others have proposed a somewhat different take and have empha-
sized that the central question is how particular groups succeed in presenting
their speci¤c interests as universal, as entailing the common good. The principal
question, then, is how certain groups succeed in being seen not so much as in
the public but rather as the public (Mah 2002, 167ff). Such a public, as the mo-
mentary outcome of the struggle between various groups with speci¤c identi-
ties and interests, is always inherently unstable and needs to be continuously
reconstituted. With the diminishing capacity of the nation-state for construct-
ing communities of belonging, sub-publics and transnational publics that are
grounded in religious convictions, imaginaries, and networks have become in-
creasingly important. Essential for the emergence of these new publics has been
the proliferation of new technologies of communication and representation.
A politics of difference is central to the development of such new publics.
Particular identities and interests are at play in the contestations between vari-
ous groups in their attempts to take up a position as the public. This may take
the form of highlighting their particular identities and interests in posing as a
counterpublic, a sub-public, or an alternative public while at other moments
and under different circumstances they may downplay such speci¤cities, nor-
malize their particular positions, and work to appear as the public in arguing
for the common good (Fraser 1992; Warner 2002). Publics are not bounded en-
tities but rather are involved in continuous processes of construction and re-
construction, of negotiation and contestation. Such contestations do not only
refer to positions taken up with respect to the secular versus the religious but
refer also to a great variety of positions within an emerging religious public. In
this regard certain fundamental questions need to be addressed: What roles do
religion and the mass media play in imagining and mobilizing new, and in trans-
forming existing, communities of conviction, producing new identities and
politics of difference? What forms of mediation and communication do these
more diversi¤ed audiences employ, and what styles of communication and per-
suasion do they use in their engagements in public debate? How are tensions
between making public (bringing into the open or making visible) and keeping
secret (refusing to reveal) played out in particular political settings? What new
forms of inclusion and exclusion are at stake, and which concepts of agency and
identity politics are helpful in understanding them?
The ways in which public religion intersects with the politics of difference
are addressed in investigations about the inclusion and exclusion of publics in
debates about family law reform in Palestine. Debates about what forms of
family law to apply in Palestine have been covered both in academic writing and
documentary ¤lmmaking. A close analysis of the different types of information
these media provide indicate that gender is implicated in more complex ways
than is often acknowledged, as Annelies Moors points out in chapter 5. If, in

12 Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors