Page 25 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

in order to prevent their articles from fueling more hatred and violence. Yet rep-
resenting occurrences of violence without a clearly identi¤able origin risks hav-
ing the opposite effect from the one intended. If violence is without any signs
of identity or responsibility, then violence in different places and circumstances
begins to look alike. The more that violence is abstracted from any concrete con-
text and speci¤city, hence occurring potentially everywhere, the more it may
inspire fear and—as a possible response to this—a recourse to more violence.
An ironic implication is that, if transparency is sacri¤ced for the sake of the
common good, effacing particular religious identi¤cations actually undermines
the peace and civility which this journalistic strategy desperately seeks to evoke.
The relation between religions’ mediated presence in the public and identity
politics is addressed differently in Rosalind Hackett’s discussion, in chapter 8,
of the contestations of the various religious communities in South Africa, no-
tably the minority groups, about reapportioning airtime. An investigation of the
negotiations over public religious broadcasting at the South African Broadcast-
ing Corporation (SABC; a public service broadcaster), which came to a head
as South Africa moved into its post-apartheid phase in the 1990s, brings into
view how religious identities are implicated in and transformed through the
media politics of the state. The South African case demonstrates the increased
centrality of the media for the identity and survival of religious collectivities.
Both the identities and actions of religious groups are increasingly located in,
and de¤ned by, the interface of modern media. These media have become cru-
cially important for shaping attitudes of religious tolerance or intolerance, and
in managing religious diversity, with new religious movements and minority
groups particularly vulnerable in this respect. Since the creation of the Religious
Broadcasting Panel (RBP) in 1994, the reapportioning of airtime for the coun-
try’s religious groups has been a key element in the refashioning of the South
African state, with these religious groups appealing to their constitutional and
international human rights to claim freedom of religion and freedom of ex-
pression.
The politics of making visible and keeping secret take on a particular saliency
in the case of media representations of Aboriginal traditional practices, where,
as Faye Ginsburg points out in chapter 9, mediated representations of indige-
nous culture in the modern public sphere have been highly contested. The par-
ticular claim to visibility upon which media as video and ¤lm thrive stands in
a strong tension with Aboriginal politics of representation of the sacred and
secret. What this means for representing a particular Aboriginal practice de-
pends on the complex ways in which mediation and identity politics interrelate
at different historical moments. Ethnographic ¤lm projects in Central Australia
made in the 1970s representing the spectacular Warlpiri ¤re used the overvoice
of the all-knowing outsider and were based on expectations that Aboriginal tra-
ditional practices would disappear. A decade later the ¤re ceremony was re-
corded through a community video project in the 1980s as part of an activist
project to take control over representation in local terms. Spurred by a desire to
block the penetration of Western television, this project also sought to deter-

14 Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors