Page 26 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

mine the formal, social, and cultural protocols for indigenizing media. By the
late 1980s Aboriginal interest in media, fueled by the desire to counter both the
absence and the negativity of their media representations, led to the creation of
an indigenous presence on state television, through a coproduction between the
Warlpiri community and urban Aboriginal producers. Whereas Australian na-
tional policies increasingly has granted Aboriginals religious expression, Ab-
original and state practices of visual representation are framed by different un-
derstandings of self and memory, and are grounded in power structures that
are dif¤cult to align.
Whereas new technologies of mass mediation and communication have en-
abled the construction of communities of belonging that go beyond the nation-
state, the examples presented here and elsewhere also indicate that this cannot
be equated with the demise of the nation-state. In various locations the nation-
alist imagery still has a presence of its own in the ¤eld of public culture (Arm-
brust 1996, 2000; El Shakry and Moors, n.d.). Yet notions of national belonging
are not static; they have also been transformed in some ways through the public
and mediated presence of other imaginaries, such as those based on ethnicity
and religion. Iranian cinema, for instance, is an arena where the rejection of the
monopolization of power in favor of political, religious, and ethnic pluralism
has become increasingly visible (Tapper 2002).

On Screen: Religious Representations
and/as Entertainment
New forms of mediation not only transform religious discourses and
practices but religion also features in ¤lms, videos, and TV programs in a frame-
work of entertainment or “infotainment.” Addressing the links between reli-
gion and the “culture industry,” it is important to analyze the implications of
the commodi¤cation and proliferation of media and religion as part and par-
cel of mass culture while avoiding three pitfalls. The ¤rst is to devalue the “cul-
ture industry” because it is held to be watering down true culture and to be “re-
feudalizing the public sphere” (the Frankfurt School perspective; e.g., Adorno
and Horkheimer 1993). This view is above all problematic because of its nor-
mative, even moralistic point of departure; in contrast, an empirical approach
is needed that seeks to investigate the particular form of entertainment in con-
crete historical contexts and to assess whose voices are privileged through this
format. The second danger is to overemphasize the capacity of audiences to ap-
propriate and even subvert the message (e.g., the work of John Fiske [1989a,
1989b] and related audience research, especially in anthropology). In line with
much work in the ¤eld of popular culture, this view quite uncritically proclaims
the people’s tactics to circumvent power and tends to overemphasize the agency
of audiences inherent in processes of appropriation. This perspective, trapped
in an opposition between oppression and resistance, is not very helpful when
the focus is on gaining insight in the emergence of new culture industries and

Introduction 15