Page 31 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

different religious traditions, is certainly facilitated by modern mass media, and
yet it implies new challenges, concerning, above all, the maintenance of religious
authority.

Notes

We would like to thank David Lehman, Stephen Hughes, and Mattijs van de Port for
their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this introduction.

1. See also Gazette 2001, a special issue on mediated culture in the Middle East, and
Middle East Journal 2000 on the new media; on transnational television, globalization,
and the Middle East, see Sakr 2003.
2. On Islam/Muslim movements and media, see Abu-Lughod 1993a, 1993b; Eickel-
man and Anderson 1999; Hirschkind 2001a, 2001b; Larkin 1997, 2000; Launay 1997;
Messick 1996; Öncü 1995; Schulz 2003; and Sreberney-Mohammadi and Mohammadi
1994; for the growth of virtual Islam and cybermuftis and transnational Islam, see Bunt
2000, and Allievi and Nielsen 2003; and for many examples of ongoing research, see con-
tributions to the ISIM-Newsletter (renamed ISIM Review in 2005). On Hinduism/Hindu
nationalism and media, see Babb and Wadley 1995; Dasgupta 2001; Gillespie 1995;
Mankekar 1999; and Rajagopal 2001; and on Pentecostal-charismatic movements, see
de Witte 2003; Hackett 1998; Lyons 1990; Lyons and Lyons 1991; Marshall-Fratani 1998;
and Meyer 2004a. On spirit possession and mass media, see Morris 2000. The question
of religion and media is addressed by scholars from different disciplines and thus offers
possibilities for future, more interdisciplinary cooperation: for a discussion of media
studies, visual arts, and religious studies, see de Vries and Weber 2001; Plate 2003; and
Mitchell and Marriage 2004; and for an investigation of Middle Eastern and Asian re-
sponses to the events of 9/11 from a perspective of anthropology, media studies, and
political science, see van der Veer and Munshi 2003.
3. When applied to postcolonial societies, “civil society” is usually conceptualized
as existing in opposition to the state, which is characterized in terms of bad, ineffective
governance, lack of legitimacy and accountability, and the absence of democracy. Civil
society is expected to cure the ills of the state and to set in motion “development” that
will eventually result in political systems replicating Western models. Starting from such
an assumption and reproducing this modernization paradigm, the idea of civil society
takes far too much for granted (e.g., Bayart 1986, 1993; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000;
Hann and Dunn 1996; Mamdani 1995). For a summary of the distinctions between civil
society and the public sphere, see Calhoun 1993.
4. Long gone seem the days when anthropologists’ attitude toward the media could
be captured by the well-known cartoon of some Indians hiding their TVs and VCRs as
the anthropologists approach (although the cartoon itself is a misrepresentation, forget-
ting Powermaker’s major work on Hollywood and media in the Copperbelt). Since the
¤erce polemic between Faye Ginsburg (1994) and James Weiner (1997), anthropologists
have struggled hard to rethink notions of authenticity and to turn the media into a re-
spectable ¤eld of anthropological inquiry that yielded substantial work. Initially anthro-
pological interest in the media focused on what media studies found dif¤cult to accom-
plish: the reception side of the mass media such as radio, TV, and ¤lm, particularly the

20 Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors