engelke - religion & the media turn (2010)

MATTHEW ENGELKELondon School of Economics

Religion and the media turn:A review essay

Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Birgit Meyer andAnnelies Moors, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,2006. vii + 325 pp., illustrations, index.

Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture. David Morgan,ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. xv + 240 pp.

Religion: Beyond a Concept. Hent de Vries, ed. NewYork: Fordham University Press, 2008. xiv + 1006 pp.,illustrations.

A B S T R A C TIn this review essay, I consider three recent collections, one editedby anthropologists, one by an art historian, and one by aphilosopher, that reflect on what might be called “the media turn” inreligious studies. I situate these collections in relation to broadertrends and interests within anthropology, religious studies, andmedia studies, focusing in particular on the idea of religion asmediation, which involves, in part, a turn away from conceptions ofbelief and toward materiality and practice. [religion, media,materiality, belief, the public sphere]

The study of religion is undergoing what might beremembered in a generation’s time as “the mediaturn.” For one thing, this means that anthropolo-gists and others are focusing more than in the paston the social uses of media within religious life,

even of such old media as printed texts and painted images(if more often radio, video and film, audiocassettes, the In-ternet, and other of the newer and newest kinds). This trendis a good thing in itself; more importantly, however, thisnew work has, at its best, started a wholesale engagementwith and evaluation of processes of mediation as schol-ars attempt to rethink how we should understand the veryconcept of “religion.” Within much of this work, religionis understood as mediation—a set of practices and ideasthat cannot be understood without the middle grounds thatsubstantiate them. Such a perspective creates some excitingopportunities, if also a few dangers.

All three volumes under review here are noteworthycontributions to the media turn. Birgit Meyer and AnneliesMoors’s Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere focuses at-tention on two of the most well-developed arguments toemerge thus far: first, that the version of secular moder-nity in which religion is considered private is untenable;and, second, that mass media and religion are not, con-comitantly, irreconcilable. Religion, in other words, is pub-lic, and religions have not been killed by television. Hentde Vries’s tome (that is the best word), Religion: Beyond aConcept, reminds readers that, among other things, usingsuch terms as religion and religions without scare quotesand caveats, as I have just done, is either very naive or verybrave. His particular insight—shared by several other au-thors in his collection and made possible by this idea ofreligion as mediation—is that it is perhaps both naive andbrave. David Morgan’s Key Words in Religion, Media, andCulture is evidence of an arrival of sorts, an indication ofjust how important it has already become for scholars of re-ligion to consider their subject in relation to its media andtheir materiality.

In constellation: The books

With apologies to the individual authors—all 70 of them—I am not able here to touch on every chapter in any depth(there are 74). In the case of de Vries’s collection, this se-lectivity is made somewhat easier to justify by the fact thatnot all the chapters address the themes of media or medi-ation, although it is worth noting that the batch of essaysmost explicitly relevant (the eight in part 6: “Materiality,Mediatization, Experience”) are not the only ones to do so:Several essays located in other parts of the volume, includ-ing those by Jose Casanova, Jan Assmann, Charles Taylor,Veena Das, Regis Debray, Willem B. Drees, Patricia Spyer,Talal Asad, Michael Warner, and Peter van der Veer addressmediation in one sense or another (via discussions of the

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 371–379, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C© 2010 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01261.x

American Ethnologist � Volume 37 Number 2 May 2010

public sphere, secularism, icons and iconography, politicalideologies, and pedagogy). Even so, it is important to givesome sense of each book in and of itself, in part because thethree are different kinds of books and so not commensu-rate at every level. It is also useful, I think, to say somethingabout how—although they are quite different—these vol-umes connect in a behind-the-scenes way. The media turnis not exhaustively represented in these volumes, and yetamong them they not only include contributions by severalof the key scholars to have fostered it but they also providea glimpse of the social networks and institutional contextsthat have helped make it possible. Like other productiveturns and “moments” in the human sciences, this one is aresult, in part, of synergies and serendipities: the right peo-ple being in the right places and the right times.

Meyer and Moors’s Religion, Media, and the PublicSphere is the most orthodox and typical kind of edited book,in the sense that it is (1) organized around a particular set ofthemes; (2) framed by a theoretically engaged introductionthat situates the chapters in relation to existing literatures;and (3) filled in with a set of empirically grounded case stud-ies. Not all of the contributors are anthropologists—the ed-itors stress the merits of interdisciplinarity (p. 19)—and yetthis is the most anthropological of the collections overall.It is also the collection most obviously focused on mediain the mass-media sense: The authors look at film, tele-vision, video and cassette cultures, and the like. Buildingon the core points I note above, the authors here explorethree main issues in relation to the public sphere. In part1, Charles Hirschkind, Patricia Birman, Jeremy Stolow, andDavid Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner examine how differ-ent media technologies (old and new) can give shape to dis-tinct kinds of publics. In Egypt, for example, as Hirschkindshows here, complementing the analyses in his well-knownmonograph (Hirschkind 2006), the development of an Is-lamic counterpublic via cassette dawa (sermons meant toinspire greater piety) is made possible by both the materialand sensual properties of the medium (cassettes are small,easily reproduced, and easily circulated; sound is permeat-ing and plays mischief with the distinctions that a secularstate wants to make between public and private spaces).In part 2, Moors, Dorothea E. Schulz, Spyer, Rosalind I. J.Hackett, and Faye Ginsburg hone in on “public religion andthe politics of difference.” Hackett’s chapter, for instance,explains how minority religious groups in postapartheidSouth Africa have made claims to state-sponsored televi-sion time in the effort to ensure political survival and tocontrol their public images. Part 3, with essays by WalterArmbrust, Ayse Oncu, Sudeep Dasgupta, Rachel Dwyer, andMeyer shift the focus to how religious communities havecirculated and supported images of themselves throughpopular culture and entertainment industries. According toDwyer, Hindu nationalists have actually not been able toshape the political meanings of religious identity in film—

as they have in television (see Rajagopal 2001)—despite theworries of India’s more secular and critically minded middleclasses. Reading the collection as a whole drives home notonly the points mentioned above (about religion’s refusal togo private and the ease with which many religious commu-nities have incorporated new media technologies) but also,in good anthropological fashion, that Jurgen Habermas’sclassic formulation of the public sphere (even as amendedto factor in religion; see Habermas 2006) cannot be trans-ported easily outside of the West. “The point here,” writeMeyer and Moors in their introduction, “is not to employthe notion of the public sphere as a universal notion butrather to use it as a starting point in order to develop a moresuitable framework for an analysis of the complicated poli-tics of identity in the information age” (p. 4).

Morgan’s Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture isorthodox as well, although in a minor tradition—that pio-neered by Raymond Williams (1976) of unpacking impor-tant terms. As Morgan ruefully notes, however, whereasWilliams was himself able to cover all the key words heselected for consideration, his own collection is a col-laborative effort, bringing together 16 scholars in art his-tory, the history of religions, religious studies, anthropol-ogy, sociology, literature, theology, journalism, and mediastudies. The list of 15 key words chosen for comment “cap-tures much of the energy and focus” of recent interdis-ciplinary work, according to Morgan (p. 14), although noclaims are made about the list being exhaustive or defini-tive. His introduction is very good at charting the emer-gence of this work (much of it, even outside the anthropo-logical constituency, indebted to Clifford Geertz and VictorTurner). The introduction also includes Morgan’s encapsu-lation of how to understand the work on religion as media-tion, which “has not defined religion as a discrete and uni-versal essence but has regarded religion as fundamentallymediated, as a form of mediation that does not isolate be-lief but examines its articulation within . . . social processes”(p. 8). It is with such regard in mind that Morgan has gath-ered essays by Meyer and Jojada Verrips on “aesthetics,”Stewart M. Hoover on “audiences,” Johanna Sumiala on“circulation,” J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu on “community,”Angela Zito on “culture,” David Chidester on “economy,”himself (Morgan’s own chapter) on “image,” Peter Hors-field on “media,” Jolyon Mitchell on “narrative,” PamelaE. Klassen on “practice,” Joyce Smith on “public,” SarahM. Pike on “religion,” Schultz on “soundscape,” Stolow on“technology,” and Isabel Hofmeyr on “text.” The authorstackle their charges in a variety of ways: Some work fromtheir own research material (or that of others) to illuminategeneral issues; some provide more theoretical overviews ofconcepts driven by the chronologies and concerns of intel-lectual history. All of the chapters are clearly written andsuitable for students; teachers and other professionals willfind most of them engaging too.

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Review essay � American Ethnologist

De Vries’s Religion: Beyond a Concept is not orthodoxin any way, shape, or form. Certainly not shape or form: Atover 1,000 pages and also larger than average dimensions(7 1/8 by 9 1/4 inches), it is the kind of book that has to begiven a space on your desk and only moved off when you aresure you will not need to pull it down from the shelf againany time soon, lest it slip from your hands and cause injury(an interesting comment, perhaps, on the materiality of re-ligion). This book is a big deal, an event in object form. In-deed, you almost feel as if, when you first open it, trumpetsshould blare. Fordham University Press has certainly sparedno expense in its production (much to its credit), so you al-most feel cheated by the silence, as if a soundtrack reallyshould have been included. If I am being somewhat flip-pant, it is only to underscore the importance of this bookas a physical object in and of itself.

It is not so easy to be flippant about the contents. Ahandful of the 43 essays will be widely influential, and part6, to which I refer above, is, in de Vries’s own words (and per-haps to the chagrin of the contributors to other parts), “anespecially rich set of essays” (p. xiv). The importance of ma-teriality for understanding the idea of mediation is drivenhome in the first chapter of part 6 (reprinted from Compar-ative Studies in Society and History), by Tomoko Masuzawa,on fetishism, which ends with a compelling discussionabout the necessary and nonfigurative link between Victo-rian understandings of the African primitive and “the every-day mystery of modern economy” (p. 667). This chapter isfollowed by a pair of essays (the first by Stolow, the secondby Stef Aupers, Dick Houtman, and Peter Pels) on the re-lationships between religion and technology, one of which(Stolow’s) pushes for a definition of religion as somethingwithin “the indeterminate spaces of exchange between hu-mans and their machines” (p. 686). Next comes Meyer’s al-ready influential 2006 inaugural address after joining thefaculty of the Free University of Amsterdam, in which shesets out her idea of “religious sensations” and a turn toaesthetics (see also Meyer 2009). Zito’s analysis of televi-sion and religion in the United States offers reflections on“‘mediation’ in the deep theoretical sense of the term” (p.724; more on this below). Niklaus Largier, in a rather dif-ferent register from the essays already mentioned, offersa close reading of Robert Musil’s fiction vis-a-vis his en-gagement with the German mystic Eckhart von Hochheim.Extending this focus on the finer arts, Sander van Maas’schapter looks at how a small group of composers in the1990s stirred controversy by producing new religious artmusic (“Holy Minimalism”) much in favor with audiencesbut not most critics, and Alena Alexandrova draws atten-tion to the “opaque residue” (p. 772) of religious concerns(with truth, with iconoclasm) present in so-called secularart.

In terms of content and form, it is also worth men-tioning that several essays in de Vries’s volume, for in-

stance, Masuzawa’s, have been published elsewhere, mak-ing compendium a reasonable word to describe it. What ismore, although de Vries’s chapter is called “Introduction,”at 110 pages (including the 319 endnotes) and no mentionof or framing of the chapters that follow (what little he doessay about them is kept to the preface), it is perhaps bet-ter seen as a prolegomenon to any future “future of the re-ligious past” (see below). De Vries’s chapter and his otherwork in the philosophy of religion (especially de Vries 2001)are worthy of a review essay in themselves, although hereI can do no more than acknowledge that fact and high-light the extent to which his work has set the terms for un-derstanding mediation in the current turn (but see Stolow2005).

Turning now briefly to scene setting for this trio of vol-umes, I can say with no exaggeration that the media turnwould be much less interesting were it not for the generos-ity of the Dutch state. De Vries’s collection is the first offive scheduled books based on an international researchprogram called “The Future of the Religious Past,” fundedby the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research(NWO). In addition to the books, this program is sponsoring13 research projects and yearly conferences, which began in2002 and will continue through 2011 (and some papers fromwhich are or will be included in the publications). Meyerand Moors’s edited volume is also the result of a conferencesponsored in part by the NWO, along with the AmsterdamSchool for Social Science Research and (the erstwhile, butformerly Leiden-based) International Institute for the Studyof Islam in the Modern World. De Vries, Meyer, and Moorsall hold chairs in universities in Amsterdam, and several ofthe contributors to the volumes under review either holdpositions in the Netherlands, used to hold positions in theNetherlands, or have spent time in the Netherlands as visit-ing fellows, researchers, or frequent guests—including Mor-gan, who, with Meyer, Horsfield, and Hoover, has been run-ning a series of “Media Religion Culture Global Seminars”coordinated by Meyer out of the University of Amsterdamand VU University Amsterdam. Meyer and Morgan are alsohalf of the editorial quartet that runs the journal MaterialReligion (launched in 2005), in which many of the articlesfocus on media and mediation. The ferment is the productof more than these Dutch elements and funding streams, tobe sure, and, when you account for, say, New York Univer-sity’s Center for Religion and Media (especially in conjunc-tion with its advisory board and the university’s anthropol-ogy department), along with the Center for Religion, Media,and Culture at the University of Colorado at Boulder (es-pecially in relation to the biennial Conference on Religion,Media, and Culture, which is spearheaded by Hoover, thecenter’s director), you begin to get a good sense of the par-ticular admixture bubbling away.

Although there is, then, some justification for speak-ing of the media turners (if you will) in terms of collegial

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bonds and intellectual affinities, it is nevertheless impor-tant to stress that I am not talking here of a school or anorganized movement; no one is passing out membershipcards. And neither is the work in these collections repre-sentative of all the work that could be included in this gen-eral whatever-it-is label of “the media turn.” A good argu-ment could be made, for instance, that Webb Keane’s (2007)work on semiotic ideologies, combining insights from fig-ures as diverse as C. S. Peirce and Bruno Latour, has alsobeen central to focusing scholars’ attention on mediation,certainly within anthropology (see Eisenlohr 2009; Engelke2007; Manning 2008). There are, moreover, parallels be-tween concerns in European and North American linguis-tics, stretching back to John Locke, at least, and those withmediation here (see Bauman and Briggs 2003). Of the edi-tors of the collections under consideration, Meyer has cer-tainly engaged with Keane’s work, yet for whatever reason,the semiotic and linguistic sides of religious issues are notprominent within the volumes.

Religion as mediation

We should no longer reflect exclusively on the mean-ing, historically and in the present, of religion—of faithand belief and their supposed opposites such as knowl-edge and technology—but concentrate on the signifi-cance of the processes of mediation and mediatizationwithout and outside of which no religion would be ableto manifest or reveal itself in the first place.

—Hent de Vries, “In Media Res: Global Religion, PublicSpheres, and the Task of Contemporary Religious

Studies”

There is no school, there is no club, but, without doubt,much of the work in the books reviewed here exhibits acommitment to something like the goal expressed by deVries in the epigraph above. The quote comes from his es-say in a collection he coedited with Samuel Weber, Reli-gion and Media (2001), that has served as a touchstonefor much subsequent work across the range of human sci-ences (see Stolow 2005). That book, in turn, is organized toa certain extent around the contribution from Jacques Der-rida, appended with the transcript of a conversation center-ing on his essay, in which Derrida speaks of, among otherthings, the “irreducible bond between religion and media”(2001:68) and the centrality of the notion of “presence” inthe logic of mediation (more about which below). Not allof the contributors to Religion and Media agree with every-thing Derrida says (in the conversation transcript, Asad andJulius Lipner challenge him on points, and in his own es-say, Michael Fischer does too), yet his ideas set an agenda,certainly for de Vries.

In the work on religion as mediation, “religion” is oftenunderstood as the set of practices, objects, and ideas that

manifest the relationship between the known and visibleworld of humans and the unknown and invisible world ofspirits and the divine. Reflecting its Latin roots, then, reli-gion here refers to both a binding together (religio meaning“to bind”) and that which binds: practice and product. In-deed, in much of this work, the points of departure are thematerial channels through which the binding and manifest-ing are understood to take place. To take just a handful ofexamples from the collections under review, from this per-spective one might say religion is video (see Meyer in Meyerand Moors)—or sometimes not (see Ginsburg in Meyer andMoors); or religion is The Pilgrim’s Progress (see Hofmeyr inMorgan); or television (see Zito in de Vries); or cyberspace(see Dasgupta in Meyer and Moors); or even electricity (seeStolow in de Vries). Materiality, then, is very important inand for this new work. One of my favorite indications of thisimportance is found in Morgan’s earlier, influential study ofpopular religious images, Visual Piety (1998). A trained arthistorian, Morgan nevertheless chooses to refer to these im-ages as, first and foremost, “religious stuff” (1998:xi). Thissays something important.

One benefit of focusing on stuff—be it a mass-produced image of Jesus or a homemade altar to Shiva—isthe opportunity it affords for getting beyond that nastiest ofreligious-studies bugbears: belief (cf. Keane 2009). I men-tion above that Geertz figures prominently in Morgan’s pre-sentation of the media turn in studies of religion and cul-ture, and yet the work after this turn—and certainly thathighlighted in the volumes under review here—is not pri-marily about questions of meaning and belief. Perhaps notsurprisingly, it is Karl Marx (and Georg Wilhelm FriedrichHegel, especially Hegel), rather than Max Weber, who isgood to think with when it comes to mediation. More im-mediately, if not always more explicitly, it is the critiques ofreligion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1963), Jonathan Z. Smith(1998), Talal Asad (1993, 2001), Michael Lambek (2000; seealso his essay in de Vries), Derrida (2001), Masuzawa (2005),and others that guide the research. Many of these authorsstress how “the materialities of religion are integral to itsconstitution” (Asad 2001:206).

Practice is a necessary complement to product, as Ihave glossed things here. Practice, one might say, producesthe product: Religious stuff is not religious until it is madeso (at least from a purely analytical standpoint). Here again,Marx is particularly relevant, although it is also possible totrace the influence of more-recent figures (Marshall Sahlins,Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau come to mind;of the three, de Certeau garners the most explicit atten-tion from the contributors to these volumes). Latour (1993,2002) has also been influential for the ways in which hiswork challenges the purity of subject–object distinctions;in the emerging literature on religion and media, carefulattention is given to how mediums can be agentive (thusalso harking back to points raised by Marshall McLuhan and

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suggesting a link to Keane’s [2007] interests). Summing upmuch of this discussion in her key-word entry for “practice”in Morgan’s collection—and reinforcing a basic anthropo-logical precept—Klassen writes,

In the case of religion and media, the concept of prac-tice has facilitated a shift from focusing purely on themessage of a text, image, or sound to considering themedium in its many dimensions: how it works andwho controls it, to what range of human senses a par-ticular medium appeals, what people do with bothmessages and the media that transmit them, and howritual, theologies, and religious dispositions are con-stituted and transformed by different kinds of media.[p. 138]

One irony of this shift to practice and product is a newhumility when it comes to the very pronouncements onwhich such a shift rests. In the wake of a recognition thatreligion has no transhistorical, universal essence, there is,in some of this work (not all), a carefully considered uncer-tainty about the end of metaphysics per se. When de Vriestalks about getting “beyond the concept” of religion, hedoes not mean getting rid of it, or even some of the mysticaltraces it contains. In the following passage, the allusion tofoundations in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s otherwise antifoun-dationalist philosophy of language serves as a backstop forde Vries, but elsewhere he turns to such different figures as,again, Derrida (who once said, “I rightly pass for an atheist”)and Alain Badiou (see de Vries, pp. 18–27; Badiou being thephilosopher du jour who is an atheist but has no time forthe likes of Derrida, holding as firmly to an idea of Truth asdid Plato):

The study of “religion” and whatever may yet come totake its place depends upon a rigorous alternation be-tween the “universal” and “essential” (to be defined)and the “singular” or exemplary “instant,” “instance,”and “instantiation.” Without ignoring or disparagingthe invocation of universals, which responds to a deep-seated need that Wittgenstein ties to the “essence” oflanguage and our “form of life,” such inquiry must me-thodically, or at least strategically, start out from thesingular, that is the particular: namely, words, things,sounds, silences, smells, sensations, gestures, powers,affects, and effects. [p. 10]

All the same, he goes on to elaborate, “the present empha-sis on the singular over the universal may be only a coun-terpoint. In fact . . . the pendulum may already be swingingback” (de Vries, pp. 10–11).

Throughout most of Religion: Beyond a Concept—andcertainly in the collection by Meyer and Moors—the focusis still very much on the singular, with most thoughts ondeep-seated needs remaining latent. Yet, even so, as Meyersuggests in her inaugural-lecture essay, these singularities

might index something more—and more than the sense ofreligion as a social fact. “I would find it shortsighted,” shewrites, “to circumscribe [sensory] regimes and the religioussubjects and communities they create as ‘mere construc-tions’” (Meyer, in de Vries, p. 718). This is, I think, in line withsuch figures as Latour, whom Meyer goes on to acknowl-edge; speaking on behalf of the contributors to his coeditedvolume on the “image wars” in art, science, and religion(Latour and Weibel 2002), Latour declares, “We are dig-ging for the origin of an absolute—not relative—distinctionbetween truth and falsity, between a pure world, abso-lutely emptied of human-made intermediaries and a dis-gusting world composed of impure but fascinating human-made mediators” (2002:14). In related ways, the essays byDroogers, Das, Taylor, and Marion in Religion: Beyond aConcept refuse certain aspects of the Durkheimian legacyof the only-social.

There is more on the concept of “religion” and “beyondthe concept” of religion in these volumes, much more. Butwhat I have highlighted thus far is indicative of the main di-rections in which discussions head: away from belief andtoward materiality; away from formalism and toward prac-tice; away from religion and the secular and toward thepostsecular and, in some cases, even back to enchantmentof some kind. At this point, it is worth noting that, by andlarge, one discussion that does not take place in these vol-umes is how institutions figure. It is not that questions ofstructure and authority are sidelined; far from it, and in theMeyer and Moors volume, they are actually key. But thereis something in the way mediums and mediation are ap-proached (perhaps because of the extent to which belief isseen as the problematic term) that does not lead to muchdiscussion of institutional power, or, even more precisely,“the link between institutional power and interpretive prac-tice” (Rutherford 2006:106).

Having touched on “religion,” what remains is to ex-plain how mediation itself functions in the turn. This is asomewhat different task, for although many of the authorsunder consideration make explicit reference to the impor-tance of mediation—or religion as mediation, or the “intrin-sic” connection between religion and media, or the “nec-essary” link between religion and media—they engage inmuch less unpacking of what this means in conceptualterms. If religion is, indeed, the concept that scholars aretrying to get beyond, “mediation,” it seems, is the one weare still trying to get to.

Some working definitions of mediation are given inthese volumes, perhaps most helpfully in a place that an-thropologists would be least likely to look: Zito’s discussionof “culture” in Morgan’s Key Words. How many anthropol-ogists are yearning to read another piece on the cultureconcept? Yet Zito serves us well by showing how a focuson mediation can help us make sense of and enrich thepractice-based critique of culture:

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If we take seriously the idea that culture is not a thingbut a process—even though it may seem like a con-geries of things, and even though we can analyze onlythrough the materiality of things—we must get it inanalytic motion. Much in human life—including “thesocial”—remains empirically directly unavailable. Yetwe know it is “there”—in fact, a good deal of human lifeis about making the invisible visible, that is, mediatingit. [in Morgan, p. 77]

Zito relates her position to Marx, although I think it is asimportant to recognize Hegel’s relevance (cf. Boyer 2007;Eisenlohr 2009), in particular, his understanding of objecti-fication. In a Hegelian sense, objectification is more of a de-scriptive term than it became after Marx, when it acquireda more distinctively negative connotation (whether that isbecause of Marx is another matter). As Daniel Miller has ar-gued, objectification should not be understood as a dirtyword; it just “describes the inevitable process by which allexpression, conscious or unconscious, social or individual,takes specific form” (1987:81).

To talk about making the invisible visible as “mediat-ing the social” is but a subtle shift from “objectifying thesocial” by the light of Miller’s definition. And it is not co-incidental that Miller has parlayed his own work on mate-rial culture into the anthropology of media (e.g., Miller andSlater 2000). It is, indeed, often those at an intersection be-tween material culture studies and media studies (and es-pecially those attentive to the legacies of both Marx andHegel) who have provided some of the most useful anthro-pological discussions of mediation to date (see, e.g., Boyer2007; Eisenlohr 2009; Keane 2007; Mazzarella 2004; Meyer2006; Pinney 2004).

Although the depth and breadth of the literature onmediation as a concept do not match those on religion, theproductivity of this writing can be traced in the ethnograph-ically based studies in the collections under review. Whatthey make clear is that religious subjects are often quiteconcerned with mediation: how it works, what it worksthrough, who or what defines or controls its channels, whatit delivers, and so on. The two most dominant expressionsof this concern have to do with what one might call “rela-tions to” and “relations of.”

“Relations to” have to do with how mediation positionspeople and their gods in relation to one another. They areconcerns with distance and, often, presence (Engelke 2007;cf. Robbins n.d.). Calibrating the proper distance betweenthe human and the divine is often intimately bound up withthe nature of a medium. In her Key Words entry on “sound-scape,” Schulz provides an overview of these calibrations inrelation to the mediations that often matter most in the re-ligious imagination: the human senses (Morgan’s own entryon “image” is complementary). It is going too far to say thatIslam is a religion of the ear and Christianity and Hinduism

religions of the eyes, for this simplifies what are intricate in-terrelations between the senses and even the importanceof synesthesia. The notion of “darshan,” or divine seeing-and-being-seen, for example, although of utmost impor-tance to what are recognized as Hindu traditions (Eck 1985),should not preclude recognizing how sound, as producedin mantras, can play a crucial role in Hindu ritual practice.These characterizations also simplify the range of ways inwhich a sense might function: Catholic and Protestant vi-sual pieties can differ greatly, to say the least, and, as LeighEric Schmidt (2000) has shown, there are parallel historiesof Christian investments in sound that complicate these la-bels even more. All the same, at least theologically, sensualhierarchies often discipline and direct the religious sub-ject. Schulz herself is one of a number of scholars in re-cent years to focus on the soundscapes of Islam, in whichpractice is shaped by audition (see also, e.g., Eisenlohr 2009;Hirschkind 2006). New media technologies (broadcasting;recording) become ways of extending the soundscape be-yond its original spatiotemporal emplacement. Among theMuslims with whom Schulz worked in Mali, this allowedone religious leader “to render his presence immediate andheighten the spiritual aura of his voice” (in Morgan, p. 183).

That, in many ways, media technologies have beenused to close the distance between the human and thedivine (or the divine’s representatives) by playing on thesenses that matter most in a sacred economy does notmean that such auratic extensions happen automatically.Walter Benjamin’s classic “Work of Art” essay (1968; see alsoBenjamin 2008) has been a touchstone in this regard, being,as it is, one of the most important reflections on mediationand how mass mediation affects the aura of the original.Although it makes many appearances throughout the vol-umes under review, Benjamin’s essay is dealt with in mostdepth by Dasgupta (in Meyer and Moors) in his analysisof “the aura in the public sphere.” For Benjamin, the aurain an original work of art (understood in traditional formas the product of religion and ritual) is indexed throughits simultaneous proximity and distance: a presence thatdemands distanciation. Using Hindu nationalist discourseas his main example, Dasgupta shows, in the spirit ofBenjamin’s original intentions, how an aura is not so mucheffaced as transformed by technological mediations; “itscharacter changes” (in Meyer and Moors, p. 256)—in thiscase, according to Dasgupta, by infusing Hindu identitywith a consumerist logic legitimated by globalization suchthat the aura “accrues in even the most profane practicesand discourses” (p. 269).

Questions of proximity and distance are also ques-tions of control. As the ethnographic and historical recordsindicate, the wider a text circulates, the more difficult itbecomes for its producers or masters to determine its re-ception, despite the fantasy of control that often accompa-nies technologies of expansion. This observation prompts

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consideration of the second dominant theme to emergefrom religious studies’ media turn, the “relations of,” bywhich I mean relations of power, of empowerment. Indeed,as within the wider field of media studies (see Boyer 2007),those on religion are often, at one level, about whether aparticular medium is a path to freedom or enslavement.Will this thing—this icon, this image, this book, this tele-phone, this computer—set me free or tie me down? Will itallow me to lead an authentic life (and in proper relation tothe divine) or will it corrupt and cripple my ability to do so?These are the kinds of questions that relations of power andempowerment raise.

It is no contradiction to say that even the most ferventsupporters of a particular kind of mediation have doubtsabout and even a distrust of the chosen technology. AsMeyer shows in her chapter in Religion, Media, and the Pub-lic Sphere, Pentecostals in Ghana are, in this way, poten-tial victims of their own success. They have managed toharness video as a powerful channel for inculcating charis-matic ways of seeing, in the process shaping the terms ofpublic life and popular entertainment. And yet, Meyer as-serts, “the spread of Pentecostalism into the public spherehas a cost: it distracts from the genuine religious experi-ence” (in Meyer and Moors, p. 300). The flip side of thisembrace of a medium is, of course, its abolition or evendestruction—technophobia rather than technophilia. Thisapproach to mediums (and their materiality) is, of course,probably one of the best-studied sets of histories of religioustraditions, the histories of iconoclasm. I am not sure if it isdespite or because of this scrutiny, but iconoclasm is onedynamic of religious mediation that receives comparativelylittle attention across the volumes under review (althoughsee Spyer in de Vries on iconography).

The dynamic between the mediate and immediate isa defining feature of what scholars have come to call “reli-gion” (see Mazzarella [2006] for a similar point relating to“politics”). Visible and invisible, immanent and transcen-dent, material and spiritual, natural and supernatural, mor-tal and immortal, human and divine, here and not here,known and unknown (knowable and unknowable), revealedand concealed, present and absent—all of these extremelyproductive yet extremely problematic conceptions are theinspirations for and products of religious mediations. Tomake sense—even to be debunked, made into nonsense—every one of these pairings is grappled with in and throughmedia. What the media turners have done is suggest thatthe pairs are interesting not in themselves but for theconjunctions that join them. These conjunctions—theseands—are not the recognition of binary oppositions but to-kens of a dialectic; these ands are the scrolls, icons, books,videos, radio broadcasts, and networks in cyberspace thatdefine, substantiate, and challenge the relationships be-tween the visible and invisible worlds.

Conclusion: To end, and begin?

Reading these (and other works) on the media turn in re-ligious studies, one is struck by the prevalence of two cri-tiques. The first, to which I have already alluded in passing,is a flat-out rejection of the version of post-Enlightenmentsecular modernity in which religion is supposed to go pri-vate or even die. Again and again, media turners decry thepoverty of this thesis. They do it so effectively, in fact, that,when one reads through these volumes systematically, as areviewer must, one begins to doubt that anyone could havebeen foolish enough ever to have believed that religion wason the way out. This doubt is not eased by the fact that it israre for critics of the post-Enlightenment metanarrative toback up their claims with much detail. Rather, that narrativeschema almost always serves as a rhetorical launching pad.This is not a criticism leveled specifically at contributors tothese volumes—or, at least, not only them. I have also beenguilty of using this metanarrative as a point of departure forthinking through things, for thinking about the “return” ofreligion. Yet religion has not so much returned as returnedto focus (see Derrida 2001:72, 78)—hardly the same thing.One task for those of us interested in the media turn andreligious studies more generally is to ask exactly what goodit does to circulate this critique—quickly becoming some-thing of a metanarrative itself—without further elaborationand reflection.

The second critique raises a related but separate is-sue about the place of religion in media studies. In theoverviews of media studies by those involved in religiousstudies, it is quite common to hear how key figures andeven schools—especially in the period from the 1970s to the1990s—excluded religion from view. Thus, although StuartHall and others in the Birmingham School of cultural stud-ies are often praised for bringing mass media to the fore asa legitimate interest, they are criticized for not linking massmedia to religion (as they did with race, class, and gender).And Manuel Castells, despite his prescient work on the net-work society, is recognized as limiting his focus to funda-mentalism. These criticisms are usually backed up with spe-cific examples, unlike those leveled at post-Enlightenmentthought in general. Consequently they tend to hold morewater. All the same, when they are viewed in relation to therich array of work in the volumes being considered, onequestion that arises is whether the media turn in religiousstudies is meant only to fill a gap or whether the under-standing of religion as mediation is supposed to reconfiguremedia studies per se. Is religion as mediation a supplementor a catalyst?

As it stands, I think, we do not know for sure. AsHorsfield rightly notes in his Key Words entry on “media,”though, “with such a broad view of social mediation and re-ligion, its rich description can be so diffuse as to be of little

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strategic or policy value” (p. 114). Not to mention analytic.Another task for those of us committed to the media turn inreligious studies, then, is to ask how, if at all, religious medi-ations differ—how they compare to other “kinds” of media-tions: political, economic, or otherwise. Is mediation itself astable and portable concept—an all-in-one tool in our kits?In the future, it will be important for media turners in reli-gious studies to reflect further on mediation as a concept initself and to link their reflections in more depth to similarones in the human sciences.

In the end, I hope above all to have shown that it isprecisely because the work in these volumes is so rich thatwe can venture to ask these questions, that we can set our-selves some potential tasks. These books represent some-thing genuinely new that is afoot in the study of religion andits beyond.

Note

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Dominic Boyer, LaraDeeb, Patrick Eisenlohr, and an anonymous reviewer for AE fortheir helpful comments on this essay.

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accepted November 27, 2009final version submitted December 17, 2009

Matthew EngelkeDepartment of AnthropologyLondon School of EconomicsHoughton StreetLondon WC2A 2AEUnited Kingdom

[email protected]

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