media and the senses

in the making of
religious experience:
an introduction

vrije universiteit, amsterdam

ABSTRACT
This introduction plaoes the articles presented in this special
issue in a broader frame by outiining current issues in the
study of reiigious material and visual culture. It argues for an
understanding of religion as a practice of mediation to which
media, understood as "sensational forms" are intrinsic. Such
sensational forms are central to construing specific religious
subjectivities, generating religious experience, and calling
upon the divine by appealing to, and tuning, the senses
and the body in ways peculiar to the specificity of religious
traditions.
Keywords: materiality, media, senses, body, experience

Birgit Meyer is Professor of Cultural Anthropology in

the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Her publications
Include Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity
Among the Ewe in Ghana (1999), Globalization
and identity: Dialactics of Flow and Closure {edlte
with Peter Geachiere, 1999). Magic and Modernity:
Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (edited with
Peter Pels, 2003). and Religion, Media and the Public
SpftefS edited with Annelies Moors, 2006), Sheiscoeitor ot Material H^igion.

Material Religion voliime 4, issue 2, pp, 124-135

DOl: 10,2752/175183408X328262

Introduction
Consider the following five vignettes:
Pieces of taboo-breaking art such as Chris Ofili's painting
The Holy Virgin Mary, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, or JoelPeter Witkin's Crucified Horse appear to invoke in Christian
viewers strong sensations of shock, despair, and disgust. Such
"blasphemous" art is so offensive, Jojada Verrips suggests,
because it violates embodied reiigious image repertoires.
Religious representations are not external to, but incorporated in
and thus inextricably bound up with believers' bodies.
The well-known Indonesian painter Abdoul Djalil Pirous has long
been searching to resolve tensions between modem and Islamic
art. In recent years, in tune with the Islamic revival in Indonesia,
Pirous has developed a new "Qur'anic aesthetic" through which
he frames his paintings as his "spirituai notes," meant to express
dzikir. "mindfulness of God." This "visual dzikir," Kenneth George
points out, offers a new way to experience a mystical "beingwith" God.
Blown by the wind, a mass-produced portrait of the Great King
of Siam Rama V [1865-1910) found its way to a new owner,
who cleaned and framed the portrait and placed it in the family's
restaurant. There, Irene Stengs reports, it came to life at a
moment of danger. Stretching his hand right out of the portrait's
frame, the king knocked a gun out of a robber's hand and made
him flee. Portraits of the king, his adepts believe, render present
his sublime power

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Accorciing to the South African shaman Credo Mutwa and his

African and Western followers, the Hollywood blockbuster ET:
The Extraterrestrial offers a truthful insight into the reality of
extraterrestrial reptilians which threaten to subjugate humans in
the near future. Credo Mutwa, David Chidester shows, authorizes
the authenticity of this film on the basis of his own spiritual
encounters with and visions of aliens in the South African desert.
"Movies touch us and we feel and touch (and sometimes even
taste and smell) them back," argues the film theorist Vivian
Sobchack. Addressing our own experiences as tilm viewers,
she explains that spiritual or religious films invoke in viewers
experiences of transcendence in the here and now.

126

TTiough inviting us into diverse settings, these vignettes have

'"^ common that they evolve around specific media, old or
newart objeots, paintings, mass-produced portraits, films
that form part of the sphere of religion, be it longstanding
religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam, modern
spiritual movements evolving around a famous Buddhist
king or an African shaman, or more diffuse experiences of
transcendence. Media, it should be noted, is understood here
in the broad sense: those artifacts and cultural forms that
make possible communication, bridging temporal and spatial
distance between people as well as between them and the
reafm of the divine or spiritual. While these media address
and affect people in various waysfrom eiioiting disgust
to rendering present spiritual power or allowing a mystical

11

encounter, from offering spiritual vision to triggering a sense

of transcendence, they all are vital to the genesis of religious
experience. The central theme of this special issue concerns
the relation between such media and the making of religious
experience. This Introduction seeks to place the articles
presented here in a broader framevi/ork, and to highlight
how they contribute to current debates on religion and
media.'
Religion as Mediation
When the interdisciplinary field of religion and media evolved
in the 1980s, there was a strong sense of perplexity regarding
the combination of religion and mediaas if, for instance,
Christianity and television were entirely different matters being
unexpectedly welded together. A wealth of studies emerged,
conducted from the standpoints of mass communication,
religious studies, anthropology, and other social-cultural
sciences that did not only explore religion's use of new mass
media, but also the ways in which popular media such as
television take on roles and functions hitherto fulfilled by
religions. Extending the focus from the setting of American
religion and popular culture towards other parts of the world,
these endeavors yielded a solid body of work, and offered up
exciting vistas.^

127

One of the most important findings lay in the realization

that, after all, the relation between religion and media is
neither as new nor as weird as was suggested by the initial
excited attention devoted to electronic mass media such as
television and film. Upon deeper reflection, media were found
to be intrinsic to reiigion. The philosophical implications of
this idea have been elaborated by the Dutch philosopher
Hent de Vries (2001). Positing a distance between human
beings and the transcendental, he argued that religion offers
practices of mediation that bridge that distance and make
it possible to experienceor indeed shape, from another
perspectivethe transcendental. Take, for example, the
Catholic icon: although obviously "human-made," being
carved from wood, painted, and arranged, to the believing
beholder (and possibly to its maker) it appears as an
embodiment of a sacred presence that can be experienced
by contemplative gaze, prayer, or a kiss. Other exampies
mentioned above are the portraits of Rama V, which depend
on teohnologies of mass production, and the "visual dzikir"
developed by the Indonesian painter Pirous, a person of flesh
and blood: posited beyond the order of ordinary things, these
portraits and paintings are imbued with a divine aura. Indeed,
from a perspective of religion as mediation, the divine does
not appear as a self-revealing entity, but, on the contrary, is
always "effected" or "formed" by mediation processes, while
resisting being reduced to mere human-made products.
Media and practices of mediation thus invoke the divine via
particular, material forms.
This understanding of religion as mediation raises
intriguing questions about the prooesses through which
media actually are adopted into religious traditions, It is one

thing to argue that, philosophically, there is no ontologioal

differenoe between religion and media, and between belief
and technology, as argued by Derrida (1998), De Vries
(2001 ), and others. However, this oan only be the starting
point for further inquiry, as this raises intriguing questions
about the modes through which media are naturalized, or
even rendered invisible in praotioes of religious mediation. To
return once again to the example of the portraits of Rama
V, the question at stake is how they become authorized as
viable looations through which the king manifests his power.
As Stengs shows, this authorization rests on the Buddhist
notion of divine kingship, as well as the organization of the
remembranoe of Rama V via portraits and specific, agreed
ways of handling them (putting them into frames, displaying
them in certain spaces where one can see and be seen by
the king, and so on). Paradoxically through such intricate
processes of mediation, these portraits are coded as forms
through which the king assumes immediate presence. The
examples of blasphemy oharges offered by Jojada Verrips, by
contrast, show what happens when works of art make use
of religious elements, yet at the same time violate authorized
Jesus placed in a container of urine, or a crucified horse. The
critical responses evoked by such art highlight the importance
of authorized modes of religious representation exactly in their
violation.
Unlike artists charged with blasphemy, Pirous works
hard to make his art live up to Islamic restrictions ooncerning
abstract visual representation, and representations of God
in particular His example, as George shows, pinpoints the
fact that artistic creativity evolves through these restrictions
(rather than being thwarted by them). This results in a
dzikir of a new kind that synthesizes aesthetic and ethical
pleasure, offering a new religious form that many view as a
suitable channel of Islamic piety. This highly self-reflexive,
gradual process of aligning paintings with piety conveys a
good sense of the oulturai work that is involved in prooesses
of incorporating new media into a longstanding religious
tradition. We encounter a similar creative adoption of new
media suoh as film into "African shamanism," which is itself
already a product of artioulating South African practices of
divination and spiritual knowledge into the conoerns of the
128

contemporary global New Age movement, with its partioular

emphasis on individual spirituality. Interestingly, as Chidester
shows. Credo Mutwa maintains a fairly ambivalent stance
towards electronic media, which he views as both limiting a
person's spiritual receptivity and offering a means to validate
religious visions, as spotlighted in the vignette. At the same
time, and very muoh in line with Sobchack's observations,
Mutwa proves to be moved and touched by film images, so
muoh so that his spiritual visions and film images of aliens
collapse into one oorporeal experience. Comparing Pirous
with Mutwa, we enoounter two quite different modes of
incorporating initially foreign media into religion. Whereas
the former seeks to bring his artistic work into oonsonance

11
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'

129

with an Islamic tradition vi/hich he considers as authoritative

(hence his subtle reflection on how to reform without violating
authorized modes of representation), the latter is very much
concerned with authorizing himself as an authentic visionary
who seif-consciously reartioulates and reinterprets Zulu
traditions of engaging dreams, visions, and extraordinary
spiritual experiences under globalizing circumstances.
The Senses, Experience, and Subjectivity
In order to grasp the affective appeal of religious media, it may
be useful to approach them as "sensational forms" that trigger
as well as condense religious experience (Meyer 2006a). The
notion of sensational form seeks to draw our attention to
the impact of authorized media and mediation praotioes on
religious practitioners. It is via particular modes of address,
established modes of communioation, and authorized
religious ideas and practices that believers are called to
get in touch with the divine, and each other. Sensational
forms do not only convey particular ways of "making sense"
but concomitantly tune the senses and induce specific
sensations, thereby rendering the divine sense-able, and
triggering particular religious experiences. In opposition to
approaches that take as a departure point the primacy and
immediacy cf individual feelings, the understanding of religious
mediation advocated here regards authorized sensational
forms as a condition for, rather than as an impediment to,
religious experience. While much work on religious experience
tends to take for granted "deep" individual feelings as the
natural site of religion, it is important to stress that religionas
a social phenomenondepends on shared collective fomis
through which such feelings are triggered, over and over
again. The point here is not to simply reverse the alleged
primacy of individual feeiings over secondary organizational
structures and authorized religious forms, but to "account for
the intersection of human subjectivity with social collectivity"
(Chidester 2005: 72). In so doing, we need to understand the
genesis of religious experiences as a process in which the
personal and the social are co-constitutive. This is the stance
adopted by the articles in this issue.
Calling upon the body and the mind (as an indivisible
whole), sensational forms are central to the making of religious
subjectivities. This use of subjectivity resonates strongly
with George's discussion of people as thinking and feeling
subjects in the worid, as well as being subject to the cultural
and ideological formations that make up their world. If indeed
"[s]ubjectivity is the means of shaping sensibility," as argued
by Biehl et al. (cited in George 2008: 176), it is of eminent
concern to pay attention to the specific modes through which
sensational forms "form" their users. This process of forming
subjects, and their incorporation into social formations, it
should be noted, does not occur via coercion, but through
longstanding processes of socialization into particular religious
traditions. It is exactly by working on the body and the senses
that sensational forms are naturalized as conveyors of truth
and embodied by the religious subjects. This point is central

to Verrips's contribution, who suggests that "believers carry

the holy and the sacred all the time within them in a particular
corporeal format. !t is both outside and inside their bodies"
(Verrips 2008: 217). Exactiy because religious imagery is
embodied, looking at taboo-breaking art may trigger strong
oorporeal reactions of pain and disgust. This view is also
relevant for a deeper understanding of current blasphemy
charges against certain representations of Muhammad and
other forms of alleged sacrilege.
Of all the senses, the articles presented in this issue direct
the most attention towards vision. However, far from limiting
vision to the distant gaze that has stood oentral in critiques
of modern ocularcentdsm (Jay 2004), the authors deploy a
view of vision as embedded in the sensorium as a whole. Film
spectators, Sobchack asserts, are now just "spectator fish,"
as Christian Metz put it, but make "sense of the oinema (and
everything else) not only with their eyes but with their entire
bodies" (Sobchack 2008: 196), Conjoining "synaesthesia"
and "cinema" in the notion of the "cinesthetic subject,"

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Sobchack stresses that "viewing, hearing, and movement

are the material means of embodiment and intentionality
not only for the viewer but also for the film" (2008: 196) This
| ^ calls for a "carnal" approaoh that grounds looking in broader
bodily practices (see also Sobchack 2004), thus being alert
to the ways in which images touch their spectators. A similar
approach of vision as implying touch is also suggested by
Verrips, for whom all senses are grounded in tactility, and by
Chidester, who argues that it is thanks to the multisensory
dimension of ecstatic vision that peroeption is "intense,
unifying, and extraordinary," Likewise, George shows how
Pirous's visual dzikir is not meant merely to represent, but
seeks to induce inner spiritual experiences in viewers through
which they sense God's presence, a point to be pursued later.
Here, visual oontemplation is central to the aesthetic-ethical
project of bringing about piety.

130

Inspired by Walter Benjamin's understanding of

photographed portraits of beloved persons as retaining their
aura, Stengs points out that the mass-produced portraits
of Rama V involve worshipers in a mutual prooess of seeing
and being seen. Moving further than the truism "seeing is
believing," she stresses that these portraits funotion in a
setting in which "believing is seeing," thereby stressing the
extent to which belief is vested in tangible images (see also
Meyer 2006b). This resonates with the work of David Morgan
on the affective power of Jesus images (1998; see also
Morgan (2005)) and that of Christopher Pinney (2004) on
mass-produced lithographs depicting Hindu godsauthors
who have contributed muoh to our understanding of looking
as a speoific, transmitted religious practice that requires
our utmost attention. Importantly, the conditions of mass
reprod ucibility do not seem to diminish the experience of a
divine presence in the image, which seems to be triggered by
such religious modes of looking. As Stengs reports, even the
possession of a series of the same image heightens a sense
of divine power.

f g

Sensing the Sublime

Sensational forms do not only address religious subjects
in specific, authorized ways, but also invoke the divine or
transcendental. In a very intriguing passage, George recounts
how he was once challenged after giving a seminar on his
work with Pirous. One listener asked: "... I want to know just
one thing: Do you tremble when you look upon the verses
of the Qur'an in his work? Do you feel awe?" (George 2008:
184) This provocative question does net only indicate possible
differences in the perception of religious forms between
researchers and their interlocutors, but also highlights that
awe and the sensibility to sense the sublime obviously do not
emerge ex nihilo, but are enshrined in the sensational forms
that are central to practices of religious mediation through
whioh religious subjeotivities are formed. Many scholars in
religious studies are familiar with the classic work of Rudolf
Otto on the Holy and the Numinous as existing sui generis
(1917: 7), and hence prior to, and independent from, the
emotions that it arouses in the feeling subject. As Chidester
points out in his piece, Ottc deployed a Protestant, dematerial and disembodied "negative theology of the senses"
that stressed darkness and silence. By contrast, the articles
presented here regard awe as a sensation that is invoked in
the here and now, by virtue of media.

131

If Otto locates transcendental experiences in a numinous

that is framed as Ganz Anders (wholly other), Sobchack
advocates an understanding of extraordinary experience
in the immanent. This is driven by her realization that for a
nonreligious person in fact even for an "unrelenting atheist"
like herselfwatching movies may induce unexpected
sensations of awe (Sobchaok 2004: 302). This is so because
"we are always grounded in the radical materialism of bodily
immanence," and yet "always also have the capacity for
transcendence: for a unique exteriority of beingand exfas/sthat locates us 'elsewhere' and 'othen/^ise' even as
it is grounded in and tethered to our lived body's 'here' and
'now'" (Sobohack 2008: 197). In this view, transcendence
is not opposed to, but grounded in immanence, and found
to be invoked by the capacity cf (fcr instance) film to lead
viewers to an elsewhere that is perceived to be located in
a "beyond" that exceeds the ordinary. In my view, this is a
useful suggestion that calls for an exploration of how religious
sensational fcrms are able to invoke a sense of the sublime by
addressing the senses and the body in particular ways (see
also Meyer 2006a).
Ail the authors in this issue address this question more or
less explicitty, Stengs's analysis is based on the recognition
that mass-produced portraits are authenticated as harbingers
of immediate divine presence and power. In other words, they
are rendered sacred in the context of shared and transmitted
religious ideas and practices through which these artifacts
are construed as vehicles of the sublime. Likewise, Verrips's
analysis of why certain pieces of art are experienced as
offensive is based on his view of the sacred as an authorized
sensational form that is incorporated by believers. In his

impressive series of examples of artistic work "that upsets

because it is seemingly plays disrespectfully v^^ith what is
experienced to be sacred" (Verrips 2008: 213), shock is
the flipside of the awe that a religious image is expected to
convey. Indeed, by foregrounding transgression and offence,
the power of religious regimes to instill strong sensations
of piety and a sublime encounter is laid bare precisely in
instances of pollution and desecration. In this sense, taboobreaking art offers an entry point to grasping the restrictions
and the dos and don'ts on which the power of authorized
religious imagery appears to thrive. George, as intimated
already, relates Pirous's search for visual dzikir, and beholders'
appreciative responses of being moved, to a longer tradition
in Islam, according to which "visualizing Qur'anic verse is
equivalent to glimpsing the divine." In other words, modes of
I'
depiction involving specific practices of looking exist that are
authorized as oapable to render present that which resists
3
to o
human representation by inducing a mystical experience of
'S)
"being-with" God.
In his detaiied examination of the nexus of media and
the senses in contemporary Zulu shamanism, Chidester
further enriches our understanding of the ways in which a
sense of sublime power is grounded in the immanent. While
he stresses the intimate connection between extraordinary
sensory experiences of higher forces and the "capacity of
electronic media to capture meaning like a oamera and
transmit meaning like film" (Chidester 2008: 149), he also
points out that Credo Mutwa and his followers consider
our ordinary five senses inadequate to enoounter spiritual
realities. Stressing that the ordinary sensorium is limited and
limiting, Mutwa construes a threshold or limen from where the
possibility of extrasensory perceptions unfolds. Onoe tuned
religiously, the senses also hold the potential for experiences
that surpass the limits of ordinary perception. What we
encounter here is an active assertion of a sense of limit in
the here and now (see also Meyer 2006a: 11 ) from where
sensations of awe emerge.

132

Materiality
By now it should be clear why the approach of media and
the senses as vital to the making of religious experience is
central to the oore business of this journal: materiaf religion.
The articles presented here conjoin in calling attention to
media as material forms that are authorized as suitable
for religious communication, address people in particular
ways that form distinct religious subjectivities, and invoke
a sense of the divine as present inand at the same time
surpassingthe forms through which it is to be accessed.
The attribute "material," It should be noted, is here not
understood in opposition to "spiritual," but in a manner that
seeks to transcend the matter and spirit opposition in the
context of which modern religion has been framed as the
realm of spirituality; far removed from the materiality, or even
materialism, of mundane existence. As the contributions to
the In Conversation section on "Material Religion" by David

"

Morgan, Webb Keane, and David Chidester also highlight,

it is high time for a critique of conventional understandings
of modem religion as situated beyond materiality. The
questions about the relation between religion and media,
and between religion and materiality, converge insofar as
media are best understood as material forms around which
religious communication evolves. In this sense, the artioles
presented in this issue address issues of great importance for
anyone concerned with re-materializing our understanding of
religion,

notes and references

' Earlier versions of the articles
published in this speciai issue were
presented in the context of the
conference "Media Technologies.
Sensory Experiences, and the
Making of Religious Subjectivities"
(University of Amsterdam, March
2006). co-organized by Charles
Hirschkind and myself in the
framework of my research program
Modern Mass Media, Religion
and the imagination of Religious
Communities (2000-2006, see
www.pscw.uva.nl/media-religion).
I am gratefui to the Netherlands
Foundation of Scientific Research
(NWO) and the Amsterdam School
for Social Science Research
(ASSR) for funding this program,

133

^ To mention just a few

multidisdplinary volumes: Babb
and Wadley 1995; Horsfield et al.
2004; Hoover and Lundby 1997;
Meyer and Moors 2006; Mitchell
and Rate 2007; Plate 2003; Sfout
and Buddenbaum 1996; Vries and
Weber 2001,

Babb, Lawrence A, and Wadley,

Susan S, eds, 1995, Media and
the Transformation of Religion in
South Asia. Philadelphia; University
of Pennsylvania Press,
Chidester, David, 2005. Authentic
Fakes. Berkeley; University of
California Press.

Chidester, David. 2008. Zulu

Dreamscapes; Senses. Media, and
Authentication in Contemporary
Neo-Shamanism, Material Religion
4(2); 136-59.
Derrida, Jacques. 1998, Faith and
Knowiedge; T^ie Two Sources of
"Religion" at the Limits of Reason
Alone, In Religion, eds. Jacques
Derrida and Gianni Vattimo.
Cambridge; Polity Press, pp, 1-78,
De Vries, Hent. 2D01, In Media
Res; Giobal Religion. Public
Spheres, and the Task of
Contemporary Religious Studies, In
Religion and Media, eds, Hent de
Vries and Samuel Weber, Stanford;
Stanford University Press, pp,
4-42,
George, Kenneth M, 2008, Ethical
Pieasure, Visual Dzikir. and Artistic
Subjectivity in Contemporary
Indonesia, Material Religion 4(2):
172-93,
Hoover. Stewart M, and Lundby.
Knut, eds, 1997, Rethinking Media,
Religion, and Culture. London;
Sage.
Horsfield, Peter. Hess, Mary E,,
and Medrano. Adan M, eds,
2004, Belief in Media: Cuitural
Perspectives on Media and
Christianity. Aldershot: Ashgate,
Jay, Martin, 1994, Downcast
Eyes: The Denigration of Vision

in Twentieth-Century Thought.
Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Mitchell. Jolyon and Pate, Brant S.
eds, 2007, The Reiigion and Film
Reader. New York and London:
Routledge.
Meyer, Birgit. 2006a. Religious
Sensations: Why Media. Aesthetics
and Power Matter in the Study
of Contemporary Reiigion.
Inaugural Lecture, Free University,
Amsterdam, October 6, 2006,
Meyer, Birgit. 2006b. Religious
Revelation, Secrecy and the
Limits of Visual Representation.
Anthropologicai Theory 6(3);
431-53.
Meyer, Birgit end Moors, Annelies,
eds. 2006. Reiigion. Media and
the Public Sphere. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Morgan, David. 1998, Visuai
Piety: A History and Theory of
Popular Reiigious Images. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Morgan, David. 2005. The Sacred
Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in
Theory and Practice. Berkeley: The
University of California Press.

Otto, Rudolf. 1917. Das Heilige.

ber das Irrationale in der Idee des
Gttlichen und sein Verhitnis zum
Rationalen. Breslau: Trewendt und
Granier.
Pinney, Christopher. 2004. "Photos
of the Gods. ' The Printed Image
and Political Struggle in India.
London: Reaktion BooksPlate, Brent S. ed. 2003.
Representing Reiigion in World
Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking,
Culture Making. New York:
Palgrave,
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004, Camal
Thoughts: Embodiment and
Moving Image Culture. Berkeley:
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Sobchack, Vivian. 2008,
Embodying Transcendence: On
the Literal, the Material, and the
Cinematic Sublime. Material
Reiigion 4(2): 194-203.

1,2
IS

mo
n'a

II

Stcut, Daniel A. and Buddenbaum,

Judfth M. eds. 1996. Religion
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Verrips, Jojada. 2008. Offending
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