MATTHEW ENGELKE

London School of Economics

Religion and the media turn:

A review essay
Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Birgit Meyer and
Annelies 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. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008. xiv + 1006 pp.,
illustrations.

A B S T R A C T
In this review essay, I consider three recent collections, one edited
by anthropologists, one by an art historian, and one by a
philosopher, that reflect on what might be called the media turn in
religious studies. I situate these collections in relation to broader
trends and interests within anthropology, religious studies, and
media studies, focusing in particular on the idea of religion as
mediation, which involves, in part, a turn away from conceptions of
belief and toward materiality and practice. [religion, media,
materiality, belief, the public sphere]

he study of religion is undergoing what might be

remembered in a generations time as the media
turn. For one thing, this means that anthropologists and others are focusing more than in the past
on 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 Internet, and other of the newer and newest kinds). This trend
is a good thing in itself; more importantly, however, this
new work has, at its best, started a wholesale engagement
with and evaluation of processes of mediation as scholars attempt to rethink how we should understand the very
concept of religion. Within much of this work, religion
is understood as mediationa set of practices and ideas
that cannot be understood without the middle grounds that
substantiate them. Such a perspective creates some exciting
opportunities, if also a few dangers.

All three volumes under review here are noteworthy

contributions to the media turn. Birgit Meyer and Annelies
Moorss Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere focuses attention on two of the most well-developed arguments to
emerge thus far: first, that the version of secular modernity in which religion is considered private is untenable;
and, second, that mass media and religion are not, concomitantly, irreconcilable. Religion, in other words, is public, and religions have not been killed by television. Hent
de Vriess tome (that is the best word), Religion: Beyond a
Concept, reminds readers that, among other things, using
such terms as religion and religions without scare quotes
and caveats, as I have just done, is either very naive or very
brave. His particular insightshared by several other authors in his collection and made possible by this idea of
religion as mediationis that it is perhaps both naive and
brave. David Morgans Key Words in Religion, Media, and
Culture is evidence of an arrival of sorts, an indication of
just how important it has already become for scholars of religion to consider their subject in relation to its media and
their materiality.

In constellation: The books

With apologies to the individual authorsall 70 of them
I am not able here to touch on every chapter in any depth
(there are 74). In the case of de Vriess collection, this selectivity is made somewhat easier to justify by the fact that
not all the chapters address the themes of media or mediation, although it is worth noting that the batch of essays
most 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, including 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 address
mediation in one sense or another (via discussions of the

C 2010 by the American Anthropological Association.

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 371379, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. 
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01261.x

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Volume 37 Number 2 May 2010

public sphere, secularism, icons and iconography, political

ideologies, and pedagogy). Even so, it is important to give
some sense of each book in and of itself, in part because the
three are different kinds of books and so not commensurate at every level. It is also useful, I think, to say something
about howalthough they are quite differentthese volumes connect in a behind-the-scenes way. The media turn
is not exhaustively represented in these volumes, and yet
among them they not only include contributions by several
of the key scholars to have fostered it but they also provide
a glimpse of the social networks and institutional contexts
that have helped make it possible. Like other productive
turns and moments in the human sciences, this one is a
result, in part, of synergies and serendipities: the right people being in the right places and the right times.
Meyer and Moorss Religion, Media, and the Public
Sphere is the most orthodox and typical kind of edited book,
in the sense that it is (1) organized around a particular set of
themes; (2) framed by a theoretically engaged introduction
that situates the chapters in relation to existing literatures;
and (3) filled in with a set of empirically grounded case studies. Not all of the contributors are anthropologiststhe editors stress the merits of interdisciplinarity (p. 19)and yet
this is the most anthropological of the collections overall.
It is also the collection most obviously focused on media
in the mass-media sense: The authors look at film, television, video and cassette cultures, and the like. Building
on the core points I note above, the authors here explore
three main issues in relation to the public sphere. In part
1, Charles Hirschkind, Patricia Birman, Jeremy Stolow, and
David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner examine how different media technologies (old and new) can give shape to distinct kinds of publics. In Egypt, for example, as Hirschkind
shows here, complementing the analyses in his well-known
monograph (Hirschkind 2006), the development of an Islamic counterpublic via cassette dawa (sermons meant to
inspire greater piety) is made possible by both the material
and sensual properties of the medium (cassettes are small,
easily reproduced, and easily circulated; sound is permeating and plays mischief with the distinctions that a secular
state 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 and
the politics of difference. Hacketts chapter, for instance,
explains how minority religious groups in postapartheid
South Africa have made claims to state-sponsored television time in the effort to ensure political survival and to
control their public images. Part 3, with essays by Walter
u,
Sudeep Dasgupta, Rachel Dwyer, and
Armbrust, Ayse Onc
Meyer shift the focus to how religious communities have
circulated and supported images of themselves through
popular culture and entertainment industries. According to
Dwyer, Hindu nationalists have actually not been able to
shape the political meanings of religious identity in film

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as they have in television (see Rajagopal 2001)despite the

worries of Indias more secular and critically minded middle
classes. Reading the collection as a whole drives home not
only the points mentioned above (about religions refusal to
go private and the ease with which many religious communities have incorporated new media technologies) but also,

in good anthropological fashion, that Jurgen

Habermass
classic formulation of the public sphere (even as amended
to factor in religion; see Habermas 2006) cannot be transported easily outside of the West. The point here, write
Meyer and Moors in their introduction, is not to employ
the notion of the public sphere as a universal notion but
rather to use it as a starting point in order to develop a more
suitable framework for an analysis of the complicated politics of identity in the information age (p. 4).
Morgans Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture is
orthodox as well, although in a minor traditionthat pioneered by Raymond Williams (1976) of unpacking important terms. As Morgan ruefully notes, however, whereas
Williams was himself able to cover all the key words he
selected for consideration, his own collection is a collaborative effort, bringing together 16 scholars in art history, the history of religions, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, literature, theology, journalism, and media
studies. The list of 15 key words chosen for comment captures much of the energy and focus of recent interdisciplinary work, according to Morgan (p. 14), although no
claims are made about the list being exhaustive or definitive. His introduction is very good at charting the emergence of this work (much of it, even outside the anthropological constituency, indebted to Clifford Geertz and Victor
Turner). The introduction also includes Morgans encapsulation of how to understand the work on religion as mediation, which has not defined religion as a discrete and universal essence but has regarded religion as fundamentally
mediated, as a form of mediation that does not isolate belief but examines its articulation within . . . social processes
(p. 8). It is with such regard in mind that Morgan has gathered 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 (Morgans own chapter) on image, Peter Horsfield on media, Jolyon Mitchell on narrative, Pamela
E. Klassen on practice, Joyce Smith on public, Sarah
M. Pike on religion, Schultz on soundscape, Stolow on
technology, and Isabel Hofmeyr on text. The authors
tackle their charges in a variety of ways: Some work from
their own research material (or that of others) to illuminate
general issues; some provide more theoretical overviews of
concepts driven by the chronologies and concerns of intellectual history. All of the chapters are clearly written and
suitable for students; teachers and other professionals will
find most of them engaging too.

Review essay

De Vriess Religion: Beyond a Concept is not orthodox

in any way, shape, or form. Certainly not shape or form: At
over 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 be
given a space on your desk and only moved off when you are
sure you will not need to pull it down from the shelf again
any time soon, lest it slip from your hands and cause injury
(an interesting comment, perhaps, on the materiality of religion). This book is a big deal, an event in object form. Indeed, you almost feel as if, when you first open it, trumpets
should blare. Fordham University Press has certainly spared
no expense in its production (much to its credit), so you almost feel cheated by the silence, as if a soundtrack really
should have been included. If I am being somewhat flippant, it is only to underscore the importance of this book
as a physical object in and of itself.
It is not so easy to be flippant about the contents. A
handful of the 43 essays will be widely influential, and part
6, to which I refer above, is, in de Vriess own words (and perhaps to the chagrin of the contributors to other parts), an
especially rich set of essays (p. xiv). The importance of materiality for understanding the idea of mediation is driven
home in the first chapter of part 6 (reprinted from Comparative Studies in Society and History), by Tomoko Masuzawa,
on fetishism, which ends with a compelling discussion
about the necessary and nonfigurative link between Victorian understandings of the African primitive and the everyday mystery of modern economy (p. 667). This chapter is
followed by a pair of essays (the first by Stolow, the second
by Stef Aupers, Dick Houtman, and Peter Pels) on the relationships between religion and technology, one of which
(Stolows) pushes for a definition of religion as something
within the indeterminate spaces of exchange between humans and their machines (p. 686). Next comes Meyers already influential 2006 inaugural address after joining the
faculty of the Free University of Amsterdam, in which she
sets out her idea of religious sensations and a turn to
aesthetics (see also Meyer 2009). Zitos analysis of television 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 different register from the essays already mentioned, offers
a close reading of Robert Musils fiction vis-`a-vis his engagement with the German mystic Eckhart von Hochheim.
Extending this focus on the finer arts, Sander van Maass
chapter looks at how a small group of composers in the
1990s stirred controversy by producing new religious art
music (Holy Minimalism) much in favor with audiences
but not most critics, and Alena Alexandrova draws attention to the opaque residue (p. 772) of religious concerns
(with truth, with iconoclasm) present in so-called secular
art.
In terms of content and form, it is also worth mentioning that several essays in de Vriess volume, for in-

American Ethnologist

stance, Masuzawas, have been published elsewhere, making compendium a reasonable word to describe it. What is
more, although de Vriess chapter is called Introduction,
at 110 pages (including the 319 endnotes) and no mention
of or framing of the chapters that follow (what little he does
say about them is kept to the preface), it is perhaps better seen as a prolegomenon to any future future of the religious past (see below). De Vriess chapter and his other
work in the philosophy of religion (especially de Vries 2001)
are worthy of a review essay in themselves, although here
I can do no more than acknowledge that fact and highlight the extent to which his work has set the terms for understanding mediation in the current turn (but see Stolow
2005).
Turning now briefly to scene setting for this trio of volumes, I can say with no exaggeration that the media turn
would be much less interesting were it not for the generosity of the Dutch state. De Vriess collection is the first of
five scheduled books based on an international research
program called The Future of the Religious Past, funded
by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
(NWO). In addition to the books, this program is sponsoring
13 research projects and yearly conferences, which began in
2002 and will continue through 2011 (and some papers from
which are or will be included in the publications). Meyer
and Moorss edited volume is also the result of a conference
sponsored in part by the NWO, along with the Amsterdam
School for Social Science Research and (the erstwhile, but
formerly Leiden-based) International Institute for the Study
of Islam in the Modern World. De Vries, Meyer, and Moors
all hold chairs in universities in Amsterdam, and several of
the contributors to the volumes under review either hold
positions in the Netherlands, used to hold positions in the
Netherlands, or have spent time in the Netherlands as visiting fellows, researchers, or frequent guestsincluding Morgan, who, with Meyer, Horsfield, and Hoover, has been running a series of Media Religion Culture Global Seminars
coordinated by Meyer out of the University of Amsterdam
and VU University Amsterdam. Meyer and Morgan are also
half of the editorial quartet that runs the journal Material
Religion (launched in 2005), in which many of the articles
focus on media and mediation. The ferment is the product
of more than these Dutch elements and funding streams, to
be sure, and, when you account for, say, New York Universitys Center for Religion and Media (especially in conjunction with its advisory board and the universitys anthropology department), along with the Center for Religion, Media,
and Culture at the University of Colorado at Boulder (especially in relation to the biennial Conference on Religion,
Media, and Culture, which is spearheaded by Hoover, the
centers director), you begin to get a good sense of the particular admixture bubbling away.
Although there is, then, some justification for speaking of the media turners (if you will) in terms of collegial

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bonds and intellectual affinities, it is nevertheless important to stress that I am not talking here of a school or an
organized movement; no one is passing out membership
cards. And neither is the work in these collections representative of all the work that could be included in this general whatever-it-is label of the media turn. A good argument could be made, for instance, that Webb Keanes (2007)
work on semiotic ideologies, combining insights from figures as diverse as C. S. Peirce and Bruno Latour, has also
been central to focusing scholars attention on mediation,
certainly within anthropology (see Eisenlohr 2009; Engelke
2007; Manning 2008). There are, moreover, parallels between concerns in European and North American linguistics, stretching back to John Locke, at least, and those with
mediation here (see Bauman and Briggs 2003). Of the editors of the collections under consideration, Meyer has certainly engaged with Keanes work, yet for whatever reason,
the semiotic and linguistic sides of religious issues are not
prominent within the volumes.

Religion as mediation
We should no longer reflect exclusively on the meaning, historically and in the present, of religionof faith
and belief and their supposed opposites such as knowledge and technologybut concentrate on the significance of the processes of mediation and mediatization
without and outside of which no religion would be able
to manifest or reveal itself in the first place.
Hent de Vries, In Media Res: Global Religion, Public
Spheres, 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 a
commitment to something like the goal expressed by de
Vries in the epigraph above. The quote comes from his essay in a collection he coedited with Samuel Weber, Religion and Media (2001), that has served as a touchstone
for much subsequent work across the range of human sciences (see Stolow 2005). That book, in turn, is organized to
a certain extent around the contribution from Jacques Derrida, appended with the transcript of a conversation centering on his essay, in which Derrida speaks of, among other
things, the irreducible bond between religion and media
(2001:68) and the centrality of the notion of presence in
the logic of mediation (more about which below). Not all
of the contributors to Religion and Media agree with everything Derrida says (in the conversation transcript, Asad and
Julius Lipner challenge him on points, and in his own essay, Michael Fischer does too), yet his ideas set an agenda,
certainly for de Vries.
In the work on religion as mediation, religion is often
understood as the set of practices, objects, and ideas that

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manifest the relationship between the known and visible

world of humans and the unknown and invisible world of
spirits and the divine. Reflecting its Latin roots, then, religion here refers to both a binding together (religio meaning
to bind) and that which binds: practice and product. Indeed, in much of this work, the points of departure are the
material channels through which the binding and manifesting are understood to take place. To take just a handful of
examples from the collections under review, from this perspective one might say religion is video (see Meyer in Meyer
and Moors)or sometimes not (see Ginsburg in Meyer and
Moors); or religion is The Pilgrims Progress (see Hofmeyr in
Morgan); or television (see Zito in de Vries); or cyberspace
(see Dasgupta in Meyer and Moors); or even electricity (see
Stolow in de Vries). Materiality, then, is very important in
and for this new work. One of my favorite indications of this
importance is found in Morgans earlier, influential study of
popular religious images, Visual Piety (1998). A trained art
historian, Morgan nevertheless chooses to refer to these images as, first and foremost, religious stuff (1998:xi). This
says something important.
One benefit of focusing on stuffbe it a massproduced image of Jesus or a homemade altar to Shivais
the opportunity it affords for getting beyond that nastiest of
religious-studies bugbears: belief (cf. Keane 2009). I mention above that Geertz figures prominently in Morgans presentation of the media turn in studies of religion and culture, and yet the work after this turnand certainly that
highlighted in the volumes under review hereis not primarily about questions of meaning and belief. Perhaps not
surprisingly, it is Karl Marx (and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, especially Hegel), rather than Max Weber, who is
good to think with when it comes to mediation. More immediately, if not always more explicitly, it is the critiques of
religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1963), Jonathan Z. Smith
(1998), Talal Asad (1993, 2001), Michael Lambek (2000; see
also his essay in de Vries), Derrida (2001), Masuzawa (2005),
and others that guide the research. Many of these authors
stress how the materialities of religion are integral to its
constitution (Asad 2001:206).
Practice is a necessary complement to product, as I
have glossed things here. Practice, one might say, produces
the product: Religious stuff is not religious until it is made
so (at least from a purely analytical standpoint). Here again,
Marx is particularly relevant, although it is also possible to
trace 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 attention from the contributors to these volumes). Latour (1993,
2002) has also been influential for the ways in which his
work challenges the purity of subjectobject distinctions;
in the emerging literature on religion and media, careful
attention is given to how mediums can be agentive (thus
also harking back to points raised by Marshall McLuhan and

Review essay

suggesting a link to Keanes [2007] interests). Summing up

much of this discussion in her key-word entry for practice
in Morgans collectionand reinforcing a basic anthropological preceptKlassen writes,
In the case of religion and media, the concept of practice has facilitated a shift from focusing purely on the
message of a text, image, or sound to considering the
medium in its many dimensions: how it works and
who controls it, to what range of human senses a particular medium appeals, what people do with both
messages and the media that transmit them, and how
ritual, theologies, and religious dispositions are constituted and transformed by different kinds of media.
[p. 138]
One irony of this shift to practice and product is a new
humility when it comes to the very pronouncements on
which such a shift rests. In the wake of a recognition that
religion has no transhistorical, universal essence, there is,
in some of this work (not all), a carefully considered uncertainty about the end of metaphysics per se. When de Vries
talks about getting beyond the concept of religion, he
does not mean getting rid of it, or even some of the mystical
traces it contains. In the following passage, the allusion to
foundations in Ludwig Wittgensteins otherwise antifoundationalist philosophy of language serves as a backstop for
de 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. 1827; Badiou being the
philosopher du jour who is an atheist but has no time for
the likes of Derrida, holding as firmly to an idea of Truth as
did Plato):
The study of religion and whatever may yet come to
take its place depends upon a rigorous alternation between the universal and essential (to be defined)
and the singular or exemplary instant, instance,
and instantiation. Without ignoring or disparaging
the invocation of universals, which responds to a deepseated need that Wittgenstein ties to the essence of
language and our form of life, such inquiry must methodically, or at least strategically, start out from the
singular, 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 emphasis on the singular over the universal may be only a counterpoint. In fact . . . the pendulum may already be swinging
back (de Vries, pp. 1011).
Throughout most of Religion: Beyond a Conceptand
certainly in the collection by Meyer and Moorsthe focus
is still very much on the singular, with most thoughts on
deep-seated needs remaining latent. Yet, even so, as Meyer
suggests in her inaugural-lecture essay, these singularities

American Ethnologist

might index something moreand more than the sense of

religion as a social fact. I would find it shortsighted, she
writes, to circumscribe [sensory] regimes and the religious
subjects and communities they create as mere constructions (Meyer, in de Vries, p. 718). This is, I think, in line with
such figures as Latour, whom Meyer goes on to acknowledge; speaking on behalf of the contributors to his coedited
volume on the image wars in art, science, and religion
(Latour and Weibel 2002), Latour declares, We are digging for the origin of an absolutenot relativedistinction
between truth and falsity, between a pure world, absolutely emptied of human-made intermediaries and a disgusting world composed of impure but fascinating humanmade mediators (2002:14). In related ways, the essays by
Droogers, Das, Taylor, and Marion in Religion: Beyond a
Concept refuse certain aspects of the Durkheimian legacy
of the only-social.
There is more on the concept of religion and beyond
the concept of religion in these volumes, much more. But
what I have highlighted thus far is indicative of the main directions in which discussions head: away from belief and
toward materiality; away from formalism and toward practice; away from religion and the secular and toward the
postsecular and, in some cases, even back to enchantment
of some kind. At this point, it is worth noting that, by and
large, one discussion that does not take place in these volumes is how institutions figure. It is not that questions of
structure and authority are sidelined; far from it, and in the
Meyer and Moors volume, they are actually key. But there
is something in the way mediums and mediation are approached (perhaps because of the extent to which belief is
seen as the problematic term) that does not lead to much
discussion of institutional power, or, even more precisely,
the link between institutional power and interpretive practice (Rutherford 2006:106).
Having touched on religion, what remains is to explain how mediation itself functions in the turn. This is a
somewhat different task, for although many of the authors
under consideration make explicit reference to the importance of mediationor religion as mediation, or the intrinsic connection between religion and media, or the necessary link between religion and mediathey engage in
much less unpacking of what this means in conceptual
terms. If religion is, indeed, the concept that scholars are
trying to get beyond, mediation, it seems, is the one we
are still trying to get to.
Some working definitions of mediation are given in
these volumes, perhaps most helpfully in a place that anthropologists would be least likely to look: Zitos discussion
of culture in Morgans Key Words. How many anthropologists are yearning to read another piece on the culture
concept? Yet Zito serves us well by showing how a focus
on mediation can help us make sense of and enrich the
practice-based critique of culture:

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If we take seriously the idea that culture is not a thing

but a processeven though it may seem like a congeries of things, and even though we can analyze only
through the materiality of thingswe must get it in
analytic motion. Much in human lifeincluding the
socialremains empirically directly unavailable. Yet
we know it is therein fact, a good deal of human life
is about making the invisible visible, that is, mediating
it. [in Morgan, p. 77]

Zito relates her position to Marx, although I think it is as

important to recognize Hegels relevance (cf. Boyer 2007;
Eisenlohr 2009), in particular, his understanding of objectification. In a Hegelian sense, objectification is more of a descriptive term than it became after Marx, when it acquired
a more distinctively negative connotation (whether that is
because of Marx is another matter). As Daniel Miller has argued, objectification should not be understood as a dirty
word; it just describes the inevitable process by which all
expression, conscious or unconscious, social or individual,
takes specific form (1987:81).
To talk about making the invisible visible as mediating the social is but a subtle shift from objectifying the
social by the light of Millers definition. And it is not coincidental that Miller has parlayed his own work on material culture into the anthropology of media (e.g., Miller and
Slater 2000). It is, indeed, often those at an intersection between material culture studies and media studies (and especially those attentive to the legacies of both Marx and
Hegel) who have provided some of the most useful anthropological discussions of mediation to date (see, e.g., Boyer
2007; Eisenlohr 2009; Keane 2007; Mazzarella 2004; Meyer
2006; Pinney 2004).
Although the depth and breadth of the literature on
mediation as a concept do not match those on religion, the
productivity of this writing can be traced in the ethnographically based studies in the collections under review. What
they make clear is that religious subjects are often quite
concerned with mediation: how it works, what it works
through, who or what defines or controls its channels, what
it delivers, and so on. The two most dominant expressions
of this concern have to do with what one might call relations to and relations of.
Relations to have to do with how mediation positions
people and their gods in relation to one another. They are
concerns with distance and, often, presence (Engelke 2007;
cf. Robbins n.d.). Calibrating the proper distance between
the human and the divine is often intimately bound up with
the nature of a medium. In her Key Words entry on soundscape, Schulz provides an overview of these calibrations in
relation to the mediations that often matter most in the religious imagination: the human senses (Morgans own entry
on image is complementary). It is going too far to say that
Islam is a religion of the ear and Christianity and Hinduism

376

religions of the eyes, for this simplifies what are intricate interrelations between the senses and even the importance
of synesthesia. The notion of darshan, or divine seeingand-being-seen, for example, although of utmost importance to what are recognized as Hindu traditions (Eck 1985),
should not preclude recognizing how sound, as produced
in mantras, can play a crucial role in Hindu ritual practice.
These characterizations also simplify the range of ways in
which a sense might function: Catholic and Protestant visual pieties can differ greatly, to say the least, and, as Leigh
Eric Schmidt (2000) has shown, there are parallel histories
of Christian investments in sound that complicate these labels even more. All the same, at least theologically, sensual
hierarchies often discipline and direct the religious subject. Schulz herself is one of a number of scholars in recent years to focus on the soundscapes of Islam, in which
practice is shaped by audition (see also, e.g., Eisenlohr 2009;
Hirschkind 2006). New media technologies (broadcasting;
recording) become ways of extending the soundscape beyond its original spatiotemporal emplacement. Among the
Muslims with whom Schulz worked in Mali, this allowed
one religious leader to render his presence immediate and
heighten the spiritual aura of his voice (in Morgan, p. 183).
That, in many ways, media technologies have been
used to close the distance between the human and the
divine (or the divines representatives) by playing on the
senses that matter most in a sacred economy does not
mean that such auratic extensions happen automatically.
Walter Benjamins classic Work of Art essay (1968; see also
Benjamin 2008) has been a touchstone in this regard, being,
as it is, one of the most important reflections on mediation
and how mass mediation affects the aura of the original.
Although it makes many appearances throughout the volumes under review, Benjamins essay is dealt with in most
depth by Dasgupta (in Meyer and Moors) in his analysis
of the aura in the public sphere. For Benjamin, the aura
in an original work of art (understood in traditional form
as the product of religion and ritual) is indexed through
its simultaneous proximity and distance: a presence that
demands distanciation. Using Hindu nationalist discourse
as his main example, Dasgupta shows, in the spirit of
Benjamins original intentions, how an aura is not so much
effaced as transformed by technological mediations; its
character changes (in Meyer and Moors, p. 256)in this
case, according to Dasgupta, by infusing Hindu identity
with a consumerist logic legitimated by globalization such
that the aura accrues in even the most profane practices
and discourses (p. 269).
Questions of proximity and distance are also questions of control. As the ethnographic and historical records
indicate, the wider a text circulates, the more difficult it
becomes for its producers or masters to determine its reception, despite the fantasy of control that often accompanies technologies of expansion. This observation prompts

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consideration of the second dominant theme to emerge

from religious studies media turn, the relations of, by
which 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 a
particular medium is a path to freedom or enslavement.
Will this thingthis icon, this image, this book, this telephone, this computerset me free or tie me down? Will it
allow me to lead an authentic life (and in proper relation to
the divine) or will it corrupt and cripple my ability to do so?
These are the kinds of questions that relations of power and
empowerment raise.
It is no contradiction to say that even the most fervent
supporters of a particular kind of mediation have doubts
about and even a distrust of the chosen technology. As
Meyer shows in her chapter in Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, Pentecostals in Ghana are, in this way, potential victims of their own success. They have managed to
harness video as a powerful channel for inculcating charismatic ways of seeing, in the process shaping the terms of
public life and popular entertainment. And yet, Meyer asserts, the spread of Pentecostalism into the public sphere
has a cost: it distracts from the genuine religious experience (in Meyer and Moors, p. 300). The flip side of this
embrace of a medium is, of course, its abolition or even
destructiontechnophobia rather than technophilia. This
approach to mediums (and their materiality) is, of course,
probably one of the best-studied sets of histories of religious
traditions, the histories of iconoclasm. I am not sure if it is
despite or because of this scrutiny, but iconoclasm is one
dynamic of religious mediation that receives comparatively
little attention across the volumes under review (although
see Spyer in de Vries on iconography).
The dynamic between the mediate and immediate is
a defining feature of what scholars have come to call religion (see Mazzarella [2006] for a similar point relating to
politics). Visible and invisible, immanent and transcendent, material and spiritual, natural and supernatural, mortal and immortal, human and divine, here and not here,
known and unknown (knowable and unknowable), revealed
and concealed, present and absentall of these extremely
productive yet extremely problematic conceptions are the
inspirations for and products of religious mediations. To
make senseeven to be debunked, made into nonsense
every one of these pairings is grappled with in and through
media. What the media turners have done is suggest that
the pairs are interesting not in themselves but for the
conjunctions that join them. These conjunctionsthese
andsare not the recognition of binary oppositions but tokens of a dialectic; these ands are the scrolls, icons, books,
videos, radio broadcasts, and networks in cyberspace that
define, substantiate, and challenge the relationships between the visible and invisible worlds.

American Ethnologist

Conclusion: To end, and begin?

Reading these (and other works) on the media turn in religious studies, one is struck by the prevalence of two critiques. The first, to which I have already alluded in passing,
is a flat-out rejection of the version of post-Enlightenment
secular modernity in which religion is supposed to go private or even die. Again and again, media turners decry the
poverty of this thesis. They do it so effectively, in fact, that,
when one reads through these volumes systematically, as a
reviewer must, one begins to doubt that anyone could have
been foolish enough ever to have believed that religion was
on the way out. This doubt is not eased by the fact that it is
rare for critics of the post-Enlightenment metanarrative to
back up their claims with much detail. Rather, that narrative
schema almost always serves as a rhetorical launching pad.
This is not a criticism leveled specifically at contributors to
these volumesor, at least, not only them. I have also been
guilty of using this metanarrative as a point of departure for
thinking through things, for thinking about the return of
religion. Yet religion has not so much returned as returned
to focus (see Derrida 2001:72, 78)hardly the same thing.
One task for those of us interested in the media turn and
religious studies more generally is to ask exactly what good
it does to circulate this critiquequickly becoming something of a metanarrative itselfwithout further elaboration
and reflection.
The second critique raises a related but separate issue about the place of religion in media studies. In the
overviews of media studies by those involved in religious
studies, it is quite common to hear how key figures and
even schoolsespecially in the period from the 1970s to the
1990sexcluded religion from view. Thus, although Stuart
Hall and others in the Birmingham School of cultural studies are often praised for bringing mass media to the fore as
a legitimate interest, they are criticized for not linking mass
media to religion (as they did with race, class, and gender).
And Manuel Castells, despite his prescient work on the network society, is recognized as limiting his focus to fundamentalism. These criticisms are usually backed up with specific examples, unlike those leveled at post-Enlightenment
thought in general. Consequently they tend to hold more
water. All the same, when they are viewed in relation to the
rich array of work in the volumes being considered, one
question that arises is whether the media turn in religious
studies is meant only to fill a gap or whether the understanding of religion as mediation is supposed to reconfigure
media studies per se. Is religion as mediation a supplement
or a catalyst?
As it stands, I think, we do not know for sure. As
Horsfield rightly notes in his Key Words entry on media,
though, with such a broad view of social mediation and religion, its rich description can be so diffuse as to be of little

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Volume 37 Number 2 May 2010

strategic or policy value (p. 114). Not to mention analytic.

Another task for those of us committed to the media turn in
religious studies, then, is to ask how, if at all, religious mediations differhow they compare to other kinds of mediations: political, economic, or otherwise. Is mediation itself a
stable and portable conceptan all-in-one tool in our kits?
In the future, it will be important for media turners in religious studies to reflect further on mediation as a concept in
itself and to link their reflections in more depth to similar
ones in the human sciences.
In the end, I hope above all to have shown that it is
precisely because the work in these volumes is so rich that
we can venture to ask these questions, that we can set ourselves some potential tasks. These books represent something genuinely new that is afoot in the study of religion and
its beyond.

Note
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Dominic Boyer, Lara
Deeb, Patrick Eisenlohr, and an anonymous reviewer for AE for
their helpful comments on this essay.

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accepted November 27, 2009

final version submitted December 17, 2009

Matthew Engelke
Department of Anthropology
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom
M.Engelke@lse.ac.uk

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