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. 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: rst, 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.

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 reect 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 lm, 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.

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 Jos Casanova, Jan Assmann, Charles Taylor, e Veena Das, R gis Debray, Willem B. Drees, Patricia Spyer, e Talal Asad, Michael Warner, and Peter van der Veer address mediation in one sense or another (via discussions of the

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 371379, 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

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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) lled 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 lm, 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 Armbrust, Ayse Oncu, Sudeep Dasgupta, Rachel Dwyer, and 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 lm

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 denitive. 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 dened 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 Horseld 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 nd most of them engaging too.

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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 rst 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 ippant, 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 ippant about the contents. A handful of the 43 essays will be widely inuential, 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 rst 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 nongurative 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 rst 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 denition of religion as something within the indeterminate spaces of exchange between humans and their machines (p. 686). Next comes Meyers already inuential 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 reections 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 ction vis-` -vis his ena gagement with the German mystic Eckhart von Hochheim. Extending this focus on the ner 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-

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 briey 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 rst of ve scheduled books based on an international research program called The Future of the Religious Past, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientic 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, Horseld, 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 justication for speaking of the media turners (if you will) in terms of collegial

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bonds and intellectual afnities, 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 gures 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 reect 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 signicance of the processes of mediation and mediatization without and outside of which no religion would be able to manifest or reveal itself in the rst 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

manifest the relationship between the known and visible world of humans and the unknown and invisible world of spirits and the divine. Reecting 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, inuential study of popular religious images, Visual Piety (1998). A trained art historian, Morgan nevertheless chooses to refer to these images as, rst and foremost, religious stuff (1998:xi). This says something important. One benet 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 gures 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 inuence of more-recent gures (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 inuential 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

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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 gures 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 rmly 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 dened) 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

might index something moreand more than the sense of religion as a social fact. I would nd 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 gures 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 gure. 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 denitions 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 objectication. In a Hegelian sense, objectication 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, objectication 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 specic 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 denition. 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 denes 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

religions of the eyes, for this simplies 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 reections 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 difcult 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 eld 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 ip 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 dening 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 dene, substantiate, and challenge the relationships between the visible and invisible worlds.

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 rst, to which I have already alluded in passing, is a at-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 specically 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 reection. 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 gures 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 specic 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 ll a gap or whether the understanding of religion as mediation is supposed to recongure 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 Horseld 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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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 reect further on mediation as a concept in itself and to link their reections 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 nal 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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