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media and the sensesin the making ofreligious experience:an introduction
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ABSTRACT
This introduction plaoes the articles presented in this specialissue in a broader frame by ou tiining current issues in the
study of reiigious m aterial and visual culture. It argues for anunderstanding of religion as a practice of mediation to w hichmedia, understood as "sensational forms" are intrinsic. Suchsensational forms are central to construing specific religioussubjectivities, generating religious experience, and callingupon the divine by appealing to, and tuning, the sensesand the body in ways peculiar to the specificity of religioustraditions.
Keywords: materiality, m edia, 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), Globalizationand identity: Dialactics of Flow and Closure {edlteú
with Peter Geachiere, 1999). Magic and Modernity:
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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 Joel-
Peter Witkin's Crucified Horse appear to invoke inChristian
viewers strong sensations of shock, despair, and d isgust. 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 boun d up w ith believers' bodies.
The well-known Indonesian painter Abdoul Djalil Pirous has long
been searching to resolve tensions between mo dem and Islamic
art. Inrecent years, in tune with the Islamic revival in Indonesia,
Pirous has de veloped a new "Qur'anic aesthetic" through which
he frames his paintings as his "spirituai notes," meant to express
dzikir. "mindfulness ofG od." This "visual dzikir," Kenneth George c =
points out, offers a new way to experience a mystical "being- «s,with" God.
Blown by the wind, a mass-produced portrait of the Great King | s f
of Siam Rama V [1865-1910) found its wa y to a new owner, • i l ' "
who cleaned and framed the portrait and placed it in the family's %S^
restaurant. There, Irene Stengs reports, it came to life at a - »mmoment 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 pow er
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 w hich th reaten to subjugate humans in
the near future. Credo M utwa, David Chidester show s, authorizes
the authenticity of this film on the basis of his own spiritual
encounters w ith and visions ofaliens in the South African desert.
"Movies touch us and we feel and touc h (and sometimes even
taste and smell) them back," argues the film theorist Vivian
Sobchack. Addressing ourown experiences as tilm viewers,
she explains that spiritual or religious films invoke in viewers
experiences of transcendence in the here and now.
TTiough inviting us into diverse settings, these vignettes have
126 '" common that they evolve around specific media, old or 1 1
new—art 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
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encounter, from offering spiritual vision to triggering a sense
of transce nden ce, 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
presen ted here in a broader framevi/ork, and to highlight
how they contribute to current debates on religion andmedia. '
Religion as M ediation
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 media—as if, for instance,Christianity an d television we re entirely different ma tters be ing
unexpectedly welded together. A we alth of studies emerged ,
condu cted from the standpoints of m ass comm unication,
religious studies, anthropology, and other social-cultural
sciences that did not only explore religion's use of new massmedia, but also the ways in which popular m edia such as
television take o n roles and fun ctions hitherto fulfilled byreligions. Extending the focus from the setting of American
religion and popular culture towa rds other parts of the world ,
these endeavors yielded a solid body of work, and offered upexciting vistas.^
One of the m ost im portan t findings lay in the realizationthat, 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 m edia such astelevision an d film. Upon deeper reflection, media were found
to b e intrinsic to reiigion. The p hilosophical implications of
this idea have been elaborated by the Dutch philosopherHent de Vries (2001). Positing a distance between human
beings and the transcendental, he argued that religion offers
practices of me diation that bridge that distance and makeit possible to experience—or indeed shape, from another
perspective— the transcen dental. Take, for exa mple, the
Catholic icon: although obviously "human-made," beingcarved from w oo d, painted, and arranged , to the believing
beholder (and possibly to its maker) it appe ars as an
emb odiment of a sacred presence that can be experiencedby contemplative gaze, prayer, or a kiss. Other exampiesmentioned above are the portraits of Rama V, which depe nd
127 on teohnologies of mass produ ction, and the "visual dzikir"
developed by the Indonesian painter Pirous, a person of flesh
and blood : posited beyond the order of ordinary things, theseportraits and paintings are imbued with a divine aura. Indeed,
from a perspective of religion as mediation, the divine does
not app ear as a self-revealing entity, but, on the con trary, isalways "effected" or "form ed" by m ediation processes, w hile
resisting being reduced to mere human-made products.Media and practices of mediation thus invoke the divine viaparticular, material forms.
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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 qu estions
about the mo des through w hich m edia are naturalized, or
even rendered invisible in praotioes of religious m ediation . Toreturn once again to the example of the portraits of Rama
V, the question at stake is how they becom e authorized as
viable looations through which the king manifests his power.
As S tengs sho ws, 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 w here one can see and be seen by
th e king, and so on). Paradoxically through such intricate
processes of med iation, these portraits are cod ed as forms 1 1
through which the king assumes immediate presence. The I I
examples of blasphem y oharges offered by Jojada Verrips, by s ï
contrast, show what happens when works of art make use S s> S.
of religious elements, yet at the same time violate authorized s S
Jesus placed in a container of urine, or a crucified horse . The ^ "
critical responses evoked by such art highlight the importanceof authorized mo des of religious representation exactly in theirviolation.
Unlike artists charged with blasphemy, Pirous works
hard to make his art live up to Islamic restrictions ooncerningabstract visual representation, and representations of God
in particular His example, as George sho ws, pinpoints thefact that artistic creativity evolves throu gh thes e restrictions(rather than being thw arte d by them). This results in adzikir of a new kind that synthesizes aesthetic and ethicalpleasure, 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 prooessesof incorporating new media into a longstanding religioustradition. We encounter a similar creative adoption of newmedia suoh as film into "African shamanism," which is itself
already a product of artioulating South African practices ofdivination and spiritual knowledge into the conoerns of the
128 contem porary global New Age movem ent, with its partioular
emphasis on individual spirituality. Interestingly, as Chidestershows. Credo Mutwa maintains a fairly ambivalent stancetowards electronic med ia, which he views as both limiting a
person's spiritual recep tivity and offering a m eans to validatereligious visions, as spotlighted in the vignette. At the samet ime, and very muoh in line with S obchack's o bservations,
Mutwa proves to be moved and touched by film images, somuo h so that his spiritual visions a nd film images of alienscollapse into one oorporeal experience. Comparing Pirous
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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
I con cern ed with authorizing himself as an authe ntic visionary
who seif-consciously reartioulates and reinterprets Zulu
traditions of engaging dream s, visions, and extraordinary
spiritual experiences under globalizing circumstances.
' The Sen ses, Exper ience , and Subject iv i ty
In order to grasp the affective appeal of religious media, it may
be useful to app roach them as "sensational form s" that tr igger
as well as conde nse religious e xperience (Meyer 2006a). The
notion of sensational form seek s to draw our attention to
I 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. Sensationalforms do not only convey part icular ways of "making sense"
but concomitantly tune the senses and induce specif ic
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 condit ion for, rather than as an impedim ent to,
religious experience. While much work on religious experience
tends to tak e for granted "d eep " individual feelings as the
natural site of religion, it is important to stress that religion—asa socia l phenomen on— depend s on shared collective fom is
through w hich such feelings are tr iggered , 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 "acco unt 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 wh ich the
personal and the social are co-cons titut ive. This is the stance
ado pted by the art icles in this issue.
Calling upon the b ody and the mind (as an indivisible
whole), sensational forms are central to the making of religious
subjectivities. This use of subjectivity resonates strongly
129 with George's discussion of people as thinking and feeling
subjects in the wo rid, as well as being subject to the cultural
and ideological formations that m ake u p their wo rld. 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 specif ic modes through which
sensational forms "form " their use rs. 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
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to Verrips's con tribution, wh o suggests that "believers carrythe holy and the sacred all the time w ithin them in a particular
corporeal forma t. !t is bo th outside and inside their b odies"(Verrips 2008: 217). Exactiy because religious imagery is
embodied, looking at taboo-breaking art may trigger strongoorporeal reactions of pain and disgust. This view is also
relevant for a deeper understanding of current blasphemycharges against certain representations of Muhammad and
other form s of alleged sacrilege.
Of all the senses, the articles p resented in this issue directthe m ost a ttention towards vision. However, far from limiting
vision to the distant gaze that has sto od oentral in critiquesof modern o cularcentdsm (Jay 2004), the authors deploy a
view of vision as em bedded in the sensorium as a whole. Filmspectators, Sobchack asserts, are now just "spectator fish,"
as Christian Metz put it, but make "sense of the oinema (and s tu
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," s ï
Sobchack stresses that "viewing, hearing, and movement
are the m aterial means of em bodiment and intentionalitynot only for the viewer but also for the film" (2008: 196) This | ^ -
calls for a "ca rnal" approaoh that grounds looking in broaderbodily prac tices (see also Sobchack 2004), thus being alert
to the ways in which images touch their spectato rs. A similarapproach of vision as implying touch is also suggested by
Verrips, for wh om all senses are grounded in tactility, and byChidester, w ho argues that it is thanks to the m ultisensorydimension of e cstatic vision that peroeption is "intense,
unifying, and extraordinary," Likewise, George show s howPirous's visual dzikir is not meant merely to represent, but
seeks to induce inner spiritual experiences in viewers throughwhich they sense G od's presence, a point to be pursued later.
Here, visual oontemplation is central to the aesthetic-ethicalproject of bringing about piety.
Inspired by Walter Benjamin's understanding of
photograp hed 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 seeingand being seen. Moving further than the truism "seeing is
believing," she stresses that these portraits funotion in asetting in which "believing is seeing," thereby stressing the
130 extent to wh ich belief is vested in tangible images (see also
Meyer 2006b). This resonates with the wo rk of David Morganon the affective power of Jesus images (1998; see also
Morgan (2005)) and that of Christopher Pinney (2004) onmass-produced lithographs depicting H indu gods—a uthors
who have contributed muoh to our understanding of lookingas a speoific, transm itted religious practice tha t requires
our utmost attention. Importantly, the conditions of massreprod ucibility do not seem to diminish the experience of a
divine presence in the image, which seems to be triggered by f g
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Sensing the Sublime
Sensational forms do not only address religious subjectsin specific, authorized ways, but also invoke the divine ortranscendental. In a very intriguing passage, George recountshow he was once challenged after giving a seminar on hiswork with Pirous. One listener asked: " .. . I want to know just
one thing: Do you tremble when you look upon the versesof the Q ur'an in his work? Do you feel awe?" (George 2008 :184) This provocative question does net only indicate possibledifferences in the perception of religious forms betweenresearchers and their interlocutors, but also highlights thatawe and the sensibility to sense the sublime obviously do notemerge ex nihilo, but are enshrined in the sensational formsthat are central to practices of religious mediation throughwhioh religious subjeotivities are formed. Many scholars inreligious studies are familiar w ith the classic w ork of RudolfOtto on the Holy and the Numinous as existing su i generis
(1917: 7), and hence prior to, and independent from , theemotions that it arouses in the feeling subject. As Chidesterpoints out in his piece, Ottc deployed a Protestant, de-material and disembodied "negative theology of the senses"that stressed darkness and silence. By contrast, the articlespresented here regard awe as a sensation that is invoked inthe here and now, by virtue of media.
If Otto locates transcendental experiences in a numinousthat is framed as Ganz Anders (wholly other), Sobchackadvocates an understanding of extraordinary experiencein the immanent. This is driven by her realization that for a
nonreligious person —in fact even for an "unrelenting atheist"like herself—watching movies may induce unexpectedsensations of awe (Sobchaok 2004: 302). This is so because"we are always grounded in the radical materialism of bodilyimmanence," and yet "always also have the capacity fortranscendence: for a unique exteriority of being—and ex-
I fas/s—that 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, transcendenceis not opposed to, but grounded in immanence, and foundto be invoked by the capacity cf (fcr instance) film to leadviewers to an elsewhere that is perceived to be located ina "beyond" that exceeds the ordinary. In my view, this is auseful suggestion that calls for an exploration of how religious
131 sensational fcrms are able to invoke a sense of the sublime byaddressing the senses and the body in particular ways (seealso Meyer 2006a).
Ail the authors in this issue address this question m ore orless explicitty, Stengs's analysis is based o n the recogn itionthat mass-produced portraits are authenticated as harbingersof immediate divine presence and power. In other words, they
are rendered sacred in the con text of shared and transm ittedreligious ideas and practices through which these artifactsare construed as vehicles of the sublime. Likewise, Verrips's
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impressive series of examples of artistic w ork "that upsets
bec ause it is seem ingly plays disresp ectfully v^ ith wh at is
experienced to be sacred" (Verrips 2008: 213), shock is
the flipside of the aw e that a religious image is expecte d to
convey. Indeed, by foregrounding transgression and offence,
the p owe r of religious regimes to instill strong sensations
of piety and a sublime encounter is laid bare precisely ininstances of pollution and desecration. In this sense, taboo-
breaking art offers an entry point to grasping the restrictions
and the dos and d on'ts on which the power of authorized
religious imagery app ears to thrive. G eorge, 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 wh ich "visualizing Q ur'anic verse is
equivalent to glimpsing the divine." In other words, modes of
depiction involving specific practices of looking exist that are
authorized as oapable to render present that which resists
human representation by inducing a mystical experience of"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 20 08: 149), he also
points out that Credo Mutwa and his followers consider
our ordinary five senses inadequate to enoou nter spiritualrealities. Stressing that the ordinary sensorium is limited and
limiting, Mutwa construes a threshold or l imen 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.
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: m ateriaf religion.
132 The articles prese nted here conjo in in calling atten tion 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 in—and at the same time
surpassing— the 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
I '
3
to o
«'S)
¡ I
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Morgan, Webb Keane, and David Chidester also highlight,it is high time for a critique of conventional understandingsof m odem religion as situated beyond materiality. Thequestions about the relation between religion and media,and between religion and materiality, converge insofar asmedia are best understood as material forms around whichreligious co mm unication evolves. In this sense, the artiolespresented in this issue address issues of great imp ortance foranyone concerned with re-materializing our understanding ofreligion,
notes and references
133
' Earlier versions of the articlespublished in this speciai issue werepresented in the context of theconference "Media Technologies.Sensory Experiences, and theMaking of Religious Subjectivities"(Universi ty of Ams terdam , M arch2006). co-organized by Charles
ÍHirschkind and m yself in theframework of my research programModern Mass Media, Rel igionand the imagination of ReligiousCommuni t ies (2000-2006, seewww.pscw.uva.nl /media-rel igion).I am gratefui to the NetherlandsFoundation of Scientific Research(NWO) and the Amsterdam Schoolfor Social Science Research(ASSR) for funding this pro gram ,
^ To m ention just a fewmult idisdpl inary volumes: Babband W adley 199 5; Horsf ield et al .2004; Hoover and Lundby 1997;Meyer and Moors 2006; Mitchel land Rate 2007; Plate 2003; Sfoutand Budden baum 1996; Vries andWeber 2001 ,
Babb , Lawrence A, and Wadley,Susan S, eds, 1995, Media and
the Transformation of Religion in
South Asia. Philadelphia; U niversityof Pennsylvania Press,
Chidester, Da vid. 200 8. ZuluDreamscapes; Senses. Media, andAuthenticat ion in ContemporaryNeo-Shamanism, Material Religion
4(2); 136 -59 .
Derr ida, Jacques. 1998, Faith andKnowiedge; T^ie Two Sources of
"Religion" at the Limits of ReasonAlone, In Religion, eds. JacquesDerr ida and Gianni Vatt imo.Cambridge; Pol i ty Press, pp, 1-78,
De Vries, Hent. 2D 01, In MediaRes; Giobal Religion. PublicSpheres, and the Task ofContemporary Rel igious Studies, InReligion and Media, eds, Hent deVries and S amuel Weber, Stanford;Stanford Universi ty P ress, pp,4 - 42 ,
George, Kenneth M, 2008, EthicalPieasure, Visual Dzikir. and Art isticSubject ivi ty in ContemporaryIndonesia, 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
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in Twentieth-Century Thought.Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Mitchell. Jolyon and Píate, Brant S.
eds, 2007 , The Reiigion and FilmReader. New York and London:
Routledge.
Meyer, Birgit. 2006a. ReligiousSensations: W hy Media. Aestheticsand Power Matter in the Studyof 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);
4 3 1 - 5 3 .
Meyer, Birgit end Moors, Annelies,
eds. 2006. Reiigion. Media andthe Public Sphere. Bloomington:
Indiana University P ress.
Morgan, David. 1998, VisuaiPiety: A History and Theory ofPopular Reiigious Images. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Morgan, David. 2005. The SacredGaze: Religious Visual Culture in
Theory and Practice. Berkeley: TheUniversity of C alifornia Press .
Otto, Rudolf . 1917. Das Heilige.Über das Irrationale in der Idee desGöttlichen und sein Verhäitnis zumRationalen. Breslau: Trewendt und
Granier.
Pinney, Christopher. 2004. "Photosof the Gods. ' The Printed Imageand Political Struggle in India.London: Reaktion Books-
Plate, Brent S. ed. 200 3.
Representing Reiigion in WorldCinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking,Culture Making. New York:
Palgrave,
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004, CamalThoughts: Embodiment andMoving Image Culture. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Sobchac k, V iv ian. 2008,
Embodying Transcendence: On
the Literal, the Material, and the
Cinematic Subl ime. MaterialReiigion 4(2): 19 4 - 2 0 3 .
Stcut, Daniel A. and Buddenbaum,
Judfth M. eds. 1996. Religionand Mass Media: Audiences andAdaptations. London: Sage.
Verrips, Jojada. 2008. Offending
Art and the Sense of Touch.Material Religion 4(2) : 204-25.
1 , 2ISm o
n'a»
II
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