Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

"... one of those rare edited volumes that advances social thought as it provides substantive religious and media ethnography that is good to think with." --Dale Eickelman, Dartmouth College

Increasingly, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and indigenous movements all over the world make use of a great variety of modern mass media, both print and electronic. Through religious booklets, radio broadcasts, cassette tapes, television talk-shows, soap operas, and documentary film these movements address multiple publics and offer alternative forms of belonging, often in competition with the postcolonial nation-state. How have new practices of religious mediation transformed the public sphere? How has the adoption of new media impinged on religious experiences and notions of religious authority? Has neo-liberalism engendered a blurring of the boundaries between religion and entertainment? The vivid essays in this interdisciplinary volume combine rich empirical detail with theoretical reflection, offering new perspectives on a variety of media, genres, and religions.

"... an important contribution to a flourishing ethnographic literature on the globalizing nexus of religion and media... Taken together, these chapters complexify and energize the 'public sphere' as Jurgen Habermas conceptualizes this realm, and also show mass mediation's close relationship to religious identity politics. ... Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere deepens the inquiry into the 'new politics of belonging'... that mass media facilitate in realms of faith making. As is apparent in the book's fine introduction... anthropology has much to gain by continuing its engagements along these lines." --American Anthropologist Indiana University Press

Birgit Meyer is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Free University, Amsterdam.

Annelies Moors holds the ISIM Chair at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, University of Amsterdam.

Acknowledgments

Introduction Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors

Part I. Mediated Religion and Its New Publics

1. Cassette Ethics: Public Piety and Popular Media in Egypt Charles Hirschkind

2. Future in the Mirror: Media, Evangelicals, and Politics in Rio de Janeiro Patricia Birman

3. Communicating Authority, Consuming Tradition: Jewish Orthodox Outreach Literature and Its Reading Public Jeremy Stolow

4. Holy Pirates: Media, Ethnicity, and Religious Renewal in Israel David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner

Part II. Public Religion and the Politics of Difference

5. Representing Family Law Debates in Palestine: Gender and the Politics of Presence Annelies Moors

6. Morality, Community, Publicness: Shifting Terms of Public Debate in Mali Dorothea E. Schulz

7. Media and Violence in an Age of Transparency: Journalistic Writing on War-Torn Maluku Patricia Spyer

8. Mediated Religion in South Africa: Balancing Airtime and Rights Claims Rosalind I. J. Hackett

9. Rethinking the "Voice Of God" in Indigenous Australia: Secrecy, Exposure, and the Efficacy of Media Faye Ginsburg

Part III. Religious Representations and/as Entertainment

10. Synchronizing Watches: The State, the Consumer, and Sacred Time in Ramadan Television Walter Armbrust

11. Becoming "Secular-Muslims": Yaar Nuri Öztürk as a Super-subject on Turkish Television Aye Öncü

12. Gods in the Sacred Marketplace: Hindu Nationalism and the Return of the Aura in the Public Sphere Sudeep Dasgupta

13. The Saffron Screen? Hindu Nationalism and the Hindi Film Rachel Dwyer

14. Impossible Representations: Pentecostalism, Vision, and Video Technology in Ghana Birgit Meyer

Contributors

Index