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media and the sensesin the making ofreligious experience:an introduction



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:



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



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.



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



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



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



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



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 '

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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



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.

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