Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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Slone, D. Jason (2004) Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A brief and accessible introduction to the cognitive science of religion, with examples and applications from Buddhism and Christianity.

Smail, Daniel Lord (2008). On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press. A historian offers a view of how social institutions are created to respond to the dynamics of brain chemistry.

Sørensen, Jesper (2007) A Cognitive Theory of Magic. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. A recent cognitive study of ritual behaviors (magic); contains up-to-date bibliography.

Sperber, Dan (1996) Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. An important and influential theory of culture and of cultural transmission based on the micro-processes of human cognition, by a cultural anthropologist.

Taylor, Marjorie (1999) Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tooby, John and Cosmides, Leda (1992) ‘The Psychological Foundations of Culture’. In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, J. Tooby, eds. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–136. This classic article is the ‘charter’ for an evolutionary approach to the study of cultural phenomena.

Tylor, E. B. (1958 [1871]) Primitive Culture, Part II: Religion in Primitive Culture. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Whitehouse, Harvey (2004) Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. An important and influential theory of different modes of culture and of cultural transmission, especially religious, by a leading cultural anthropologist.

——and Laidlaw, James A., eds (2004) Ritual and Memory: Towards a Comparative Anthropology of Religion. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. An exploration by anthropologists of comparative studies based in the cognitive sciences.

——and Martin, Luther H., eds (2004) Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. An exploration by archeologists and historians of historical approaches to religion based in the cognitive sciences.

Wilson, David Sloan (2002) Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. An evolutionary argument for religious groups as culturally evolved adaptations, by an eminent biologist.

Wilson, Edward O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. A recent if brief look at religion by the founder of socio-biology.

Young, Lawrence A., ed. (1997) Rational Choice Theory and Religion: Summary and Assessment. London: Routledge. A good introduction to the pros and cons of modelling religion in terms of classic economic theory, i.e. rational choice theory.

Suggested reading

As a relatively new field of study, few introductory works in the cognitive science of religion have been published. A brief introduction to the basic premises of the cognitive science of religion is Justin Barrett’s ‘Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion’, in Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (2000): 29–34. Longer introductions to the cognitive science of religion include Jason Slone’s Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), with examples from Christianity and Buddhism, and Todd Tremlin’s Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), which emphasizes the evolutionary framework of the field. The most significant contributions to the field to date include Justin Barrett’s Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (London: Heinemann and New York: Basic Books (2001), and Ilkka Pyysiäinen’s How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001). Michael Gassaniga’s Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us

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Unique (New York: HarperCollins, 2008) is a good overview of the recent research into brain and cognitive functions generally.

For recent specialized studies in the cognitive science of religion, with good bibliographies, see Jesper Sørensen, A Cognitive Theory of Magic (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007) and Emma Cohen, The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an Afro-Brazilian Religious Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

For specialized topics in the cognitive sciences, see The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, R. A. Wilson and F. C. Keil, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Chapter 32

Religion, media and cultures of everyday life

Gordon Lynch

Despite sometimes well-supported claims about the growing secularization of society, religion remains embedded in the media and cultures of everyday Western life. Religious figures and issues attract substantial interest in news media. Religious debates generate considerable interest through interactive media such as online discussion forums and blogs. Entertainment media continue to represent traditional religious figures and narratives in a variety of ways ranging from the reverent to the ironic, as well as addressing alternative spiritual traditions and broader forms of the supernatural. The rise of new media, and cheaper forms of media production and distribution, have supported the growth of a range of niche religious media including film, popular music, and educational materials. The internet, and other mobile communications technology, have also provided new opportunities for religious communication and the development of religious networks spread over wide geographical areas. Religious lifestyle media and products (which in mass-produced forms, date back well into the nineteenth century) have continued to evolve with the emergence of new religious lifestyle magazines and branded religious drinks, games, clothing and jewellery.

Whilst the numbers of active participants in religious services and institutions may therefore be low, and falling, in many Western societies, religion therefore remains a powerful presence in media and popular cultures. Public awareness of religion is framed through the media, and some of the deepest controversies around contemporary religion are bound up with the content and uses of media. The controversy over the publication of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was both a dispute over the content of particular media publications, but was also fuelled by media that circulated the cartoons around the world with the intention of encouraging Muslim protests or rallying people around support for principles of freedom of speech. Similarly the rise of the new atheism has been made possible by various global media that disseminate the ideas of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others, and by various communications media (such as online discussion boards and social networking sites) that enable supporters of the new atheism to collaborate and campaign together with little face-to-face interaction. The media also increasingly become the key public space in which such religious issues are discussed and argued over.

Understanding how religion is bound up with media and cultures of everyday life is therefore essential for making sense of contemporary forms of lived religion, as well as how religion is encountered and negotiated by people who are not themselves active religious adherents. In this chapter, we will examine the growing academic literature that has developed in this field since the 1990s, noting the different concerns and approaches that scholars have brought to this work as well as the key questions that this work has addressed and continues to generate.

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By the end of the chapter, we will also have discussed how the study of religion, media and cultures of everyday life has a central role to play in making sense of some of the most important questions in the study of contemporary religion. Before doing this, though, we will take a step back from specifically focusing on religion to examine why scholars have thought that media and popular culture is, or is not, worth studying, and consider the implications of wider scholarship on media and popular culture for work in the study of religion.

Just kitsch? Why study media and popular culture

Until the middle of the twentieth century – with a few exceptions such as the Mass Observation project in the UK – scholars paid little serious attention to mass forms of media and popular culture. A common assumption was that popular culture was devoid of any intellectual, moral or aesthetic value, and that it should be largely ignored as worthless kitsch or berated from a distance for its potential to produce moral decay (see Storey, 2003; Lynch, 2005, pp.1–11). Popular or mass culture was, from this perspective, typically contrasted with other, more valuable forms of culture; either the ‘high’ culture of the canon of great art, literature and philosophical thought (Arnold, 1869), or authentic ‘folk’ cultures passed down through generations which were now being replaced by superficial forms of mass entertainment (McDonald, 1957).

By the 1950s, however, more sustained academic attention was being paid to understanding media and popular culture. The early part of the twentieth century had seen the growing social impact of what were then new media, radio and film, and later, television. The role of these expanding media as a tool for propaganda before and during the Second World War, as well as its role in the growing advertising industry, generated interest and concern about the ways in which media could be used to influence the way in which the public thought, shopped and voted. Over time, this generated an increasingly sophisticated research literature on the effects of the media on its audiences (see, e.g. Brooker and Jermyn, 2003).

In the period after the Second World War, critical social theorists also increasingly turned their attention to issues of popular culture. Whilst earlier Marxist thought had focused on the importance of economic structures for determining how power was maintained in capitalist societies, a growing number of theorists began to explore how culture itself perpetuated particular power structures or ideological myths about the nature of society (Barthes, 1957; Lefebvre, 1961). Particularly influential in this regard was the work of Theodore Adorno (1991), a leading writer in the Frankfurt School of critical Marxist thought, which critiqued the ways in which various forms of popular culture (newspaper horoscopes, popular music, the Hollywood star system) provided consumers with illusory and unimportant choices that deflected them producing genuinely creative and participatory societies. This radical critique of contemporary cultures of everyday life was also evident in the work of the Situationist International, a group of intellectuals, artists and architects, who sought not only to identify oppressive structures in contemporary cultural life, but to develop new forms of cultural practice that enabled people to experience social spaces in radical and creative ways (Vaneigem, 1967; Debord, 1977). The intellectual and activist work of the Situationists played an important role in encouraging the student protests in France which led to the Paris uprising of May 1968, in which for a short time, it appeared that a revolutionary social movement might generate major political change in the country. The failure of workers’ organizations to support this uprising led both to its political collapse, but also led a number of disappointed radical intellectuals to reflect on how it was that people oppressed by a

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particular social system would not be moved to rise up against it. Again, attention turned to the role that culture played in winning people’s assent to existing power structures. A number of cultural theorists turned to both the work of Louis Althusser (1971), who proposed that ideological state apparatuses determined the ways in which people were able to think about themselves and their social world, and Antonio Gramsci (1972), another disappointed revolutionary from earlier in the century, who wrote about how power elites were able to win the assent of wider populations through processes of hegemony.

An important stimulus for the study of media and popular culture during this period came with the formation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in 1964. Whilst critical theorists such as Adorno regarded popular culture with suspicion, staff at the CCCS were increasingly interested in how culture operated as a system of power relations in which people were subjected to, but also able to resist, dominant forms of power and ideology (see Turner, 2003, pp.58ff.). The CCCS became particularly associated with the idea of sub-culture, typically focused on young, workingclass people (and, as some critics of the concept later observed, men) who developed new cultural styles and practices to challenge dominant social structures and expectations (Hall and Jefferson, 1976; see also Bennett and Kahn-Harris, 2006). Dick Hebdige’s (1979) study of the punk movement became a classic text of this kind of analysis. The CCCS played a foundational role in the development of cultural studies as a new academic discipline, and its interest in media and popular culture as a site of struggle provided an alternative approach to thinking about cultural texts and practices beyond the critique of popular culture as kitsch or opiate of the people.

Within this academic turn to the study of media and popular culture, important tensions have arisen which also frame the more specific study of religion, media and cultures of everyday life. The first of these is the tension between a critical view of popular culture which sees it as trapping its consumers into the assumptions and power structures of capitalist societies (e.g. Adorno, 1991), and a more optimistic view which sees in everyday cultural practices the potential to resist dominant power structures and assumptions about gender, ethnicity and sexuality (see, e.g. de Certeau, 1984; Fiske, 1989). One specific example of this tension is between the view of contemporary consumer culture as trapping people into an illusory sense of choice and freedom which obscures the real roots of their suffering (Williamson, 1986; Carrette and King, 2004), and the view that consumer culture can provide people with the freedom to challenge existing structures and assumptions and to live creatively (Nava, 1992; Ward, 2002). A second tension has arisen between approaches to the study of media and popular culture that are purely theoretical and those which emphasize the importance of empirical work (see Lynch, 2009). Advocates of theoretical approaches to the study of media and popular culture (who draw on Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and queer theory) argue that such theoretical critiques are necessary because those involved in everyday cultural practices may well suffer from a false consciousness produced by particular psychological or social processes. Such false consciousness makes it very difficult for people to be able to detect the power structures and assumptions embedded in their cultural lives, and interviewing people about their perceptions will therefore simply generate accounts from this false consciousness. Conversely, other researchers have argued that without some real-world study, purely theoretical approaches are in danger of generating accounts of people’s cultural lives that are inadequate, or in some cases, wholly wrong. One example of this debate focused on ideas developed by contributors to the film journal, Screen, in the 1980s, who drew on the work of theorists such as Althusser, and the film theorist,