Aesthetic Formations / Religion/Culture/Critique (PDF)

BIRGIT MEYER is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is the author of Translating the Devil. Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana, and co-editor of Globalization and Identity (with Peter Geschiere), Magic and Modernity (with Peter Pels) and Religion, Media and the Public Sphere (with Annelies Moors). She is also co-editor of the journal Material Religion.

'Aesthetic Formations invites us into the most exciting research on religion and media today. More than a collection of essays, the book has the coherence of a campaign, with each chapter theoretically coordinated and animated by vivid ethnographic accounts, full of wonders. A model of collaborative research, this book is a landmark in cultural studies of religion, media, the senses, and the social dynamics of conflict and community.' - David Chidester, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa and author of Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture

'This compelling volume argues that in order to understand the strong social connections that modern religions nurture, we need to attend to their aesthetic mediation in a variety of sensory forms and practices. The essays demonstrate the thesis in a concerted and accessible way that scholars and students of religion will welcome.' - David Morgan, Professor of Religion, Duke University, USA

'This is a groundbreaking new collection that invites us into the 'intellectual space' created by a lively and deeply original group of anthropologists whose work grapples with the experiential shape of religion in an increasingly mediated world. Their exciting new work offers us a welcome and at times dizzying journey through contemporary postcolonial religiosity - from Latin America to Africa to South Asia - to understand how the uptake of new media forms intensifies and reshapes the sensory worlds of religious practices and identities, from their fundamental location in the body, and its extensions into the world via television, radio, and film. This is important and essential reading for anyone interested in religion or media, and dispels any lingering illusion that one precludes the other.' - Faye Ginsburg, David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director, Centre for Religion and Media, New York University, USA