Media, Spiritualities and Social Change 9781472549112, 9781441145550, 9781441114723

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Introduction: Media, Spiritualities and Social Change Stewart M. Hoover, Ph.D. and Monica M. Emerich, Ph.D.

Much has changed in the worlds of the media and of spirituality in recent years. These two realms are interacting, even converging, in fascinating and compelling ways as individuals seek new ways to be active in making meanings and identities in contemporary life. It has become common, in fact, for observers to note how modern media and practices of communication support unique – and often self-absorbed – life explorations, particularly among younger people. And, while it is less often noted, exploration of specifically spiritual roots, ideas and meanings is becoming an important project of emergent media forms and audiences. The contributions here argue that the ways that media and spirituality are interacting today can have purposes beyond promoting individual growth and serving as the sites and tools of exploration. Indeed, modern media provide an ever-expanding range of opportunities for people to address issues of social change in contemporary life and culture. The idea that the media sphere can have a unique, even positive, role to play in realizing such expanded purposes may be less obvious. It is the objective here to bring these developments, possibilities and instances forward. The authors herein demonstrate just how media are ideal for and necessary to emergent forms and purposes regarding social change. When we look carefully, we can in fact see many examples of such media. Toward that end, it is essential to acknowledge the vista of possibilities represented by the media sphere and, because of that, the major role they play in contemporary efforts directed at social change, both in the interests of progressive reform and in efforts to resist reform. The dynamics of the intersection of media, spirituality and social change occur in such complex ways, however, that the processes are not always readily transparent, as the authors represented in this book explain.

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There is no necessary flow of influence among these three domains of media, spirituality and social change; one does not always follow from the other. This book focuses upon the fluidity of these processes and how and where they are put to use by individuals, groups and institutions for the purpose of social transformation, both positive and negative. The cases included here problematize ideas of the public good – the ways in which that notion is constructed, represented and brought about; the places where these concepts and practices occur; the channels through which ideals are generated and action taken; and the populations involved. Each case reveals different and unique valences of media, spirituality and culture in the expression of social change. While the book argues for a sense of the integration of these three phenomena with social action, we need to take care here to disconnect them in order to explore the transformative capacities of each and to find a place from which we can view the ways in which each is mobilized today. We begin with the media and a definition of what we mean by ‘media’. In this book, the authors address a range of media – the channels, technologies, texts and culture through which communication, opinions, ideology, beliefs and values are generated, circulated, understood and acted upon. What comes first to mind may be the media of mass communication such as radio, television, Internet or newspapers and other print media, but it is soon obvious that this is too narrow. Media also include the technologies of voice, the visual media of art and graphics, the textile media of fabric, iconography, shrines, tourism and entertainment – and this still is a partial list. We live in a media age. By this we mean that media introduce and establish certain conditions for how we perceive and even experience life, beginning with such fundamentals as how we perceive the dimensions of time and space. But media have also come to intervene in foundational ways in the development of our social consciousness and in our construction of meaning and identity. This role for the media continues to be controversial: media have been condemned for everything from the undermining of traditional authority – be it religious, national, cultural or familial – to psychological impairment, moral decline, cultural disintegration and the perversion of language. On the other hand, with the development of each and every new media form, advocates celebrate its liberating potential. We’ve heard claims such as the promise of a new world order brought about through heightened individual agency or claims that media serve as windows onto or tools for democratic achievement. While it is beyond our purpose here to address such grandiose claims, we can say with certainty that the media are not

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going away. In spite of occasional and situational political and technical constraints on media expansion, media technology and media literacy (the ability of various populations to use media technologies), the demand for access to media continues to grow worldwide. This fact stems from two key characteristics of media: their political economy and their relationship to culture (Hoover 2006: 8). While media are, of course, embedded in markets and thus solidly part of the global hegemony of market capitalism and operating under the imperative of expansion, what is of most interest for the purpose of this book is this integral and complex relationship of media to culture. Not only do media possess structural independence and fiscal autonomy that supports their global expansion and social permeation, they have also claimed a cultural authority outside other, traditional centers of power including religious authority. These capacities are a direct result of their location in the global capitalist marketplace. Traditionally, many have been tempted into complacency with regard to media, in thinking about media as serving as nothing more than cultural mirrors merely reflecting what populations do, make or say. This is certainly partly true – media do reflect such processes – but such a benign and passive role for the media fails to understand the integral role of media in culture, that web of values, beliefs and processes by which and through which we make meaning. Scholars have argued that media have shifted the way in which humans perceive the world and process information, for example, shifting our reliance upon our senses by moving us from a reliance upon ‘the ear’ to ‘the eye’ (see Ong 1956). Others, such as British Sociologist John Thompson, argue that what has occurred is a ‘mediazation of culture’ (1995: 4), whereby the symbolic forms by which humans create meaning are increasingly distributed through, sited in and even generated by media. James Carey famously reoriented understandings of media with his essay ‘A Cultural Approach to Communication’, in which he proposed that we stop thinking about media as the carriers or transmitters of communication and instead understand them as engaged in the rituals of daily life. With the term ‘ritual’ Carey referred to the work of media in evoking the manner in which populations imagine, represent and come to build the values and frameworks of their lives (Carey 1989). The more ‘culturalist turn’ in media studies represented by Carey’s view took root on both sides of the Atlantic, forcing scholars to rethink how and where people creatively use ‘texts’ or the artifacts of daily life to construe, convey and construct meaning. Rather than viewing these mediations of life

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and culture as mere influences on culture and on daily lived life, researchers instead came to regard these as being among the very threads and fabric of that culture in as much as these mediations constitute the symbols through which we translate experience meaningfully. Innovations in communication technology promote wider circulation of these symbolic forms people use to understand and to shape the world and their positions and identities within that world. But it is important to understand here the impact on global cultures stemming from the broader acceptance of the ‘culture of media’ itself. That is, media are not just legitimated in contemporary life as sources of information but also as naturalized sites where both public and private life take place, are expressed and even develop. So while media institutions and media producers have gained greater public attention, this goes hand-in-glove with the fact that people have incorporated media into their lives in nuanced ways to become intimately involved with their processes of meaning-making and identity construction. In an era of globalization and global media, it is possible today to have unprecedented access to the raw resources of symbols plucked from the world’s cultures and to employ these symbols in the construction of the expressive and unique ‘self’. This situation may give pause to traditional authorities in religion because it can potentially undermine other traditions and cultural mores. At the same time, though, individuals may find that very process liberating as they discover new information about the world, find new ways in which to access that world, and, perhaps, come to perceive themselves differently, as having the ‘freedom’ to choose lifestyles. In this view, media have enabled a heightened reflexivity among individuals whereby we can regard ourselves not only as objects of history, but also as agents of change. Bruce Lincoln has argued that the areas of the ‘the arts, the media, science and popular culture’ have become the ‘chief battlegrounds’ where the issues concerning the broadest imaginable ‘grouping’ – the globalized world – are engaged (2000: 418). The cultural positioning of media and their penetration into the lifeworld means that much of what most people know about ‘others’ elsewhere in the world results from their portrayal in media. The transnational civil sphere is determined in important ways by the mass media through their involvement in the formation of public opinion (Hoover 2009) but also in the articulation of a social or collective identity. But the media themselves are changing in ways that serve to broaden and deepen their role in civil society. With the advent of what we know today as ‘social media’, it has never been easier for individuals to align themselves

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with collective interests, with social movements and causes, and to link up through these various identity projects with a global network of mostly unseen but self-declared, like-minded others. In the midst of this, the idea of ‘the public good’ has increasingly become one of the identity markers of the private consumer. While we can view this as an expression of resistance to dystopian economic and political systems we must also understand it within the context of the market imperative – of the capitalist market to expand, co-opt and reshape almost any human endeavor into a ‘marketable moment’. Spirituality has been threaded through these mediated and market processes, as a key facet of ‘identity’, of culture and of meaning-making. ‘Spirituality’ has become a symbolic resource of note for individuals, of course, but has also become so for commercial entities for which it is useful as a sort of curative that can legitimate the ‘profane’ processes of the marketplace, including those mediated processes of identity and social action. Increasingly, the word spirituality has gained new purchase, becoming reimagined as the distillation of religion, the pure form left after the removal of religion’s dogma, infrastructure, authority and ritual. This condensed version of religion has come, on the one hand, to represent for many people their deeper values, something that is not religion but is expressive of religious-like values while, on the other hand, simultaneously being claimed by the religious as representing the more personal part of faith. The term spirituality has been stubbornly resistant to definition. Its porosity, however, is part of its intense social caché. It is what Lucy Bregman (2006) refers to as a ‘glow-word’. It connotes a naturalized meaning about the realm of deeper values, morality, ethics and even the transcendent without being held captive to anyone’s attempt to define it. Spirituality can as easily describe states of being, practices and beliefs occurring within the structures of formal religion as it can those states occurring within private, informal and individualized values projects. In the case of the latter, where religion might be considered a package combining institutional and clerical authority, spirituality stands in for the concept of the individualized system itself. That is, it appears often to be a term constructed as at least partially, if not completely, unplugged from received and determinative doctrines and histories. In both instances – both formal religion and informal value systems – spirituality is increasingly viewed as a framework that can provide a defined space within which to develop and implement strategies to address pressing social challenges of the times in ways that traditional authority,

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religious or otherwise, is perceived as incapable or unwilling to do. That is, increasingly, spirituality is employed to describe sets of practices and beliefs that, while they might include a self-actualization element as in the case of the ‘New Age’, also prominently advocate for social and environmental activism. We have used the term ‘spiritualities’ rather than spirituality in the title of this book. The very fluidity of the meaning of spirituality is part of its appeal, and referring to spiritualities better emphasizes and captures the diversity, creativity and autonomy involved in its expression around the world. The spiritualities addressed in this book, therefore, reflect sensibilities that collect, reassemble and reinterpret symbolic resources in an attempt to carve out space in which different types of actions, partnerships and ideals categorized as civic engagement and social transformation can flourish. While some of these resources necessarily come from historic faith traditions or religions, it is the acquisition and combination of resources (the ‘quest’, as it is often described) in unique and uniquely meaningful ways that is the task of the autonomous individual ‘self’ today within or outside of formal religious institutions. Disenchantment with institutions, traditional authorities, political agendas, rationalization and materialism has given voice to new concerns about ‘self, experience and spiritual need’ (Roof 1999: 48). Most important to our purposes here, access to these resources is necessarily a matter of media. As people and organizations quest after individual (and collective) spiritualities that make sense, they turn to the ‘marketplace of religious symbols’ that has emerged – and is expanding – in the media, both locally and globally. These symbols transform into salient values and symbols, technologies and understandings for the synthesis of public and private identities, practices and beliefs. This book is keenly interested in the way media and spirituality are put to use for social transformation. While the involvement of spiritual life with social transformation is certainly not peculiar to contemporary societies, what has changed is the upsurge of media in these matters, coupled with the pressures of globalization bearing down upon the boundaries of personal identity, geographic location, national sovereignty and cultural meaning in uniquely complex ways. In the specific case of religion, globalization has unleashed a cascade of unexpected and unpredictable implications, many of which are consequences of the media. This has meant good and bad news in the sphere of religion. The fact that the media are embedded in markets is one of the most important sources

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of their significance to institutions like religion and the state because of the ways in which capitalism has become a new ‘metaphysics’ of existence (C. Campbell in Bauman 2007). Traditional religious authorities have regarded media with suspicion while at the same time accepting and utilizing the expansive reach of media for their own publicity. For citizens, however, media representations of spirituality and social change may offer a transformative agency, through, perhaps, a freeing up of constraints on religious or spiritual expression; a revelation of policies and practices undertaken by national, political, economic or social institutions that contradict deeply held personal values; or even a presentation of alternative lifestyles and beliefs. The question becomes one of how spirituality can leverage new concerns within the social world to engender a new vocabulary for speaking about old issues, to perhaps defray the tension that marks so much religious discourse. Perhaps we should think about a ‘mediascape’ of spirituality, borrowing the term by Arjun Appadurai (1990) to describe the distribution of media, their interconnectedness and the images and representations of the world put forth by those media. The mediascape of spirituality bears intricate patterns of social action, resistance and reformation threaded through its eschatological, soteriological and transcendent discourses. Spirituality as the realm of ‘deeper meanings’ is interjected in economic, political and social life by social actors to stimulate or introduce other values into consideration, using metonyms for spirituality such as ‘consciousness’ or ‘wisdom’. Ursula King (2001) has said that these types of meaning exchanges are capable of mobilizing individuals to ‘practical action’ in the world where religion has not or cannot do so, and, we might add, in ways that politics and economics have not or cannot as well. This sort of inner development, says Ursula King, lies outside of the ‘religious heritage of humankind’ that is today ‘tainted by an incriminating record of injustice, tribalism violence, and the violation of fundamental human rights’ (2001: 1–2). According to King, ‘A new kind of spirituality is needed for the crosscultural, mutually interdependent context of our new global society’ (ibid.). A politicized spirituality is thus rising, generated through and by media. Among the key questions for this book, then, are how and where values, practices and beliefs are articulated as spiritual and socially transformational and in what ways these evolve through and with media culture. This book is a first step to exploring emerging international and interdisciplinary scholarship on the ways in which media and spiritualities are engaged around the world in efforts to restructure paradigms, institutions, beliefs and practices to affect social change.

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The authors here show how spiritualities are informing and intersecting in socially transformative ways, expressing through and as a result of media. The first section focuses on identity and questions of where consciousness about social change occurs and mobilizes the individual toward collective action. Garry Tregidga investigates the competing narratives of Cornish identity in the context of media representations of the region of Cornwall, United Kingdom, both past and present. Director of the Cornish Audio Visual Archive at the Institute of Cornish Studies in Penryn, Tregidga focuses on the spiritual meanings and values that have been communicated to a wider audience through popular films, media documentaries, oral history recordings, books, magazines and newspaper articles. Also looking at the dynamics of identity formation, Elonda Clay of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago examines how mediation is restructuring science communication and public engagements of science, raising the question of how changing social and market arrangements of new ‘techno-sciences’ are shaping aspects of individual and group identity. Lee Gilmore of Holy Names University takes on Web 2.0 and the way in which it affects the American religious landscape. Individuals and communities utilize the Web to participate in and shape public discourses around diverse religions and spiritualities. Using Henry Jenkins’ concept of ‘convergence culture’ as a model for understanding some of the ways in which contemporary spiritualities are being reimagined and recontextualized, Gilmore is keenly interested in the reversal of flow of communication from traditional ‘top down’ hierarchies to ‘bottom up’ modalities whereby the line between information producer and audience is blurred. Part Two addresses the notion of integration of spirituality with mediated practice through the reconciling of self and other. Here, Carol Bliss of California State Polytechnic University looks at the ways in which new media, especially YouTube, can serve as a springboard for discussion among students in the ‘integrated’ classroom and deepen their awareness of different cultural, political and personal values while helping them to build communication and possibly regroup for social action. Developing the theme of ‘bridge-building’, John Hochheimer of Southern Illinois University argues for a role for media in the means of reconciliation, a necessary context within which peace may be facilitated in societies that have experienced the trauma of war. In this, media must first be founded on the idea of communication as a process of meaning-making that is, in turn, dependent upon people who commit to sharing their

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experiences through dialogue intent on the reconciliation of differences. ‘Media, then, are the ways through which we can ascertain, and express, the logos’, he says. Perhaps nowhere in the world is the need for reconciliation of differences more urgent than in the Middle East. Rebecca Self writes about the creation of the website and network MidEast Youth. What makes this project more remarkable is that it is a student-owned independent network dedicated to eliminating extremist ideologies and to promoting tolerance in the Middle East. It is an online cyber-democracy within which Arabs, Iranians, Kurds and Israelis post side-by-side. In Part Three, we consider how the idea of philanthropy is articulated into this new media/spirituality marketplace. Janice Peck of the University of Colorado examines the phenomenon of Oprah Winfrey as a project of neoliberalism. She argues that Winfrey’s appeals to social-consciousness and the resulting philanthropic projects are generated within a historical practice of self-help developed and evolved through U.S. Protestantism and New Thought movements. Peck argues that such philanthropy through privilege elides the possibility of necessary social-structural changes that could promote more equitable social arrangements by stressing private initiatives and individual responsibility for the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. This, she argues, occludes the real reasons for inequality, forcing the individual to bear the brunt of blame for what are really classinduced structural deficiencies and injustices. In her work on corporate branding and the ‘social gospel’, Mara Einstein of Queens College investigates the intersection of the consumer marketplace and Christian social action directed at poverty. Corporations are intent on capitalizing on the social gospel to generate a more munificent image of corporate social responsibility (and benefitting financially as a result). At the same time, charities are seeking to incorporate businessmarketing practices by attempting to brand themselves to attract corporate sponsors. Einstein argues, ‘The consequences of branding and celebrity are a depoliticized, and in most cases less effectual, means of creating a just world.’ The authors in Part Four develop further the role of the spiritualized marketplace in social transformation. Claire Badaracco of Marquette University explores the relationship among health and wellness, media and spirituality. Badaracco focuses on what she calls the ‘medicated public sphere’, the profitable space where drug companies, agricultural interests, faith groups and global media vie for the attention of the American public and its wellness practices and dollars. She argues that there is a tension

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surrounding the idea of wellness that engages the public and private spheres. These tensions are played out in a contested mediascape that pits Americans’ health worries against their value-driven, spiritualized understanding of wellness. Curtis Coats of Millsaps College takes us on an excursion into well-being of a different kind. In his analysis of spiritual tourism and its cultural geographical implications, Coats explores the spiritual mediascape of Sedona, Arizona, where New Age pilgrims flock to experience a self-transformation that they hope will evolve a deeper consciousness and even a socially revolutionary cosmic energy. This kind of tourism is on the rise internationally and Coats considers the issues that arise when media imaginary creates imagined spaces for tourists out of the sites of ‘the Other’ as part of a marketplace logic. Tourists seek healing solutions to an increasingly divided world including solutions to the real or imagined divisions among their own minds, bodies and spirits. Coats examines the mediated spirituality underlying this aspect of the so-called green alternative economy. In the final work in the section, Samantha Lawrie of Auburn University argues for the spiritual role of a little-examined niche within the category of ‘media’ – that of the graphic designer. These professionals are, she states, the ‘facilitators of societal well-being, stewards of community values, and agents of spiritual growth’, and she makes an interesting argument for the connection between the traditional shaman and the contemporary graphic designer, as the speakers and generators of symbolic community. In Part Five, we continue to explore the theme of community through a contribution from Solomon Schimmel of the Hebrew College. Looking specifically at blogging or the blogosphere, Schimmel’s ethnographic and critical textual analysis reveals how members of tightly knit Orthodox Jewish, Fundamentalist Christian and Traditional Muslim communities navigate the tensions between traditions, religious rules, authorities and self-expression as they attempt through blogging to be both critics and members of their communities. Part Six moves from human relationships exclusively to that formed between humans and the natural world. Lionel Wee of the National University of Singapore writes about the role of media in the promulgation of nature discourses in the world, specifically comparing discourses of climate change and of animal rights. Intent on discovering how an understanding of the differences in these mediated discourses can be put to work to enable other, less visible or audible discourses about nature, Wee focuses on ‘stances’ taken by social actors – by which he means how they align with ‘an interactional other’ and how these are conveyed in mass media.

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Again exploring mediated versions of environmental discourses, Jennifer Schneider of the Colorado School of Mines uses rhetorical and content analysis to demonstrate ways in which environmentalists and evangelicals can dialogue about pressing issues. She writes, ‘The shared language of spirit and responsibility could form the basis for more generative or meaningful conversations about environmental crisis between environmentalists and Christians than we have seen in the past, when the debate has been framed as one primarily of science or politics.’ In the final section, Ann Hardy of the University of Waikato turns the focus to the level of the nation in her investigation of ‘nation-branding’. Hardy argues that media advertising is employed in the creation of newly imagined nations drawn up to promote tourism or to attract other economic-expansion opportunities. This frequently involves applying spiritual symbols in nostalgic or otherwise carefully crafted appeals to a specific population or client. Her essay looks at the tensions created for audience members between, on the one hand, their understanding of the need to position their countries in a competitive global marketplace and, on the other hand, their sensibilities concerning the ways in which their spiritual heritage or spiritualized identity might be applied for marketing purposes. The concluding essay takes on that final frontier, the largest of imagined collectives: outer space. Linda Billings of George Washington University and NASA’s Astrobiology, Mars Exploration, and Planetary Protection programs, examines the ‘ethical, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of space exploration in the 21st century and the role the media might play in fostering public dialogue on and civic engagement in the future of space exploration’. Billings scrutinizes how ideologies of American identity, specifically that of pioneer and innovator, inform discourses about space exploration. She weaves into this analysis the spiritualized undercurrents of that rugged Americanism, perpetrated by and exploited by the media. We see this book addressing the ongoing intellectual work taking place around the world through NGOs, universities, and political and social institutions struggling to understand the ways media, spirituality and culture interact and interlock in expressions of social transformation. We hope the provocative questions here will further the field of inquiry about the cross-fertilization of spirituality and social action and the role that media play. It is a project that becomes more urgent in a world being torn by religious, political and cultural differences and – in the era of neoliberal globalization – a world falling more and more under the thrall of capitalism as the sole arbiter of social and cultural value. Changes in the spiritual and

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the media landscapes are reorienting – though not always calmly or comfortably – and the dynamics of these collisions and collusions in the environment of global interconnectivity are complex and challenging. We hope the book provides a window on to these processes, particularly underscoring the importance of the kind of interdisciplinary and international perspectives represented in its pages. The scholars who gather here are committed to laying the groundwork for a new and invigorated discourse of emerging definitions of media, spiritualities and social change. It is our hope that this book will prove to be an important waypoint in that journey.

Chapter 1

Competing Narratives of Religious and Cultural Identity in Cornwall Garry Tregidga, Ph.D.

The spiritual landscape of Cornwall, which is situated at the far end of the southwestern peninsula of the United Kingdom, has been constructed and contested at many different levels. Interpretations range from its traditional image as the Land of the Saints to a New Millennium identity as an otherworldly Celtic space for contemporary pagans and from the chapel landscape of Cornish Methodism to the leisure and surfing rituals of mass tourism (Hale 2000, Holmes and Wilson 1994, Milden 2004, Orme 2000, Payne 1999). This study investigates these competing narratives in the context of media representations of the region both in the past and present. It focuses on the diverse spiritual meanings and values of Methodism, the dominant religious force in Cornwall in recent centuries but in long-term decline since at least the 1960s. The opening section highlights recent academic debates on the complex relationship of Methodism to Cornwall’s Celtic Revivalist movement in the early twentieth century before investigating more recent trends in media, spirituality and social change. Data for the study also include some preliminary findings from an ongoing ethnographic study of young people in relation to notions of cultural heritage and religious belief.

Historical Context Cornwall has been described by one historian as a halfway house between English county and Celtic nation (Deacon 2007: 2). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was one of the most industrialized parts of Britain as a result of its rich copper and tin resources, but the collapse of mining in the 1860s led to early deindustrialization and ultimately to

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a new economic identity that essentially looked toward tourism (Deacon 2007: 165). In this postindustrial era an antiquarian interest in Cornwall’s ancient Celtic language (Kernewek) and its distinctive past, symbolized by a tradition of rebellion against the English state established during the pivotal Early Modern period, was to pave the way for a so-called Celtic Revival. In 1901 Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak (Celtic-Cornish Society) was created to promote the cause of cultural nationalism and just three years later Cornwall was officially recognized as a member of the Pan-Celtic Congress. This was followed in 1928 by the formation of Gorseth Kernow, a bardic college modeled on the druidic-inspired gorseths of Wales and Brittany, and in 1951 by Mebyon Kernow (Sons of Cornwall), a pressure group for constitutional and socioeconomic issues that eventually developed into a political party by the late 1960s. Religion was a distinctive characteristic of Cornish identity at this time with weekly Methodist attendance at church services being greater than in any English county. In 1851, the various branches of Methodism accounted for 64.5 percent of church worshippers in Cornwall with the Anglicans (Church of England) accounting for just 27.2 percent (Coleman 1980: 40). The local chapel, which remains the popular name in Cornwall when referring to a Methodist Church, therefore took on a central role in communal and regional culture. But locating religious nonconformity within the context of the Celtic Revival is apparently no easy task. The conventional view is that the rise of Methodism in the eighteenth century had actually shattered the older traditions and established a crucial historical break between modern Cornish and ‘Celtic’ preindustrial Cornwall (Deacon 1985: 44). It is certainly easy to portray the followers of John Wesley, with their utilitarian instincts and temperance beliefs, as the Protestant force that swept aside the remnants of Cornwall’s ancient folk culture of feast days and festivals because of a perceived association with alcohol and immorality. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Cornwall’s Celtic Revivalists appeared to publicly distance themselves from the dominant nonconformists. Philip Payton concludes that this was no coincidence since many of the leading figures associated with the Cornish movement at the time – such as Henry Jenner, L. C. Duncombe Jewell, Rev. W. S. LachSzyrma and Canon G. H. Doble – were either Roman Catholics or High Anglicans in the Church of England. Their romantic objective was to rebuild a preindustrial Celtic-Catholic culture in Cornwall that existed before Methodism. Payton contrasts the success of the Welsh Revivalists,

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who managed to address their aspirations to the Methodist majority, with the failure of the Cornish movement to appeal to the mass of Cornish people (Payton 1992: 132, Payton 1996: 267–269). Yet other perspectives suggest that the relationship between religious belief and Cornish identity during this period was far more complex. David Luker’s work in the 1980s pointed to evidence that Methodism emerged as a badge of Cornish regionalism in the nineteenth century (Luker 1986: 603–619). A critical factor that needs to be recognized is the heterogeneous nature of chapel culture with the desire for respectability in the Methodist establishment, particularly in urban Cornwall, contrasting sharply with the populist folk or vernacular Methodism of the country districts. Indeed, a recent study on dance and folk culture challenges the Puritan myth of Cornish chapels. In some cases Methodism was actually able to ensure the survival of traditional Cornish dances like Snail Creep by co-opting them into the chapel culture of anniversaries and related tea treat processions (Davey 2009: 38–42). Moreover, evidence is starting to emerge that suggests many Methodists were interested in the Celtic Revival. Even Jenner remarked in 1904 that a very large proportion of the support for his Cornish language work came from the classes of hard-working clerks, small business men, shopkeepers and artisans, the classes that form the backbone of Cornish Methodism – a very different sort of people from the same classes in a non-Celtic country’ (Tregidga 2007: 176). In the years leading up to the First World War there were indications that the Revival was starting to develop a political dimension based on Cornwall’s Liberal-Nonconformist nexus with calls for devolution and the regional disestablishment of the Anglican Church (Tregidga 2007: 174). What accounts for these conflicting interpretations of Methodism? A possible explanation is provided by the work of Robert Gildea on the history and political culture of France (Gildea 1996). He stressed the importance of the way in which churches, communities and political parties construct different versions of the past to strengthen their own agendas. In his view ‘there is no single French collective memory but parallel and competing collective memories elaborated by communities which have experienced and handled the past in different ways’ (Gildea 1996: 10). A particular historical event or personality ‘was often the subject of different constructions by different communities, each trying to privilege its own interpretation over those of others’ (Gildea 1996: 11). In this clash of competing narratives it was in the interest of individuals and groups to suppress the historical contribution of their rivals and impose their own collective memory.

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This approach can usefully be applied to the competing narratives of religious denominations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cornwall. Published accounts of Cornish history by individuals like William Borlase in the 1750s and Samuel Drew in the 1820s meant that by the time of the formation of Cowethas Kelto Kernuack there was already a popular understanding of the region’s ‘Celtic’ past. Significantly, however, Borlase and Drew represented the contrasting viewpoints of rival religious beliefs since the former was an Anglican clergyman and the latter was a Methodist preacher. These historical accounts were not necessarily objective since their interpretations reflected political and religious bias. Drew, for example, described the Cornish rebellion of 1497 as an example of ‘that spirit of daring independence which their British forefathers had transmitted to them’. But the 1549 Cornish Prayer Book rebellion was seen as the action of ‘degenerate sons’ who had betrayed the legacy of the ‘simple worship’ of Cornwall’s ancient Celtic church in favor of the rituals of Roman Catholicism (Drew and Hitchens 1824: 480–489).

Media and Mediation in the Struggle for Cultural Supremacy This struggle for cultural supremacy in Cornwall between Anglicans and nonconformists was conducted through the written medium of books and newspapers. For example, Drew’s implicit attempt to associate Methodism with the early Celtic church was to be matched by the historical writings of Anglican like Lach-Szyrma and the Rev. Thomas Taylor (Lach-Szyrma 1889, Taylor 1916). Yet by the early twentieth century it was the growing power of regional newspapers that enabled Cornish nonconformists to engage with popular culture by articulating their own Celtic narratives. A good example was Alfred Browning Lyne, a Methodist local preacher, president of the Bodmin Free Church Council and founder/editor of the pro-Liberal Cornish Guardian newspaper in 1901. Lyne was able to use his newspaper articles to present an alternative view of Celtic Cornwall. For example, in 1914 he declared that: The Celtic temperament [was] the vivifying spirit of Methodism. No doubt there are pure Saxons from the ethnic point of view, who are Methodists, but it probably remains true that the extent to which a man is distinctively Methodist is the extent to which he has in his composition an element which may be most nearly described by calling it Celtic. (Cornish Guardian: February 20, 1914)

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This interest also extended to constitutional issues with Lyne publicly calling for domestic self-government for Cornwall (Cornish Guardian: September 6, 1912) at a time when the Anglicans in the Cornish Revival movement were opposed to a political agenda because of their Unionist sympathies (Tregidga 1997: 134). The Cornish experience echoes the process that took place in Wales in the 1890s when David Lloyd George and his Liberal-Nonconformist supporters were able to link the power of the chapels and the local press (Morgan 1971: 18–21).

Media and Spirituality in Contemporary Cornwall Cornish Methodism was unable to rely on the emergence of new media like film and television to promote its agenda as the twentieth century developed. Early films and newsreel documentaries on Cornwall produced in the 1920s and 1930s tended to ignore Cornwall’s Methodist and industrial traditions since these media productions were intended for a wider U.K. audience, rather than a Cornish audience only. The focus instead was placed on such subjects as folklore, tourism and maritime representations (Keys 2006). One notable exception took place in 1962 when the Methodist Church Home Mission Department produced a documentary on the region entitled ‘Beyond the Tamar’. Although intended for showings throughout Britain, particularly in village and church halls, it portrayed Methodism as a denomination that combined a respect for Cornish cultural traditions alongside a continuing reputation as a vibrant and active force at the community level (Beyond the Tamar, 1962). But the absence of a regional television channel for Cornwall has limited the ability of both cultural and religious groups to project their own identities. Indeed, religious programs about the region have increasingly been produced externally and then targeted at a wider British market. For example, ‘A Seaside Parish’, which was a controversial BBC documentary series set in Boscastle in North Cornwall in 2004, essentially ignored the larger Methodist congregation in the village (BBC News 2004). Similarly, in January 2006 an episode of ‘Heaven and Earth’, a weekly religious affairs series by the BBC, explored the inspirational landscape of Cornwall. Although covering a wide range of themes – such as the Celtic saints, surfing in a spiritual context and mythical constructions of place – there was not a single reference to the region’s nonconformist traditions. This raises a practical problem in studying the relationship between media and Methodism in Cornwall. The Internet offers new opportunities

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for cultural and religious groups to create their own cultural narratives but at the time, and when this chapter was being written, the website of the Methodist church in Cornwall was undergoing an extensive overhaul and was effectively dormant (Cornwall Methodist District website). In these circumstances it is necessary to go beyond the conventional interpretation of the word ‘media’ and look at the ways in which members of the denomination are able to sustain their beliefs at the community level. A useful perspective can be seen in Kayleigh Milden’s oral history interviews with Cornish Methodists (Milden 2004: 157–162). She argued that the ‘chapel’ itself was a powerful ‘visual icon’ that played a prominent role in everyday life. Although obviously lacking the creative power of film and television, the static medium of a church building can convey a meaningful if nostalgic message to its supporters: The symbolic power of bricks and mortar within the cultural memory of Cornish Methodism should not be underestimated it would seem. Cornwall experienced a bonanza of chapel building in the nineteenth century, and in this sense, a chapel can act as a mnemonic link back to a mystic golden age of the days when Methodism, local industry and community were firmly entrenched in Cornish society . . . In addition to being symbolically reminiscent of the culture of their forebears, the chapel is often representative of the family, community and locality ties that reverberate within its walls. (Milden 2004: 159) Chapel anniversaries provide a focus for remembering the past. Through celebrating the building of their church the ‘Members and friends’ of local Methodist societies are able to engage with the ‘self-sacrifice and faith’ of the early pioneers of religious nonconformity (Vidamour 2008: 1). Key anniversary dates also become opportunities to link religious traditions to the wider culture and history of a particular place. A good example is the 150th anniversary of Bugle chapel in mid-Cornwall in 2008. This weekend event combined a flower festival with musical concerts, exhibitions of old photographs and an anniversary brochure detailing the local history of the chapel and the surrounding area. The inclusion in the brochure of personal reminiscences of individuals highlighted the importance of family traditions for maintaining a sense of continuity. This can be seen in the following extract from the testimony of Marjory Stanlake, whose family has been closely associated with the chapel since the 1850s: One hundred and fifty years – a long time, I thought – but then I realized that I had been around for more than half of them, and it didn’t seem so

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long! My grandfather’s family worshipped at Gracca [an adjacent settlement that was the site of the original chapel] and my great, great uncle, Thomas C. Jacob was christened there [in 1852] but went on to attend the new Sunday School and Chapel and in 1876 offered for the Ministry. When I was about four years of age, my family moved from Menadue to Molinnis, and from that time the Chapel at Bugle became my chapel. I realize how much I owe to the people who went to chapel and to the various meetings that were so much part of my young life: The Recabites, the Wesley Guild, Sunday School anniversaries, tea treats, chapel concerts, Sunday School outings, Faith Teas were also a feature of chapel life. The chapel was at the very heart of the village community. (Stanlake testimony in Vidamour 2008: 6) Stanlake reinforces the findings of Milden on the importance of chapels for maintaining a ‘mnemonic link’ to the past. Yet in recent decades scholars have argued that Britain’s Christian culture has been dramatically undermined by a ‘cultural revolution’ in values and religious beliefs (Brown 2000). According to this interpretation the critical decade was the 1960s when younger women in particular ‘were revolting against their assigned role of religious and moral guardians of the nation, rejecting church authority in favour of sexual liberalism and feminism’ (Brown 2006: xvi). The rise of a satirical approach to religion in the theater, films, popular music and television was accompanied by a decline in church membership, baptisms and Christian marriages (Brown 2006: 224–270). This process was particularly evident it seems in Cornwall. Although one of just six places in Britain to see an increase in Methodist membership in the 1950s, there has been a steady decline in support in subsequent decades. Indeed, in numerical terms the Cornish Methodists have fared relatively worse than the other Christian denominations in the region with their percentage of total Sunday attendance falling to 42, 35 and 29 percent in 1989, 1998 and 2005 respectively (Brierley 2007: 12.20). While Stanlake’s remarks might reflect the views of the increasingly elderly and dwindling congregations of Cornish Methodism, they provide no clue to the current attitude of younger generations toward the role of ‘the chapel’ in narrative constructions of Cornwall. In order to explore this subject in greater detail the remainder of the chapter will analyze ethnographic evidence drawn from the ongoing work of the Cornish Audio Visual Archive. It focuses on interviews in 2008 and 2009 with two young females in their early twenties who are identified by the pseudonyms of ‘Sarah’ and ‘Lauren’. Sarah is a 21-year-old office worker who recently graduated from university. Although not a practising

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Christian, it was interesting that she used the ambiguous phrase ‘I am apparently a Methodist’ in order to describe both her religious and cultural views. As a child Sarah had attended the Methodist Sunday School in her close-knit community and she explained that her grandfather, though no longer a regular churchgoer, still proudly regarded himself as a Methodist. Yet it is evident that the family’s traditional allegiance to religious nonconformity, though weaker in terms of actual church attendance, remained an important cultural factor. Indeed, Sarah automatically linked the chapel to her active involvement in other local institutions, notably the village pantomime and brass band. Living in a community that is currently going through the process of long-term economic decline and marginalization it is perhaps not surprising that these cultural symbols of everyday ‘Cornishness’ can also take on political overtones evident in Sarah’s concern over the rise in second home ownership in Cornwall and the cultural threat from ‘Englishness’. There is evidence that family traditions and kinship networks are still important for maintaining a sense of Cornish identity (Bryant 1993: 182, Tregidga 2009: 4). Furthermore, Sarah’s continuing attachment to the ‘chapel’ as a symbol of Cornish and communal identity points to the potential importance of religion in the politics of cultural defence: Modernity undermines religion except when it finds some major social role to play other than mediating the natural and supernatural worlds. Most of these social roles can be grouped under the two headings of cultural defence and cultural transition. (Bruce 1996: 96) This perspective appears to be supported by studying the Cornish experience. In 1999 a campaign group established to secure official European recognition of the Cornish as an ethnic minority group claimed that the continuing strength of Methodism, despite the numerical decline in church attendance mentioned earlier, was evidence of Cornwall’s separate ethnicity (Milden 2004: 153). Milden highlights the way in which the cultural legacy of Methodism is now being used by nationalists to sustain a sense of Cornish identity. Oral testimony evidence suggests that this perception is not restricted to members of the denomination. For example, an Anglican clergyman who founded a campaign in 2004 to disestablish the Church of England in Cornwall claimed that ‘the Methodist Church is the Church of Cornwall, because it’s a rebellion against the Church of England . . . and it is still fulfilling that role’. Similarly, John Angarrack, a self-styled Cornish civil rights campaigner and a ‘confirmed agnostic’, stressed the importance

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of Methodist survival on the grounds that the denomination ‘has its roots in Republicanism’ and a sense of Cornish independence (Milden 2004: 154). Moreover, the closure of many of Cornwall’s chapels, destined in some cases to be converted into second homes for individuals living outside the region, might be perceived as symbolic of the wider threat to Cornwall and its communities. David Easton’s work on chapel closures highlights the way in which many Methodist worshippers tend to drift away from regular church worship if their own chapel closes (Easton 2002). Yet there is a need for academic research into the wider impact of church closures on the community both in Cornwall and other similar regions. This provides the context for our final case study of ‘Lauren’ who was recorded in 2008 when she was a 22-year-old university student. Unlike Sarah she was born in London and her family, who had no local connections, only moved to Cornwall when she was a child. Lauren’s family was officially ‘Christian but never went to church’ and her father is now an atheist. Moreover, after briefly becoming a Buddhist at the age of fifteen she has been a Pagan for the past eight years. Significantly, however, Lauren attended a Methodist Sunday School in Cornwall when she was younger. Methodism was surprisingly a prominent feature of her spiritual identity since she felt that chapels are ‘part of the Cornish environment’ and that at the local level the denomination is much more ‘open’ to people of other beliefs. Moreover, Lauren concluded that ‘Cornwall is part of my religion’. When asked to list five specific images of Cornwall she replied: nature; home (‘I have been here before’); industry; festivals (especially Padstow Obby Oss with its pagan associations); and Methodism. Lauren’s views were also a response to media coverage of religious belief in Britain. She claimed that television had a ‘big problem with paganism’ with its rituals and activities being trivialized and unfairly reported. As a result she felt unable to ‘even talk about it to my friends since they wont understand’. Turning to alternative media sources Lauren expressed her preference for books and websites on the grounds that written texts can ‘hold both sides’. Although British Christianity was ‘boring’and a threat to her religious beliefs, she was able to relate to the micro culture of Cornish Methodism because it was ignored by mainstream media. The ‘Chapel’ therefore acted as an alternative medium for Lauren since its spiritual energy reflected Cornwall’s traditions and a sense of continuity with the past. Although further oral testimony research into the spiritual beliefs of young people in Cornwall is now required, it is interesting that both Sarah and Lauren point to the continuing cultural importance of Methodism at a time of numerical decline.

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Conclusion The story of Cornish Methodism in the past and present reflects the wider paradox of Cornwall itself. Rival interpretations of its relationship to the Celtic revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should be considered against the background of the competing cultural memories of religious and political groups operating at the time. One might add that we also need to consider the personal bias of contemporary writers whose own historical interpretations of both the early Celtic church and the Celtic Revival can easily reflect their personal sense of composure about the past (Isaac 1997). The power of the media is an underlying theme in the creation of these community narratives. By the early twentieth century the emergence of a pro-Methodist provincial press had made it possible for the notion of a Celtic-Nonconformist Cornwall to be disseminated to a wider audience. But centralized control of the British media industry in the twentieth century had the effect of eroding regional distinctiveness in cultural and religious affairs. Only the physical medium of the ‘Chapel’ remained to promote its communal and spiritual narratives. In more recent years, however, there has been evidence of a renewed sense of confidence in the Cornish regionalist movement, which is demonstrated by government recognition of the Cornish language in 2003 and even some electoral success with Mebyon Kernow winning more votes and seats than the Labour party in the 2009 Cornwall Council elections. Within this more positive environment the radical nonconformist traditions of Cornwall are still valued and respected. Only time will tell if the Methodist church in the region will be able to build on this cultural legacy by reinventing itself as a spiritual force for the twenty-first century.

Chapter 2

Mediated Science, Genetics and Identity in the U.S. African Diaspora Elonda Clay

While the mediatization of culture and religion has been theorized for several decades, media scholarship has only recently embarked on attempts to understand how mediatization is restructuring science communication and public engagements of science, raising the question of how media presentations of science are shaping aspects of individual and group identity. This dynamic shift is especially brought to light through the intersection of new genetics, televised science programming and the popular consumption of genetic genealogy testing in the search for ancestry and human origins. Post-genomic applications of DNA analysis not only have transformed population genetics, criminal investigation, pharmaceutical manufacturing and medical practices; these same applications are also transforming genealogical practices and discourses about self, belonging and racial/ ethnic identity. This chapter takes as its point of departure that science communication does more than serve as mere science ‘edu-tainment’; it also plays a role in the media sphere that is sifted through and borrowed from by people for meaning-making in everyday life. Mediated science draws, sometimes heavily, from the inclusion of ‘mediated spectacular nature’ and the application of stylistic visual production techniques in order to inspire awe, wonder and desire concerning science and technology. I argue that the narratives within genetic genealogy documentaries suggest that personalized genomic science services and its representations are taken to be authoritative and legitimating resources for exploring and validating claims to identity (Skinner 2006). Using the PBS documentary series African American Lives (2006) and BBC film Motherland: A Genetic Journey (2003) as media texts, I examine how black identity is being reimagined through DNA ancestry testing and narratives of self, ancestors, diaspora and motherland.

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Mediated Science and Meaning What is mediated science? Mediated science is a particular communication genre devoted to science, including but not limited to academic publications of scientific research, mass media and new media coverage of sciencerelated topics and trade publications. It can also be described as a cultural production following a particular politic of scientific discourse. Mediated science broadly spans institutional, mass media and popular media presentations of science that are present in the media sphere, which includes but are not limited to televised science programming, the Internet, magazines, movies and books. The term ‘science’ here denotes the natural sciences, which includes physical and life sciences. Physical sciences include cosmology, physics, chemistry and earth sciences and life sciences include biology and medicine among others. The concept of mediated science emerges from my interest in and engagement with science documentaries (from public broadcasting venues as well as from the genre of science fiction), the recognition of segments of television programming as media presentations of science and also my engagement of various scholarship on aspects of genomic science, media and religion. Mediated science sometimes relies on scenes of nature, on contrasting images of the modern/West with pre-modern/non-West. These stylistic visual-production techniques intermingle natural images with scientific images that are created in order to inspire awe, wonder and desire. Research regarding the processes of mediation represents a theoretical framework of critical and cultural approaches to media. Mediation theory developed by Latin American communications scholar Jesus Martin-Barbero and employed by media anthropologist Stewart Hoover draws from the cultural studies tradition (Hoover 2006, Martin-Barbero 1997). It is useful to examine the applications of media and the consequent explanatory discourses that originate from the media, incorporating media reception research as a form of analysis. In that methodology, the subject-viewer gives new meanings to media messages, identifying his/her negotiations of and resistance to the logic of the media. Within this theoretical framework, media plays a more integral role than just being an influence on or resource for culture; instead, the media functions as mediator among individuals, their cultures and social lives. In this sense, mediated science can serve as a source of common knowledge of science (Livingston 1999, de Cheveigne 1999) and provide ‘structures of feeling’ for its viewers (Williams 1978). In this regard, forms of media are agents of social and cultural change in the production and circulation

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of knowledge, interpretations and meanings of science. Moreover, mass media are an arena for public discussion as well as being sites of contestation concerning science (Maeseele 2007). Positive presentations of dramatized, commodified and heroic science frame scientific information as authoritative and legitimating symbolic sources for meaning, while negative presentations such as the issue politics surrounding stem-cell research or plant biotechnology have a persuasive potential that challenge the ethics and limits of science.

The Mediatization of Science and Public Engagements of Science The processes of social change that have occurred among scientific institutions, social and cultural institutions, and the media prompt reconfigurations of science communication. This alteration of communication that flows through intra- as well as inter-institutional interactions has been described as the ‘mediatization’ of science. The burgeoning growth of science communication concerning scientific research, new products and commercial services in addition to cycles of public debates about scientific research, policy and funding has led to a plethora of cultural productions concerning science that contain informational, persuasive and political content. Sociologist Stig Hjarvard notes that, ‘Mediatization should be viewed as a modernization process on a par with urbanization and individualization, whereby the media, in a similar manner, both contribute to disembedding social relations from existing contexts and re-embedding them in new social contexts’ (Hjarvard 2008). The mediatization of science communication speaks to the changing contexts of cultural productions about science as well as to the growing number of institutional sources for media presentations of science. Biotechnology corporations, professional science associations, public broadcasting companies, popular film companies, book publishers, scientists, patient advocacy groups, public educators and religious media are now participating to varying degrees in a transforming public sphere in which competition for the attention of various publics is steep and where rival frames of technoscientific issues are contingent on shifts in the balance of power and politics (Maeseele 2007). The degree to which mediated science communication plays a role in public engagement of science and public values and attitudes about science is a matter of dispute. Several scholars argue for a correlation among mediated science communications, the circulation of shared knowledge

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and interpretations of science among various publics and public attitudes about specific scientific issues; naturalizing the idea of a mediatized public sphere (Maeseele 2007, Hjarvard 2008). Other scholars contend that ongoing change processes concerning specific scientific topics like genetics are complicated and involve contextual forces that interact to produce change on individual, institutional and social levels (Conduit 2004, Nelson 2008). I turn now from mediatization of science communication to trends in commercial applications of genomic science. Although still in its early stages, direct-to-consumer genetic testing is becoming a mediated issue because of its lack of federal and medical regulation, its exploding popularity and growing consumer base, and its huge profit potential for biotechnology companies. The most popular commercial personalized genomic tests are those that focus on predictive health information based on genetic risk factors for disease and bio-geographical ancestry-testing estimations, more commonly known as genetic genealogy.

Genetic Genealogy and the Quest for Heritage Several scholars have argued that the quest for heritage that is driving the consumption of genetic genealogy services often involves highly reflexive responses to genetic information as well as a negotiation of the ancestry test’s significance and the incorporation or rejection of genetic information into one’s personal or group identity. Yale professor Alondra Nelson, in her ethnographic research on African American genetic genealogy consumers, refers to ‘affiliative self-fashioning’ as the aligning of bios (life) and bios (life narratives, life histories) in ways that are meaningful to persons researching their ancestral roots (Nelson 2008). Anthropologist Catherine Nash also draws connections between active self-construction, the pursuit of self-actualization and the search for family origins: Genealogy is a practice which joins imaginative self-making and guarantees of truth about individual identity. The genealogical quest to know with certainty ‘who you are’ and ‘where you come from’ by knowing your ancestors suggests a primordial and predetermined identity that can be simply uncovered. (Nash 2002) Genetic genealogy uses DNA analysis to supplement genealogical information obtained through traditional genealogical research and to approximate the geographic region where one’s distant ancestors

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originated. DNA fingerprinting is generally pursued through maternal lineage, paternal lineage or whole genome analysis (Greely 2008). Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is maternally inherited genetic information that both males and females receive; Y-chromosome (Y-DNA) is genetic information that sons receive from their fathers. Genetic markers referred to as Ancestry Informative Markers or AIMS are used to estimate biogeographical ancestry. Genetic genealogy relies on population genetic models of mutation and techniques from genetic anthropology and molecular genetics (Yang 2007). Reports generated from ancestry-testing estimations are based on less than 1 percent of a person’s entire genetic makeup. The genetic genealogy and heritage quest is increasingly popular among African Americans in the United States. More than 20 commercial genetic genealogy companies offering DNA analysis have emerged. Human biotechnology, which makes these services possible, has helped genetic genealogy to become a multi-billion dollar industry. The rapidly growing number of testing companies has outpaced the ability of state laws and industry regulation to deal with the implications of these personal genomic tests. Two states, California and New York, have passed laws to block the marketing of direct-to-consumer testing services and the consumption of services without the written approval of a medical professional (Magnus, Cho, Cook-Deegan 2009). I will briefly focus on two of these genetic testing companies as they are linked to the genetic-genealogy documentaries that I will discuss later. African Ancestry, founded by geneticist Rick Kittles, is an ancestry-testing company that specializes in personal genomic tests for persons of African descent. Dr. Kittles makes guest appearances in two genetic genealogy documentaries and describes DNA ancestry testing for African Americans as ‘Roots revisited or Roots Two’ (Motherland: A Genetic Journey 2003). Kittles has argued that DNA ancestry testing is one way in which U.S.-born African Americans can reclaim their black identity (Gibson 2008). African Ancestry offers testing services that range from $349 USD for either mitochondrial DNA or Y-chromosome tests to $590 USD for both tests. A second testing company, AfricanDNA, is important because it was founded by and is co-owned by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Gates consulted Kittles for genetic services and information during the first African American Lives documentary and in November 2007, Gates announced his own start-up genetic testing company called AfricanDNA. AfricanDNA is a business partnership between Gates, several scientists and scholars and the online genealogical giant Family DNA (Business Wire 2007). He explained

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his new business venture as necessary due to disagreements over the testing procedures of African Ancestry, with which he was formerly associated and with which he is now in direct competition. AfricanDNA offers personal genomic tests that can be combined with family-tree research in packages that range from $300 to $1,200 USD.

Genetic Genealogy Documentaries as Mediated Science Texts Two recent documentaries have dealt specifically with the topic of African diasporan ancestry and DNA testing; Motherland: A Genetic Journey (2003) that aired on BBC television and the PBS documentary series African American Lives, which consists of nine one-hour shows airing over the span of three years (2006–08). Both Motherland and African American Lives purport the view that black identity was ‘lost’ during the transatlantic slave trade. They follow a similar narrative: Persons of African descent in search of their ancestry are cut off from discovering their origins due to incomplete record keeping and the brutal decimation of forced immigrant African families during slavery. But now, ‘using the science of genetics to overturn a legacy of slavery’, genetic genealogy has made it possible for descendents of African slaves to ‘reclaim their history and journey back to their motherland in search of their ancestors’ (Motherland: A Genetic Journey 2003). Many viewers of Motherland and African American Lives, especially African diasporan viewers, have some cultural memory of Haley’s best-selling book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) and the television miniseries Roots (1977). Roots became an international media event largely due to its portrayal of the historical realities of the Middle Passage, the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. In the final installment of Roots: The Next Generation (1979), Haley’s character ends his heritage quest by tracing his ancestral lineage to Gambia and meeting with village griots that confirms Kunta Kinte’s disappearance. These actions complete the Haley family’s rite of return to their ancestral homeland. The final linking of personal family history to ancestral origins has become an idealized goal for many genealogy researchers. U.S. African Americans who view genetic-genealogy documentaries can be seen as interpretive communities rooted in particular cultural and social contexts that nonetheless have rich intra-community diversity. Genetic-genealogy documentaries repeatedly reference the Roots television

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miniseries. Roots did not simply influence or reflect culture. It became an international ‘cultural forum’ (Newcomb and Hirsh 1983) for the discussion and negotiation of British and American enslavement of Africans, genealogy and black identity. The PBS documentary series African American Lives (2006), Oprah’s Roots (2007) and African American Lives 2 (2008), all hosted by Gates, attracted more than eleven million television viewers. It followed well-known African Americans who were researching their roots. Early in African American Lives, Gates says, ‘I conceived of these series as “Roots” in a test tube.’ Personal genomic tests are portrayed as transformational because they tell you who you are, the origins of your ancestors and ‘why you are the way you are’. Consequently, personal DNA information is presented as a vital element in the reconstruction of a usable past and construction of a new geneticized identity, as a means to overcome present racial subjugation, and as an ongoing narrative connected to family history and U.S. American history. It perpetuates the unspoken stereotype that many blacks, because of their assumed lack of knowledge about their family history and heritage, are in the midst of an identity crisis or, worse, are in some way ‘lost’. Subliminal themes that are partially and subtly developed throughout the program’s storyline include questions of native-born U.S. African American identity, the consuming of genomic science commodities as a strategy for individual and collective empowerment, scientific measurements of authentic blackness, implicit genetic explanations for black elite success and genetic genealogy’s redefining power over the black body. Motherland represents a hybridic mediated science presentation that mixes interviews of scientists in laboratories, ancestry testing, images of nature, African villages and modern-day Britain with the spiritual pilgrimage of three black British persons to their (claimed) ‘motherland’: Africa. Motherland also advances the claim that DNA analysis is transformational for its test-taking participants. In the program, DNA analysis is presented as a journey, not only of physical pilgrimage to a new homeland, but also of self-growth or enhancement flowing from participating in one’s own genetic relatedness.

Narratives of Geneticized Blackness Genetic-genealogy narratives can claim a central place in common knowledge of genetics in that they represent the achievement of the goal of the dramatic human quest for heritage; the moment when your family’s history,

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your personal genetic history and geographical estimates of your ancestral homeland come together and undergo interpretation. But what happens with genetic-genealogy narratives when they are mediated and enter into the public sphere? It is difficult to predict the meanings and impact of media discourses on genetics. The repeated portrayal in mass media of genes as unmediated truths and the mediatization of personalized genomics as a way of exploring and experiencing identity obscure the limitations and risks associated with DNA ancestry-testing estimations. In the post-genomic context, genetic essentialism or ‘geneticization’ continues to be a growing concern for scholars and professionals working in a broad range of disciplines from genetics and medicine to the social sciences to ethics and religion. Geneticization has been described as ‘the ongoing process by which priority is given to the differences between individuals based on their DNA codes, with most disorders, behaviors, and physiological variations . . . structured as, at least in part hereditary’ (Lippman 1993). University of California Law professor and sociologist Osagie K. Obasogie calls for an updating of the DuBois’ ‘color line’ thesis, positing that the problem of the twenty-first century may not simply be the color line, but its geneticization, which he defines as ‘increasingly sophisticated arguments that social categories of race reflect inherent genetic differences, and that these biological variations can explain racial differences and disparities without broader consideration of their social determinants’ (Obasogie 2009). Alondra Nelson suggests weak, not strong geneticization, as a probable outcome for DNA test-takers as they make meaning of genetic information. She notes: Genetic genealogy testing is an important vector of geneticization. Indeed, the appeal of this testing owes in large measure to purveyors’ assertions that their products can provide scientific substantiation of one’s identity or origins – information that may be unavailable by other means to persons of African descent. (Nelson 2008) I would like to argue for the concept of ‘geneticized blackness’ as a way of understanding how cultural and social understandings and debates of genetics, race/ethnicity, history and heredity are reinvented, reinforced or resisted within the public sphere, media representations and social practices. Hence, the media operate as cultural forums and sites of contestation concerning representations of race (blackness) and representations of genetics, particularly when both of these representational forms and

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their related cultural politics converge in the public sphere. This term ‘geneticized blackness’ is indebted to Catherine Nash’s work on genetic kinship, which discusses the prioritizing of biological identity, difference and relatedness for social and cultural affiliation. Here, I have also relied on work by media sociologist Herman Gray and his discussions of the cultural politics of black representation and the social productions of blackness in the public sphere (Gray 2005) along with a similar but differentiated term – ‘genetic blackness’ (Goodman and Jones 2005). It can be suggested that discursive forms of geneticized blackness are expressed in popular cultural productions in at least three ways: (1) as the molecularizing of black heritage or African ancestry, rendering a biological basis for racial or geographical identity and belonging – thereby rearticulating the classic ‘one-drop’ convention; (2) as a genetic language about race that functions to emphasize essential differences between blacks and other ethnic groups, and; (3) as genetic explanations that invoke lineal discordance (the tracing of ‘blood’ relationships) to justify inclusion or exclusion from kinship groups, to reinforce current social hierarchies or to assign inferior or superior status. In African American Lives, the often-emotional responses of celebrities to their DNA analysis are positioned as personal narratives of this ‘geneticized blackness’. A kind of confessional self-disclosure, these stories follow a ‘before and after’ symbolic ‘reversal of fortune’ plot. The ‘before’ stories are an amalgamation of interpretations of the transatlantic slave trade, diaspora and U.S. history mixed with personal accounts of displacement, struggle and low self-esteem due to lack of family historical knowledge. ‘After’ test-takers express stories of empowerment, surprising new kinship relations, new homelands and affirmations of often previously intuited African tribal belonging. The test-taker’s act of seeing DNA testing reports in the film invests the imagery of DNA tests with the power of a sacred object. These narratives are of a personal nature, suggesting that the formations of group responses to geneticized blackness in relation to diaspora, homelands and personal genomic histories will involve far more complexity. The problems that arise with DNA analysis and sampling projections are glossed over in most, but not all, mediated narratives of geneticized blackness. In African American Lives 2, after hearing their ‘exact tribal DNA match’ or ancestry-testing estimation, some test-takers describe genetic genealogy as ‘seeing the future’ (Chris Rock) and having ‘a logic that is inescapable’ (Peter Gomes). Other responses allude to the image of Africa as genetic homeland and the birthplace of humanity, such as Morgan Freeman’s

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assertion, ‘There is a sense of self in the knowledge of where it all might have or did all begin’ and Tom Joyner’s exaltation, ‘Like a theme from Roots, Africa! I’ve found you!’ In a dramatic reinforcement of the adage that knowing your family history has life-changing power, comedian Chris Rock confesses just after learning of his great great-grandfather’s enlistment in the Civil War as a Union soldier: Until I lucked into a comedy club at age 20, just on a whim, I assumed I would pick up things for white people for the rest of my life. If I’d known this, it would have taken away the inevitability that I was going to be nothing. (African American Lives 2 2008) Author Bliss Broyard, daughter of New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, responded to news of her family’s hidden racial heritage by re-signifying geneticized blackness. While delivering Broyard’s DNA admixture testing results, Gates says to Broyard, ‘You’re a bit more Negroid than we thought; 17.2 West African, almost 20 percent black. Does this make you black?’ Broyard replies: I sort of think of myself as an expatriate in the black community and I think that being black is not a result of my DNA test, it’s not finding out that I have this ancestry; it’s experience and the way that you’ve lived. So I think of myself as somebody who has mixed-race ancestry and I feel like I’m a kinda cousin to blackness, but I don’t think that I’ve sort of earned the right to call myself black. (African American Lives 2 2008) Broyard added in another interview, ‘It’s a complicated message to get across . . . We can find the geographic origins of our ancestors, but it doesn’t mean that race is a biological destiny’ (New York Times 2008). The slippage between racialized, ethnic, clan and tribal ancestral categories is apparent in most media presentations of genetic genealogy. It reflects the wide array of conflicting classifications used to describe genetic ancestry in marketing direct-to-consumer genetic services. In the Motherland documentary, the visual flow of discovering family’s roots, seeing DNA ancestry estimations and ‘pioneering’ pilgrimages to the motherland while presenting challenges and disappointments also contributes to this theme of the creation of a political economy of hope linked to scientific progress. The economy of hope emerging from genetic genealogy is not one related to the cure or treatment of a disease or genetic

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condition; it is the hope that lost identities can be found, that erased roots become recovered genetic kinship and that unknown homelands be reconciled to a specific African country, tribal group or another national affiliation. It is the reimagining of a new ‘somebody-ness’ for diasporic people of African descent that can now be reclaimed through their ‘genetic blueprint’. Rose and Novas note that an economy of hope, such as the one forming around geneticized blackness, ‘is not eschatological, rather it comprises a domain of possibility, anticipation and expectation that requires action and awareness of the present in order to realize a range of potential futures’ (Rose and Novas 2003). The messages from Motherland cater to hope in scientific innovation and a reimagining of a racialized self as the film begins with the narrator’s voice amidst the sounds and images of windblown desert sand: This is the story of a quest to recover lost identity; a search from the descendents of African slaves to discover who they are and where they came from. . . . A group of British African Caribbeans have looked for answers within their own DNA, their genetic blueprint. DNA is a message from your ancestors and so you can look into the past with it . . . (Motherland: A Genetic Journey 2003) The last sentence is important because it signifies both the promotion of the magical qualities of DNA as an uninterrupted source of ancestral inheritance (denoting its purity) and the oracular functions of DNA ancestry test imagery to predict the past in the present with certainty. If DNA is a message from your ancestors, as suggested in Motherland, what exactly might this message from your ancestors be? Is it that persons of African descent (or any other group) should rely upon DNA analysis and biological relatedness to determine who they are in terms of belonging, identity, family and nation? Or perhaps we should ask for more humility on the part of science to predict with certainty what genetics can tell us about ancestral origins, much less identities. Genetic narratives do not have inherently liberating outcomes. They also do not prevent the cultivation of human relatedness and practiced kinship based on extra-genetic factors, even when DNA ancestry estimates are known (Nash 2004, Nelson 2008). Yet, genetic narratives do exert some influence on previous understandings of the meanings of genetics. Mediated science provides a means of thinking through the emerging forms of biological citizenship, biosociality, biopolitical advocacy and biopolitics of racialized identity associated with human biotechnologies and personalized genomics.

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Conclusion I have attended here to three distinct yet interrelated processes of social change: the mediatization of science communication, the growth industry of direct-to-consumer genetic genealogy services, and media representations of genetic genealogy focusing on U.S. and British persons of African descent. I also considered how the quest for heritage and genetic genealogy have contributed to the emergence of genetic narratives, suggesting that personal genetic histories are becoming additional sources for exploring, experiencing and validating claims to identity. Genetic genealogy documentaries featuring persons of African descent differ in content and contexts than previous media representations of blackness based on shared cultural experience and kinship structures. By prioritizing biological relatedness as the basis for social and cultural affiliations, these mediated programs utilize biologism – biologically based accounts for human life and human difference – in their representations of social identities (Skinner 2006). The ethical, legal and social implications of personalized genomics – such as the ethics of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, the limits and risks associated with genetic knowledge and the significance of race in the genomic era – are likely to continue to be sites of contestation. In addition, audience reception of mediated science (especially among minorities) remains understudied and the potential influence of mediated science on meaningmaking, industry regulation of genetic testing and cultural group identities have yet to be determined. By bringing attention to the ways in which mediated science portrays genetic genealogy, genetic kinship, the African diaspora and representations of blackness, I hope to encourage public dialogue about media as a source of common knowledge for popular understandings of heritage, race and human genetic variation as well as to encourage consideration of the meanings and outcomes of discourses about genetics.

Acknowledgments My research has greatly benefited from dialogue with scholars Richard Perry, Dorothy Roberts, Troy Duster, Evelynn Hammonds, Alondra Nelson, Stewart Hoover, Ronald Grimes and David Morgan who were all gracious enough to engage me in conversations on race, personalized genomics, media and religion.

Chapter 3

DIY Spiritual Community: From Individualism to Participatory Culture Lee Gilmore, Ph.D.

I consider myself a spiritual person. I wouldn’t consider myself religious. . . . I don’t call myself anything. I believe that we all have our journeys and our beliefs and I think love is the essence of all the religions I’ve read about and looked into and talked about. I kind of extract what I need from everything I come in contact with, with no judgment. — (‘Julie’, personal communication at Burning Man 2003)

Declarations that one is ‘spiritual, but not religious’ likely mean different things to those who speak them, and sociologists have likewise sought to interpret such statements in many different ways. One particularly influential approach was taken by Robert Bellah and his fellow researchers who interpreted a similarly professed spiritual individualism as indicating a lack of connection to any larger moral community, and hence any sense of community responsibility. This trend came to be known as ‘Sheilaism’, referring to an interviewee’s statement: ‘I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice’ (Bellah et al. 1985: 221). My conclusions about the implications of Julie’s statement are rather different. Where Bellah and his coauthors were concerned that Sheila’s individualistic spiritual perspective threatened to weaken the fabric of church-based societies and understandings of faith and morality, I argue that a ‘DIY’ (or ‘do-it-yourself’) spirituality need not result in a solipsistic, disconnected or anchorless individualism, but is instead often grounded within specific communities and cultural contexts. Furthermore, I contend that this sort of spiritual independence may actually cultivate different routes toward the participatory and the collective. In so doing, I utilize

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Henry Jenkins’ concept of ‘convergence culture’ and locate my claims within two distinct, though occasionally related, cultural arenas – an annual festival of art, performance,and fire known as Burning Man and the realm of Internet-based media characterized as ‘Web 2.0’. As Internet media resurged in the mid-2000s (following the ‘dotcom bust’ of the early 2000s), an increased focus on the Internet’s interactive and democratic promise came to be called the ‘Web 2.0’ movement, also sometimes known as ‘social media’. Although it is a contested term among Internet engineers and entrepreneurs, Web 2.0 is generally taken to refer to explicitly interactive and participatory applications of Internet technologies, such as open source programming, user-generated content, social networks and ‘blogs’ (O’Reilly 2005). For example, the explosion of the so-called blogosphere made it relatively easy for anyone possessing minimal skills and tools to establish her or his own ‘media’ site and thereby not only ‘talk back’ to but in some cases even supplant the mass media. In addition to blogs, online applications such as Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are just a handful of popular sites that exemplify Web 2.0. I will briefly examine a few cases of spiritual and religious discourse on the Internet that demonstrate how individuals are utilizing this interactivity to create and reflect community. The other arena I draw from here is my research on Burning Man, where I encountered the young woman who offered the opening quote, and many others like her. Elsewhere, I have argued that Burning Man provides a venue for ritualizing that favors creative DIY expressions of spirituality that often blend symbols and ideas from any number of diverse religious traditions, rather than relying on a single and clearly defined set of conventional practices (Gilmore 2010).1 Given its presence in both the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ worlds, Burning Man is particularly useful for illustrating the extent to which individualistic spiritualities can be grounded in social networks and communities. The concept of ‘convergence culture’ as proposed by media scholar Henry Jenkins is helpful for thinking about DIY spiritualities in both of these cases. Referring to some of the ways in which individuals and communities are interacting with, influencing, and changing culture through new technologies and new media, the term ‘convergence culture’ stems from recent trends toward ‘media convergence’ – a process by which media tools are increasingly united into singular products capable of multiple tasks (i.e. cell phones as not only phones, but cameras, music players, game consoles and web browsers). Jenkins examined the ways in which media convergences are shifting how individuals see themselves and express their

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voices in contemporary popular culture. According to Jenkins, convergence culture is ‘where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways’ (Jenkins 2006: 259–260). In this process the flow of media content shifts from the top down to the bottom up, fostering a more ‘participatory culture’ and building ‘collective intelligence’ (Ibid.: 2). If Jenkins is correct in his assertion that ‘convergence culture is the future, but it is taking shape now’, then it stands to reason that these processes are in turn at work in movements across the American religious landscape, as new media and Web 2.0 tools are being utilized by individuals and communities seeking to participate in and shape public discourses around diverse religions and spiritualities (Ibid.: 260). Jenkins describes how ‘fan cultures’ appropriate their favorite characters in order to tell new stories, such that convergence culture fosters hybridity by shifting the perceived ownership and meanings of symbols and ideas. In this sense, convergence is nothing new in the history of religions, and indeed can be said to have long played a key role in religious change through what has been called ‘syncretism’, as diverse traditions and cultures have come into contact across contexts and inevitably borrowed from and occasionally merged into one another. The mass media that developed and dominated in American society in the twentieth century contributed to this process by making a global religious ‘symbolic inventory’ available on an unprecedented scale, which individuals have then been able to utilize in negotiating their own self-understandings (see Hoover 2006). Recall Julie who ‘extract(s) what (she) needs from everything she come(s) in contact with’. In contemporary media cultures, this process is being increasingly sped up, democratized and rendered more transparent via the mechanisms of Internet media and the sources and mergings are as infinite and dynamic as the bounds of human cultures, histories and imagination.

Burning Media Burning Man is a quintessential example of many of the principles of both DIY spiritualities and convergence culture. Begun as an impromptu gathering among a handful of friends on a San Francisco beach in 1986, the event soon outgrew this location and moved to a desolate and otherwise obscure corner of northwestern Nevada known as the Black Rock Desert, where the principal feature is an absolutely barren plane of crackled clay known as the playa. Though fewer than 100 intrepid adventurers make the

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initial sojourn to the desert in 1990, by 1996 the event had grown to 8,000 attendees, and drew nearly 50,000 in 2008. At the center of the festival site stands a 40-foot sculpture known as the Burning Man – a towering wooden latticework figure, lit with multicolored shafts of neon, and filled with explosives designed to detonate in a carefully orchestrated sequence as the figure is offered up in blazing sacrifice at the climax of each iteration of the event. Ostensibly genderless and void of any specifically stated meaning, the effigy remains open to individual interpretations and projections. Burning Man also features hundreds of other artworks created by event participants – often monumentally scaled – many of which are similarly fated to be consumed by fire. At the festival’s conclusion, all physical traces of this week-long encampment are completely eliminated and the entire city fades back into the dust. Burning Man is many things and most participants would probably agree that it can ‘be whatever you want it to be’. Indeed, independent and idiosyncratic points of view, alongside ongoing emic critiques about the nature of the event and its meaning are cornerstones of this community’s ethos. Yet among the many frameworks within which this event can be situated – be it arts celebration, social experiment or orgiastic revelry – for many participants it provides a sense of ritual. In particular, Burning Man is a venue to express and ritualize individualized conceptions of ‘spirituality’ while resisting the doctrines and institutions of ‘religions’. My research found that the majority of Burning Man participants describe themselves in various different ways as spiritually eclectic or ‘DIY’ and most also stated that they had experienced some significant life or perspective change through their experiences of this event. For most, these experiences were tied in various ways to a sense of ‘community’.2 The rituals and artwork that participants create for Burning Man often involve creative appropriations of religious motifs from a vast global well of symbolic resources. Crosses, devils, labyrinths, buddhas, gods and goddesses – the list is potentially endless – all are here patched together in a heterodox hodgepodge, through which participants explore, comment upon, play with and parody religion and spirituality. At Burning Man, the random flotsam of human history and global cultures washes up on the shores of the Black Rock playa for one week, and then washes back out as participants return to the default world, having shared in an experience that often leaves residual traces on their sense of self and notion of culture. To borrow a term from the electronic music and DJ-cultures that intersect with Burning Man, it is a ‘mashup’, an idiom referring to the mixture of two or more popular songs from different genres to form a new polyphonic

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creation. In this implicit invitation to play with and converge the stuff of diverse cultures, reshaping them to one’s likings or whims, Burning Man serves to render the constructedness of cultures transparent, highlighting their native hybridity, adaptability and plasticity. In these and many other ways, Burning Man is a pertinent reflection of the principles of convergence culture. It is an intrinsically ‘participatory culture’ centered around a number of key values articulated by its organizers, the cornerstone of which is the oft-repeated injunction to ‘participate’, with the corollary that there should be ‘no spectators’.3 Perhaps most significantly to the mechanics of convergence culture is the fact that Burning Man has come to be seen as a playground for ‘computer-geeks’ and the ‘digerati’. Many participants as well as the event’s organizers were ‘early adopters’ of new media technologies who continue to use the Web as an organizing and community-building tool for the event, and a significant number of attendees hail from Silicon Valley or are otherwise employed in the ‘tech’ and Internet industries. The intersections and mutual nativity of the ‘alternative’ and ‘techie’ subcultures, particularly in the Bay Area, was documented by Fred Turner in his examination of the influential early online networking forum know as The Well, which stands for ‘Whole Earth “Lectronic Link” ’ (Turner 2006). The Well’s developer, Stewart Brand, had previously published the popular Whole Earth Catalogues that served as ‘bibles’ for the countercultures of the late-1960s and early-1970s. Burning Man had a presence on The Well by 1994 and as early as 1996 Burning Man organizers were attempting to ‘webcast’ live from the event. The Burningman.com website was launched not long afterwards and would grow to include a substantial interactive forum known as the ‘e-playa’.4 Burning Man has even been compared to the Internet itself, as both constitute open and seemingly limitless spaces, which are populated by individual nodes for creativity and community, be they theme camps and artworks or websites.5 In this regard, Burning Man and ‘cyberspace’ would be mutually influential during the critical growth of the Internet in the late 1990s, a phenomenon facilitated by the overlap and convergence of these communities, as many of the key movers and shakers during the dotcom boom were Burners.6 As the media sector in which the line between participant and observer is most noticeably obscured the Internet – like Burning Man – can be seen as a zone of ‘radical inclusivity’, ‘radical self expression’, and of course ‘participatory culture’. Burning Man is a unique cultural space that readily showcases some of the ways in which the principles of convergence culture are unfolding

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within and influencing spiritual cultures. As an event that holds a distinctly DIY ethos, participants’ takes on religion and spirituality are similarly eclectic, independent and hybrid, borrowing unabashedly from an infinite range of symbols in order to create art and ritual that transcends any one doctrine. Burning Man not only changes people’s lives, it often touches people in ways they describe as spiritual. These personal transformations do not take place in isolated bubbles, but are instead most commonly grounded in specific communities and human connections. In so doing, Burning Man challenges normative assumptions about where lived religious and ritual practice is located and how it is authorized.

Webs of Community The Internet is another context in which individuals are expressing eclectic spiritualities as well as participating in more traditional religions as never possible before, utilizing the Web to express individualistic perspectives on spirituality and carve out new identities and cultures. One prominent example is the website Beliefnet.com, which claims to be ‘the largest spiritual web site’.7 Assiduously avoiding the term ‘religion’ on their home page (and in much of the rest of their site) in favor of the terms ‘inspiration, spirituality, and faith’, they state that they are ‘independent and not affiliated with any spiritual organization or movement. Our only agenda is to help you meet your spiritual needs’.8 They provide access to dozens of different online ‘faith communities’ – including Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam (listed in that order) among others – and feature participatory discussion boards as well as editorial content focused on ‘faiths and prayer, inspiration, health, entertainment, holistic living, and love and family’.9 Beliefnet reflects an individualistic spiritual ethos but that, unlike Burning Man, also retains clear ties to more traditional religions.10 Their language focuses on meeting the needs of individuals by providing tools for ‘exploring your own faith or other spiritual traditions’ but does so largely in the context of traditional faith communities, providing new avenues through which to connect with community in one’s religious tradition. Beliefnet also has features that are both Web 2.0 and 1.0. Emerging during the initial dotcom boom of the late 1990s, they encourage – and indeed rely upon – participation in their many different discussion forums, but they also retain an editorial policy that pushes content from the top down rather than the bottom up.

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At another end of the spectrum is the popular social network and ‘microblogging’ website Twitter, which limits posts to 140 characters and which is intentionally based on an ‘open source’ code so that independent developers can create related applications for a variety of platforms and mobile devices. Users typically utilize the service to keep up with friends, professional contacts, media services and (increasingly as of this writing) celebrities. Providing no set interest groups, users track shared interests and topics via the use of ‘#hashtags’ – signified by placing a ‘#’ symbol in front of terms – thereby creating a community-driven ‘folksonomy’ rather than a hierarchically driven classification structure. Because updates are posted in real time and in rapid fire, it is difficult to track the topical-range and popularity of discussions regarding spirituality and religion with much depth. But in specific cases, the DIY spiritual impulse here blurs the bounds not only of distinct religious boundaries but also of what may or may not be properly considered ‘religious’. In an interview with a religion writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, self-described ‘Mac Geek’ Mike Lee passionately argued that an atheistic worldview by no means automatically entails an amoral or even un-spiritual life, and went so far as to describe his religion as ‘engineering’ and his church as ‘Twitter’. He explained: When I find myself in a moral quandary, I’ll analyze the problem on my blog and discuss it on Twitter. My peer group’s role in resolving moral quandaries didn’t change when I swapped the church pews for ergonomic Aeron chairs and the songbook for a MacBook. . . . [Engineering] fulfills that sense of purpose that I was looking for. It’s very useful. It solves problems. For me, being happy means making other people happy. When you solve problems, you create happiness.11 While one might be inclined to take his statements metaphorically, David Chidester has argued that even ‘authentically fake’ pop-culture ‘religions’ like baseball or rock and roll are doing real religious work if they are ‘engaged in negotiating what it is to be human’ (Chidester 2005: 18). Elsewhere in the interview, Lee described how his spiritual seeking took him on a journey from evangelical Christianity, to exploring his Japanese heritage through Shinto and Buddhism, and finally to atheism. In this case, his individualistic seeking did not lead him to solitude, but rather drove him to create and connect to new communities through his love of technology. By locating and remaining in constant contact with his community through

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Twitter, Lee seeks to create ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘participatory culture’ by exploring ethical questions in an online community. It should be noted that ‘convergence culture’ does not necessarily entail drifts toward a generic or atheistic spirituality, let alone radical reinterpretations of all religious institutions and ideologies to suit independent and idiosyncratic ideals. As Jenkins notes, resistance to convergence culture is another of its features: On one hand, some conservative Christians are striking back against media convergence and globalization, reasserting traditional authority in the face of profound social and cultural change. On the other hand, some Christians embrace convergence through their own forms of media outreach fostering a distinctive approach to media literacy education and encouraging the emergence of Christian-influenced fan cultures. (Jenkins 2006: 21–22) Some of the basic tensions between more dogmatic and more individualistic points of view, as well as some of the ways that some Christian communities are utilizing social media tools, are suitably reflected online. For example, on the social networking site MySpace.com, three of the four most popular groups found under the ‘religion & beliefs’ category as of mid-2009 included: Daily Bible Verse for Myspace, Christianity, and one called www. TruthOfGod.com. Yet others in remaining the top ten included such groups as: Universal Masters (devoted to a number of Hindu gurus), the Atheist and Agnostic Group, The Pagan Circle and Occult Studies.12 Religious debate, conflict and prejudice can also encourage extensive participation online. For example, in November of 2007 the New York Times reported that the all time most discussed video available on YouTube was one called The Truth About Islam From an Ex-Muslim Lady, which purported to show a formerly Muslim woman castigating that faith as backward and violent, and celebrating the ‘civilization’ of the West (Heffernan 2007). Although this video has since been removed for ‘terms of service violations’, many of the top discussed videos on YouTube as of mid-2009 still include several that address religious and spiritual issues, including such titles as 10 questions every intelligent Christian must answer (which rather simplistically seeks to undermine the logic of Christianity); Atheist (featuring brief profiles of famous atheist intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, among others); and I Am a Muslim (in which an individual Muslim man challenges prevailing stereotypes about his faith and culture).13

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If these cases are any indication, the spectrum of the American religious landscape runs not simply between conservative and liberal, nor between the religious and the secular per se, but between conformist religious modes on the one hand and independence, antiauthoritarianism, eclecticism, hybridity or ‘the DIY’ on the other. Where Beliefnet focuses on individualistic spiritual needs and desires in order to create a supportive online spiritual community, atheists on Twitter seek out ethical community. In these cases, it is a particularly individualistic and idiosyncratic seeking that leads people from various walks of life to form webs of spiritual community via the Internet, giving voice to both dogmatic and eclectic points of view, and declining the sidelines in favor of carving out their own slice of participatory culture.

Conclusions Recent media scholarship has taught us to be wary of technological determinism, as well as of the methodological pitfalls of the ‘effects paradigm’ – that is that media technologies themselves utterly control the development of cultures, or that media’s social ‘effects’ are driven unilaterally from media producers to purely passive audiences (Hoover 2006: 42–43). In this regard, I would like to posit that the question to ask is not simply how the Internet may be shaping culture, but rather to remember that it is culture that is shaping the Internet, and in turn that various cultural forces – including the increasing interactivity and democracy of Web 2.0 – are mutually and reflexively responsible for the evolution of cultures, and in turn religions. In the reflexive media of the Internet, the extent to which all members of a society participate in the construction of culture becomes ever more apparent. To return to Julie from Burning Man, I believe that the social forces that drive her to claim a ‘DIY spirituality’ where she ‘extracts what (she) need(s) from everything (she) come(s) in contact with’, run side by side with those that are driving the participatory and collective impulses of ‘convergence culture’. At Burning Man, hybrid ritual and DIY spirituality leads people to discover profound connections with one another as well as with a sense of something larger than themselves. On the Internet, individuals seek – at times sincerely and at others ironically, at times peacefully and at other times contentiously – to express their individual spiritual quests and desires in ways that also express their quests for human connection and community. The social media tools of Web 2.0 make it ever more possible to see how

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individuals may locate both traditionally religious and DIY spiritualities in new communities and participatory cultures online. Where the forces of social power and authority have traditionally sought to legitimate or delegitimate syncretic, hybrid or convergent developments within religious realms, today the power to choose and define one’s own spirituality rests ever more in the hands of individuals. The presumably passive consumer or congregant becomes more and more the active participant in brand, media or religious domains. One no longer needs to nail the theses to the door in order to challenge religious authority. Rather, millions are claiming individual authority – and creating genuine community – through social media, in alternative venues such as Burning Man, as well as in their day-to-day lives. In this regard, ‘convergence culture’ is a metaphor that describes not only emerging changes between the media and the public, but that is also in tune with significant cultural shifts in the way that the American public is thinking about, discussing, practicing and imagining religions and spiritualities.

Chapter 4

Creating Deeper Connections: Exploring Values and the Potential for Transformation through New Media Carol Bliss, Ph.D.

Introduction The visual impact and wealth of resources available through new forms of media such as YouTube1 can be an excellent source of deeper learning and connection among diverse groups of students because of the popularity of new forms and technologies. Connection in this context refers to the integration of affect and cognition in learning (Dweck et al. 2004, Forgas 2008), as well as the interconnectedness of students and teacher as a community of learners who explore ideas together (Wenger 1998). Parker J. Palmer, the master educator and spirituality author, writes extensively on the importance of respect, community and connectivity. He says, ‘Good teaching isn’t about technique. [Students] . . . describe people who have some sort of connective capacity, who connect themselves to their students, their students to each other, and everyone to the subject being studied’ (Palmer 2007: 27). Educators across disciplines can utilize and tap into this intense interest in media in the college classroom by providing opportunities to use media as resources and catalysts for the exploration of inner values and the formation of connections to other students.

Creating from the Heart Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them. — Albert Schweitzer

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If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. —Marc Chagall (1887–1985), Russian-French painter, graphic artist

A multi-year research project at the University of California, Los Angeles is investigating interest in spirituality and the deepening awareness of its importance among undergraduate college students. Spirituality in Higher Education: A National Study of College Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose is a project defining this important field of study and its impact. A written description of the project states, ‘Spirituality points to our interiors . . . Our spirituality is reflected in the values and ideals that we hold most dear, our sense of who we are and where we come from – the meaning and purpose we see in our lives – and our connectedness to each other and to the world around us’ (Spirituality in Higher Education 2007: para. 1). In my classrooms at California State Polytechnic University I try to connect with diverse students and to help them connect with each other by engaging their core values, believing that they will then be more likely to remember the deeper connections of learning and community and to pass on their knowledge to others. Media offer an excellent tool for this work because they can help make these sometimes hidden values visible. This empowers students by encouraging them to explore ideas and resources and to share these with others. We live in an age where new media are quickly becoming the language of a generation of students and new learners and this creates the potential for dialogue that leads to greater self-awareness as well as to awareness of the community beyond the self, enabling transformative potential. The capacity of open-source global media to engage students in action across spatial and temporal boundaries and the potential to encourage dialogue, particularly across the cultural divide, can assist educators in opening new pathways of understanding about the multiple ways in which diverse populations connect. Similar to literature, visual media can provide a gateway to inner worlds, illuminating universal struggles and aspirations and bringing students’ values, beliefs and assumptions about culture and the world around them into a more conscious awareness. Each media form inspires and teaches differently. In the case of the vividly visual and auditory new media, I find that these particularly incite new understandings of cultures, disciplines and even technologies. I can involve my students in more meaningful conversations through new media and this often leads to greater

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compassion, deeper connections and heightened awareness of cultural and societal issues. As an example, one of my students hails from a small village in Mexico. She is very connected to her childhood roots, including to traditional art forms and to her extended family. She might show a clip on YouTube of her favorite uncle’s Ranchero musical group. After playing a short selection featuring men lifting their horns in staccato bursts of impassioned music – followed by the swirling movement of women dancing in traditional dresses and celebrating life in the connected community of friends and extended family – the student describes why this music and this scene is such a meaningful part of her life. Speaking from the heart, while illustrating her meanings with music and visuals, other students can feel her passion and this enables them to ask thought-provoking questions about her culture. In this way, students expand their awareness of the world and the ways in which global populations experience life and connection; they begin to appreciate one another’s deepest values, in other words. These are highly transformative experiences for twenty- to twenty-two-year-old students who are well conditioned to use media, who have an avid interest in media and who love being turned on to new things. We live in a fast-paced, commercialized society where the messages of media play a dominant role in shaping cultural values. Today’s college students are exposed to an average of 3,000 media messages a day (Campbell et al. 2007). Messages produced and received through new media such as text messages, webbased chat, Twitter, Facebook and blogposts increasingly inform students’ values and ideas about the world, shape their opinions on important issues and inform their understandings on the relative worth and rights of other individuals. In short, they so powerfully contribute to students’ thinking, formal education is challenged to compete with these media. Beard and Wilson describe the powerful impact of messages received through the senses and the benefits of color, sound and sensory enhancement: ‘Perception moves us beyond mere sensations and involves the memory bank of experience and higher processing levels, including the subconscious . . .’ (Beard and Wilson 2006: 160). In particular, the frequency and volume of exposure to messages from these forms of new media likely far exceeds the time students spend engaged in formal learning. Certainly, many of my students tend not to regard books (older, more traditional ‘media’) as important sources of information. A study by Keith Anderson, staff psychologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, shows that ten years ago the average college student spent approximately 100 minutes a day on the Internet (Anderson 1998). Student surveys

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conducted in my California classroom in Fall 2008 suggest that this figure has risen to quadruple that time. When we include listening to music, IMing (instant messaging), playing video games, watching movies on the computer and other forms of electronic intake, the ‘Net [Internet] Generation of college students spends an estimated 6.5 to 11 hours a day multitasking and in digital media’ (Berk 2008). The forms of information and the ways in which information is processed are changing, but this is not necessarily bad news; it can lead to new ways of learning and connecting.

New Media in the Classroom My student population is made up of undergraduate communication students at California State Polytechnic University. They range in age from eighteen to twenty-four. At the beginning of each new class, I ask the students to identify their favorite media across categories including books, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, new technology, music, movies and ads. If we were to analyze these responses on a bar graph, we would see that time spent with books and newspapers is shrinking dramatically, that time spent watching movies in theaters is less often identified as a favorite, and that time spent with specific Internet sites is gaining. According to self-reported media diaries assigned to my students at the beginning of each new quarter, Internet use is by far their dominant form of media. When asked to identify their favorite sites, MySpace and YouTube rank among their favorites. Rather than engage in a competition with the multimedia impact of sound, speech, moving images, color, speed, interactive capacity, recency and personalization of Internet options such as MySpace and YouTube, I chose to view these interests as opportunities to make connections among students. Helping students discover that they share interests in new media as well as in values and ideas develops higher interpersonal engagement in the classroom. This builds a sense of community and peer support in the classroom that makes learning interesting for the students. An oft-heard concern about increasing media use is the potential to alter social dynamics, particularly through the resulting reduction in face-to-face communication (Campbell et al. 2007). For example, according to researchers for the Quantitative Study for Society at Stanford University, ‘there is a steep social cost and 31 % of the U.S. population spend 70 minutes less daily interacting with family’ (Dixon 2005: 5).Historically, however, we can see that while technology affects social habits it isn’t always in a negative

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direction. In earlier eras, there have been public outcries against the damaging effects of television (causing violence in children, for example), audio music, MTV, sensational journalism and countless other forms of media. Many of these studies prove inconclusive at best. Too, we know that people still convene in social networks, still nurture and care about others and about social issues and still seek out opportunities for growth, collaboration and education. My research shows that these core values have not eroded for my students. Year after year and in class after class, these integral values of faith, family and friendship remain relatively constant in their importance to students. As an educator, I realize that students’ interest in technology can provide an excellent bridge from which to introduce and explore new ideas and ways of thinking. Aware of the fascination with and potential of the new dominant favorite, the website YouTube, among my students, I began to explore possibilities for using this form of media as a way to connect individuals from different backgrounds, global geographies and life experiences. In an increasingly globalized world, the dynamics of human interactions have shifted for many populations. More individuals have instant access to global and globalizing media; private individuals become participatory and productive in media content, freed from the intermediate role of gatekeepers. These more interactive media roles offer exciting possibilities to help students learn some of the important distinctions between information and knowledge. As is the case with many American communities and institutions, my students come from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultural experiences. The demographics of a university classroom at California State Polytechnic University are likely to include a vast range of religious traditions and ethnicities. The demographics of the university’s student body are 33 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, 27 percent Hispanic, 25 percent white, and 4 percent African American (Office of Public Affairs, California State Polytechnic University 2007). In this multicultural setting it is often the case that our students’ parents or grandparents have emigrated from war-torn countries and hold vastly different views on political issues. As a professor of media and culture, one of the interesting challenges for me is to create opportunities through which these different awarenesses can be expressed and shared. I like to implement ideas that connect people rather than to separate them into demographic niches or ethnic groups with different tastes, values and experiences. As media grow more fragmented with hundreds of technologies, channel choices and time-shifting devices such as TIVO, how can we create a common ground where diverse knowledge and experiences can be shared

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fruitfully? How can educators bridge these differences in a 10-week quarter or a single semester as we explore the vast and daily changing landscape of media and culture? An example of a shared media experience came from a new teacher in one of my graduate-education classes. This teacher explained that she creates a class Facebook page where individuals can post comments, upload pictures, share favorite sites, and stay connected in a more personal way by being a part of an online social community. Other teachers since have been eager to implement this type of social networking through new media. One of the interesting trends in new media is that individuals are able to customize media in order to focus on and access issues and topics in which they are personally interested, however, in terms of knowledge of world events. Ask college freshmen, for example, to name the top news stories of the day and you will receive a curious collection of responses. Here in Southern California, for example, where electronic news media tend to focus on sensationalized celebrity stories, students know excruciating details about the life of Brittney Spears and can recite the name of the latest singer to be kicked off the television show American Idol, yet they are hard-pressed to name their state senator much less give a modest summary of the causes and casualties of the Iraq War. In my experience, very few college freshman know about some key news stories of our times: the state of AIDS in Africa, the plight of migrant workers in China or the causes of recurrent violence in the Middle East. Nonetheless, just before the last Presidential election, I asked how many could remember the Oscar Mayer bologna song that begins: ‘My bologna has a first name. It’s O-s-c-a-r . . .’ Forty-eight out of 52 students could sing and recite the entire song and did so in unison. I then asked how many knew their state senator; only 2 out of that 52 raised their hands and of those, only one had the correct answer. To an outsider or casual observer, this focus on the seemingly superficial may appear to demonstrate that in American culture, college students are less interested in and less aware of social and political issues, but that is too simple an explanation and is not the case. We make the mistake of reading an indifference to factual knowledge as a lack of engagement. As teachers we ask what they know, when maybe we should be asking what they care about. While they may not know hard facts about their senator or their country, they are passionate about ideas and issues that impact their communities and even the larger global community. Students care very deeply about their friends and their families, the environment, about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur and many other important global issues.

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This is where open-source media such as YouTube are valuable in connecting people from different experiences and cultural backgrounds. For example, one of my students, Melissa B. is a Muslim, a Political Science major and a student activist in social justice. She is highly politically aware and suffers through what she would term, ‘fluff comments from unaware students’. To illustrate, Melissa expressed these feelings in a paper: Suspicion and discrimination hits us from every angle, every day. We as Muslims need to be on our game at all times and stay on top of what is going on in the world and why. While many college students are worried about which baby belongs to Brittney Spears, Muslim students are worried about how many of their family members were killed in Palestine today. While most college students are gabbing about their hot new iPods and music download discounts, Muslim students are thinking about whether or not a war with Iran will lead to internment camps for American Muslims, much like what happened with the Japanese in World War II. How can we as educators help connect these vastly differing life experiences? By using open source media2 in the classroom such as the website Sociological Images: Seeing is Believing, I can convey positive images about diversity and difference, including among religious traditions especially those often negatively stereotyped in the mass media, particularly Islam and Evangelicalism. Portraying alternative perspectives exposes students to new ideas that might otherwise have taken years of personal experiences to learn and integrate. The value of this, of course, is that groups with shared experiences tend to coalesce along cultural and ethnic lines. Images create an opening through which my students can consider alternative perspectives about Islam such as was the case when I showed Lena Khan’s ‘Muslim images’ media clip on YouTube showing Muslims holding hand-written signs that illustrate their Islamic identities with humor and insight (Khan 2008). Viewers see a burkha-clad woman holding a sign that reads, ‘I, too, shop at Victoria’s Secret.’ A second image shows a college girl carrying the sign, ‘Terrorists hijacked my religion.’ A little boy with a scrunched face is framed with a sign, ‘Broccoli is my personal jihad.’ A single red rose fills a screen with the words, ‘My sister died on September 11.’ A black-clad teen puts a knife at his throat and holds the sign, ‘Islam inhibits my suicidal thoughts.’ A young mother is curled on a couch facing a television with

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a sign above reading, ‘Islam tells me to help the less fortunate but sometimes I’d rather watch Grey’s Anatomy’. Another clip known as ‘Occupation 101’ graphically depicts violence in the Middle East in ways that can be easily understood and appeal to students who have otherwise shown no interest in reading about such things in the newspaper. This clip depicts women running and children lying in the street. I couple this with a discussion of how these images could relate to other situations and to values about freedom and democracy and how we can communicate commonality based on shared values with the hopes of transforming our relationships to the world around us (Wagha 2007). Recognizing the power and potential of YouTube and other open-source media to connect people’s passions and life experiences, I asked my college communication majors to select a short YouTube clip and to analyze its potential impact on the intended audience. I then asked them to try and connect the clip to their own values and to the values of their peers. This becomes a five-minute assignment called the ‘Hip Clip’. The five-minute time frame is divided into two and a half minutes of clip and two and a half minutes of values analysis among the students in the class. For example, a student who loves the artist Pink showed a five-minute YouTube clip of Pink’s latest song and then discussed how and why the lyrics connected with her deep values. She then related how she believed the clip might also connect to the values of the other students in the audience. This exercise made her think carefully about the possible different values that might exist in the room and offered an opportunity for her to reflect on how to negotiate these differences through media and in public presentation. The following is an example from the student’s written paper on Pink’s clip, Dear Mr. President: It was not until I heard this song that I really realized how much I should really start becoming more interested in politics and vote. I need to make myself more aware of the type of president and government I want. Everyone does, because it affects me, my family, and my friends as well as yours. Instead of anguished and polarized discussions about the war, a YouTube clip spoke to the audience through an artist’s voice. Understanding that the clip reflected one person’s view, students were inclined to listen and to process the information in their own ways. One of the hallmarks of this Generation Y demographic is their passion for the discovery of new media, especially messages that are not yet

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mainstream or commercially popular (Merchants of Cool 2001). That is, they appreciate the cultural capital of being exposed to new clips that they can then show to their friends, and this may further extend discussion about events and culture. YouTube also showcases art forms from other countries. International students can use this media to show their classmates cultural materials from their home countries. An excellent example of this is a video clip from SICAF (Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival) showing a sand-painting artist from Korea (The toon 2007). This video clip shows the artist creating a rapid succession of exaggerated animal poses, as sand drips from his hand. Two more clips illustrate the breadth of possibilities in sharing opensource media, particularly as it is paired with a well thought out values analysis. In these examples, the media messages have the potential to be powerful sources of persuasion on important topics such as prevention of drug and alcohol abuse, perhaps even more so than are some public-service announcements (PSAs) created by agencies such as the Ad Councils. You can apply this to your own life. Think, for example, about the mediated messages you can recall about prevention of drug abuse. I can still remember from thirty years ago the lyrics from James’ Brown’s song ‘Heroin’: ‘Heroin, it is my wife. It is my life’. Recently, one of my students powerfully illustrated the dangers of drug abuse. She played a YouTube video that employs the song Dance with the Devil with lyrics by rapper Moebius, which speaks to my student’s generation about the potential wasteland of drug abuse. Backed by a montage of images of Harlem and the grim realities of blighted urban landscapes, the video clip presented students with scenes and sensibilities from someone of their generation who embodies these experiences and this enabled students to engage in a meaningful discussion about the subject (beebopbaloobop 2007) (2). Another clip showed in class led to vibrant discussion about the volatile issues surrounding the war in Iraq. The clip by the American Friends Service Committee speaks to the costs of war and possible alternatives to war spending. The 106-second video features a ticking clock with a header showing the daily cost of war ($720 million USD) mounted at the top of the screen. The clip goes on to describe a series of options that could be achieved with the same amount of money such as 34,904 four-year college scholarships. This is a powerful and appealing element to a student population, most of whom are working full-time in low-wage jobs and accruing student-loan debt. For this generation, accustomed to processing information quickly, a one-second image, backed by music effectively plants

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the seeds of new thoughts. But it does something else as well and that is to instill admiration for the person who presents the clip to them; in this case, in my classroom, it was a shy but very passionate student. Associating a clip with an individual can serve as an excellent introductory device, helping students get to know one another (AFSCVideos 2008).

Conclusion Building bridges of awareness among individuals from diverse backgrounds is one of the greatest challenges of twenty-first-century education. The use of YouTube and other Internet clips in the discovery of new information, combined with an analysis of how and why this information connects with students’ values, is a distinctive and engaging way to expose students to thinking anew about normative social tropes. By connecting their experiences through visual media such as YouTube, we encourage students to realize the commonalities that lie below their external differences and, in turn, mobilize a deepening spiritual awareness of our humanness, our vulnerability and our longing for community. Since the sources of information to which people are exposed are so vast and because newspaper readership and use of other traditional forms of media is declining among college students (Campbell et al. 2007), YouTube offers a fast and almost endlessly diverse alternative. When college students are allowed to select their own clips based on what is meaningful to them and are allowed to show these clips to others, an interesting connective synergy occurs. The student becomes associated with the values and sensibilities in his or her clip, enabling students to grow their relationships more quickly and to connect in new ways. YouTube facilitates analysis of deeper values by helping students to find common ground and urge on their sense of discovery. Students also gain a new media literacy by being prompted to analyze and to consider the connective capacity of the media and images that speak to them. This simple activity with YouTube can empower students by letting them know their voices matter and by deepening their own awareness of and connections to the media they love. I have seen this transform worldviews in the classroom.

Chapter 5

Communication, Reconciliation and the Human Spirit: Reconnecting Without and Within Through Five Media Forms John L. Hochheimer, Ph.D.

In Memory of August G. Blume Seeker, scholar, teacher, friend One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his (sic) own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As each situation is life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, a man should not ask what the meaning of life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life you can only respond by being responsible. — Viktor E. Frankl (1963: 172). There is no one living without failings; no person that is so happy as never to give offense; no person without a load of trouble; no person so sufficient as to never need assistance . . . Therefore we should think ourselves under the strongest engagements to comfort, and relieve and instruct, and admonish and bear with one another. — Thomas à Kempis (cited in Gottlieb 2003: 101)

Reconciliation: Inward and Outward Reconciliation refers to the restoration of fractured relationships (Adelman n.d.: 1), by overcoming grief, pain and anger. It is ‘a societal process that involves mutual acknowledgment of past suffering and the changing of

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destructive attitudes and behaviour into constructive relationships toward sustainable peace’ (Brounéus 2003: 5).1 The path toward reconciliation is a lifelong journey going in two directions: inward, toward discovering and accepting one’s self, and outward, toward recognizing and, hopefully, accepting others. It is both an intrapersonal and an interpersonal exercise, each advancing the more deeply a person discovers the reconciliation possible both within and without. Inward reconciliation may be defined as the effort to come to terms with who one truly is, by acceptance of the fact that whatever life’s struggles may be, their recognition and embrace can result in personal growth and harmony. Ideally, inner reconciliation comes as the result of a constant effort to move the socially constructed ego out of the way in order to better listen to the ‘still small voice’ of truth, sanity and wholeness (Riley 2004). It is an effort to release oneself from the burdens of pain, hate and quite often the desire for retribution. This then is combined with the act of bearing witness to that effort with others in order to reach some mutual place of growth and support, that is, to act in every way to honor the soul (Palmer 2004: 170). Inward reconciliation is reached via discovery, reflection and growth while finding one’s own path to the Way (to the Taoist), or the release from attachment (to the Buddhist) or to the love of God or Hashem or Allah to the Christian, Jew or Muslim. Inward reconciliation is a continuing effort of prayer or meditation directed toward a level of inner peace and harmony as the individual reconciles him- or herself to acceptance of what has happened that cannot be changed, and of one’s own foibles, weaknesses, experiences, shortcomings. It is a forgiveness and acceptance of the self that is central to the message of the teachings of all the great spiritual traditions of the world. Outward reconciliation connotes a reuniting of community, a restoration of broken relations to friendship and harmony between two or more people. Although there are various factors of reconciliation to be considered – the religious, sociocultural, economic, political, psychological and juridical aspects – at its base is the decision to move forward in peace. Inward and outward reconciliation are connected: the more I can reconcile myself with myself fully, the more I reconcile differences with you. The more fully I can accept myself, forgive myself, love myself, the more fully I come to recognize that you and I are fundamentally joined and the more fully I can accept, forgive and love you. If I cannot reconcile myself to my own being, understanding that I am a part of a greater life force in the world, then I cannot reconcile myself with others who are similarly trying to find meaning and purpose in the world. More complete reconciliation means

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that we engage co-participants honestly and respectfully in the construction of a world through meaningful and faithful relationships. Yet, critical to the enterprise of reconciliation is a commitment to telling truths, painful truths, as perceived through the experiences of the various victims and perpetrators. These truths comprise the ways in which media depict, describe, enact the very real grieving, anger, hostility, suspicion that are the natural aftermaths of violent loss. Critical, too, are the roles that media practitioners – journalists, catalyst communicators, media teachers – play in constructing the ways in which grieving and reconciliation are portrayed, covered, analyzed, actively engaged in the process of building a new civil society. The most likely, albeit quite difficult, place to begin inward reconciliation is grieving for what has been lost: a family member, a friend, a community, a way of life. Grief is a part of the human ecology of the soul . . . Our grieving affirms life. It is a profound declaration of interdependence; that someone or something has penetrated my heart and my grief is my acknowledgement of that love. The background wash of grief we feel when we stand still for a moment is testament to the fact that the world itself has made its way into our hearts. (Weller 2002) Much of the desire for revenge and for retribution is grounded in the inability to grieve sufficiently, as if meting out similar pain to someone else could somehow expunge what has been lost. Yet, every spiritual tradition in the world teaches us that no level of revenge or retribution is ever sufficient either to overcome the pain or to wipe away the suffering. The only way to get beyond the pain is to go right into the middle of it, to suffer it intensely and to recognize that the experience of grief is, fundamentally, an expression of love, as M. Scott Peck (2003) has defined it: ‘the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth’, wherever that may lead. Sometimes Love leads to joy, sometimes to pain or sorrow. But Love in this sense always leads to deeper spiritual understanding and awakening. Were we not able to experience the sense of loss without grieving, we would not be able to have had love, to know love, to experience love for ourselves, for others, and for a spirit of love which pervades and, ultimately connects, us all. Were we able to live without the troubling entanglements of grief, life would seem a lot less complicated. There certainly would be a lot less pain. But, the degree to which we are able to plumb the depths of our pain, to allow ourselves to

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experience fully the great losses and the disappointments which have and will come to us in life, is the degree to which we are able to probe the depths of our own capacity for love: for ourselves, and for one another. Since reconciliation is an outcome of compassion (i.e. of ‘suffering together’), the degree to which any of us can acknowledge our own grief, our own loss, is the degree to which we can recognize and acknowledge similar losses in others. As we share their grief with others, we allow our public masks to come down in order to reveal who we truly are. Once the masks come down (and we allow ourselves to touch one another’s experiences), we are able to support one another in their right, indeed in their necessity, to grieve. At this point there comes a sense of support in mutuality when we allow ourselves to accept the common experience in our grieving. It is the accompanying, aching aloneness that keeps us apart, isolated. It is the embracing of how everyone has had times of great loss and suffering, and acknowledging them with each other, that provides us with a great gift with which we can hold one another in the bosom of our embrace. This, too, is a manifestation of love in the world, if only we can allow ourselves to accept it in ourselves, and in each other. Because the flip side of coming to terms with our common humanity is the root of oppression and intolerance: when we cannot acknowledge our own pain and loss, and when we cannot embrace the commonality with others of our experience with grief, then we become less tolerant of the pain of others, and less compassionate. We can all-too-readily begin to look for ways in which ‘he’ or ‘she’ is not like ‘me’, that ‘they’ have not suffered like ‘we’ have, and that the grief experiences of the Other is of less consequence than is our own. Without allowing ourselves to grieve for our own loss, the pain reappears elsewhere, in hatred, jealousy and affliction of pain upon others. This is the foundation of the ‘oppression of the oppressor’ of which Paulo Freire (1999) wrote so eloquently, in that ‘(e)ach of us is both spider and fly in the web of human experience’ (Hochheimer 2005).2

Communication Media and Reconciliation Communication media are lenses for creating, perceiving and sharing meaning between individuals, groups, cultures, nations, who and which exist in disparate places and times. Through them are both expressed and perceived the meanings within ourselves3 and of others. Media can be used to find or to deny truth, of course. But, there can be real gaps between what

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we tell ourselves and what we tell others, gaps between what we think to be true and what we allow others to know. This has been the world of the propagandist, which is a world of exploitation of pain and fear, of deception and of the denial of truth.4 The manipulation of truth via media has had many tragic consequences.5 The process of using media to achieve reconciliation posits reporters and other media workers and audiences in the same way that the problemposing approach of Freire’s pedagogy considers analogous roles: the teacher (or journalist) is an animator who acts to provide a framework for thinking; creative active students (or community members) to consider common problems and to find solutions among themselves. Media of reconciliation6 are grounded in the belief that people and communities can create their own sense of meaning and purpose through dialogue around issues they find of importance to them. They are dedicated, in the words of Michael Lerner (1996), ‘[t]o create a society that encourages and supports love and intimacy, friendship and community, ethical sensitivity and spiritual awareness among people . . . It means, in part, challenging the instrumental, utilitarian, mechanistic reductionism of thought and the disenchantment of our social experience’ (55–56). This also means creating a way of thinking about, and constructing, media in ways that seek to foster interconnectedness of people, with their mutual experience and with the wisdom derived from that experience. They tell stories that speak of people’s pain and loss, their struggles and disillusionments.7 They facilitate respectful, compassionate dialogue between people, many of whom may have been stifled in a culture of silence (Freire 1999).8 But, media of reconciliation also speak to people’s hopes and aspirations, to their dreams for their future and to the future they imagine for their children. It is inclusive, not exclusive, in that it seeks to build bridges between people. This can only be done through dialogue, mutual respect and understanding. Sometimes, ‘hope’ can come merely from the ability of media to provide a respite from misery, from boredom, from pain, from despair. Communications media, therefore, are the means through which meaning is both created and shared. These media can be anything: people, objects, symbols, signs, our perceptions of our pasts, our telling of stories who we are, where we come from, why we are here, where we are going. They are what come between us and the locus of our investigation and interpretation. Media, then, are the ways through which we can ascertain, and express, the logos. We can identify five such types of media, reflecting the range of meanings possible within them: monologic, dialogic, polylogic, pneumologic and empalogic (see Hochheimer, 2005).

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Monologic media are those through which a single range of meaning is expressed. This is the realm of ‘mass’ or ‘mainstream’ media in that a small group of trained people create messages to be broadcast to ‘the masses’. Through dialogic media, two or more actors engage each other as equals. All who participate are probing and pushing the others to engage each other in the pursuit of understanding, i.e., the sense that, together, we stand under some greater sense of meaning that exists in the world.9 Dialogic media require that each side not only speaks, but also listens, in a mutual sense of compassion. As Koss-Chioino (2006) argues, it is essential in the process of post-traumatic healing. While the most obvious of dialogic media may be the telephone or cell phone, we can also see their application in education (Freire 1999, Kazanjian and Laurence 2002, Kessler 2000, Palmer 1999, Richards, Thomas and Nain 2001), theater (Boal 1979, Gumucio Dagron 2001, White 1999), video (Gumucio Dagron 2001) and community development projects (Hope and Trammel 1992, Richards, Thomas and Nain 2001). Polylogic (or multilogic) media refer to the ability for people to sample each others’ works to blend them into the various meanings they are making.10 It is a postmodern polyglot of voices, but anyone with access can play. The process of communication is a sharing of meaning between sensate beings, about the ways in which we perceive the world. From our places in our mothers’ wombs, we try to derive meaning from the world around us. The fetus can hear and process sound and, most likely, experiences dreaming (Armstrong 2007: 15–30). Once born, the child makes meaning from everything it sees, hears, tastes, touches, smells. We make meaning from and through the inner voice which speaks through our hearts for communication is not only a rational process, one of the mind, but it is also a process of filtering what we sense through our emotions, which is the realm of the human heart. Both mind and heart are always interacting as we engage the world, a vital mixture of both ‘up from the body’ and ‘down from the spirit’ experiences (Armstrong 2007). We ignore either at our peril. This is where the realm of pneumologic communication resides. It is predicated on our abilities to listen to the voice residing within. This voice emanates from the depths of the human heart.11 The inner listening is much like breathing: I perceive within and I express within and without. It is a back and forth, in and out, experience. To make peace with others, one must first make peace with one’s self. The degree to which I can reconcile myself with myself, the more I can listen to the inner voice to find out who I truly am, and forgive myself for being so, then, and only then, can I reach

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out to you, a similarly flawed, similarly conflicted, similarly hurting and scared (perhaps, scarred) human being. Peace and reconciliation is the process of healing, both within and without. We need not experience this all by ourselves. In post-traumatic situations, we may well look for assistance from someone who has had similar experiences of coping with pain, loss, death, fear. Here is the realm of empalogic, i.e., the interposition of the ‘wounded healer’ as a means to facilitate healing through communication with the source of the inner voice. ‘Spiritual communication becomes the foundation for the healer’s capacity for empathy . . . Spiritual work is based on the emergence of an intersubjective space where individual differences are melded into one field of feeling and experience shared by healer and sufferer’ (Koss-Chioino 2006: 50). The engagement of the healer and the sufferer is a medium as well, interposing experience with deep listening, both within and without. Perception as a component of peace building, then, is an encounter both without and within. Perceiving without can be defined as ‘logic’ via external meaning-making through formalized rules. The world outside is experienced as sounds and pictures derived from formal seeing. Perceiving within, however, means creating the space to listen to the still small voice while seeking connection to the spiritual center. This is irrational engagement with the world inside as perceived from our connection within. Thus, pneumological meaning-making is accomplished by listening within while listening, seeing and speaking without. Meaning-making is twined simultaneously within and without. Peace via reconciliation can only be built upon the inner and the outer foundations simultaneously. By bringing these strands together we have a heightened possibility to weave more harmonic spiritual chords and more resilient social cords the better to connect people to each other and to themselves. One example of using media in service to reconciliation is The Compassionate Listening Project (TCLP), of Bainbridge Island, Washington. It is an effort to bring together victims of the Holocaust in Europe with its perpetrators, as well as the children from both sides of the Holocaust generation. Together they explore their twinned experiences with pain, grief and shame. They collect stories of inner conflict and resolution as a means to build bridges between participants. TCLP is running similar projects aimed at reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. They also produce documentaries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, grounded in the process of Compassionate Listening to overcome the fear of reaching out to others who are similarly conflicted.

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Here is a prime example of dialogic media in which people both challenge and nurture each other as a necessary condition to overcoming hatred and the will to recrimination. A similar project is the Vietnam Friendship Village where U.S., Vietnamese, Australian, Canadian and British veterans of the Vietnam conflict have come together to build a residential facility for the care of orphan children and elderly or disabled adults, especially those who had been disabled by the use of Agent Orange as a weapon. The mission of the Vietnam Friendship Village Project is to cultivate reconciliation and heal the wounds of the Vietnam War by uniting veterans and caring citizens through international cooperation in the building and support of the Village of Friendship, a living symbol of peace. The motivation for the construction of this village was, in the words of founder, George Mizo, ‘The horrible experiences during the war and the suffering on all sides inspired me to do something that would be a symbol of peace, reconciliation and hope’ (Mizo n.d.). While showing a film should be considered monologic, it is in its presentation of meaningful dialogues, with examples for others to engage each other in postwar peace-building, that the foundations for peace can best be laid. An outstanding contemporary example of what E. J. Graff (2005) calls ‘intimate political reporting’ comes from former Yugoslavia: the Videoletters project of Dutch filmmakers Katarina Rejger and Eric van den Broek. Since 1999, they have created a series of television programs seeking to reconcile separation between old friends or neighbors separated by the conflicts of former Yugoslavia.12 In these ‘letters’ they demonstrate the desire of many old friends and other acquaintances to reconcile their differences to reignite their close relationships. For example, they recorded a message from a Serb, Ivana Nikolic, to a Muslim boy, Senad, with cerebral palsy whom she had informally adopted. The boy had fled a hospital in the Serbian capitol, Belgrade, after fighting erupted. Rejger and ven den Broek found Senad in another city, showed him the tape from Nikolic and then filmed his reaction to seeing it. They then filmed their subsequent reunion and then mixed all of the tapes into one program. Another program depicts two childhood friends from Pale, one Muslim, the other Serb, who were forced to separate due to the war. The Serbian boy, Sasa, reaches out to his old friend Emil via video letter, but Emil suspects that Sasa has killed another Muslim during the war. The film, ‘Emil and Sasa’ depicts the accusation, Sasa’s denial and their meeting to discuss the issue face to face. The mayors of Pale and Srebrenica have also recorded and sent letters of reconciliation to others throughout the former Yugoslavia (Riding 2005). Milan Trivic of BosniaHerzegovina TV reportedly said, ‘I saw the first three episodes of this series and I was speechless – other TV executives were in tears’ (Prodger 2005).

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Another example of intimate political reporting is the film ‘Sarajevo: The Living and the Dead’, by Redovan Tadic (1994). In this hour-long documentary, Tadic takes us into the homes of people living in Sarajevo during the siege of the early 1990s to see how the people are experiencing war on the ground in a way ‘so that we could get to know them’. We see women, men and children trying to keep some semblance of a normal life as they dodge bullets to fetch water, as they find firewood in an old theater, as they try to celebrate life and death and birth even amidst the growing nightmare of the seemingly endless siege of the city. A woman marries her man in absentia although she does not know he has already been killed in a prison camp. An emergency room doctor tells of interrupting an endless series of amputations to give birth to a baby. ‘Even within all of this death, all of this pain’, he says, ‘here is life crying out, demanding to be heard’. How can such journalistic and other media enterprises be used to facilitate the dialogue necessary to stimulate reconciliation? As Villa-Vicencio (2001) writes: The reconciling process needs honest, blow-by-blow reporting, which conveys the emotion, atmosphere and the angst of the moment. It is important not to underestimate the will and the ability of the reader or viewer to make intelligent and informed decisions about what the next step may be in the pursuit of reconciliation. The question with which I find myself left, is whether there is not room for more sensitivity in the media for ‘good news’ stories that keep alive the possibility of reconciliation – the interruption and quest for human wholeness . . . (10) A part of the answer to Villa-Vicencio’s challenge is to see the roles of media in service to reconciliation as being about much more than journalism. It also involves approaches to media and journalism education and dialogue facilitation in which teachers foster a sense of connectedness among their students with the worlds from which they came, and the worlds in which their readers/listeners/viewers live. Such media of reconciliation posit reporters and audiences in the same way that the problem-posing approach of Freire’s pedagogy considers teachers and students, or White and Nair’s Participatory Development Communication (PDC) considers the Catalyst Communicator and the community. Each approach poses communicators as animators who provide frameworks for posing problems, and for thinking, reflection and action among creative, active students (or community members) who then consider common concerns, drawing upon their own historic and cultural resources to find solutions among themselves. ‘Problem-posing education is prophetic, and as such is hopeful,

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corresponding to the historical nature of human beings. It affirms people as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead . . . for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are, so that they can more wisely build the future’ (Freire 1999: 57). The underlying unity of all humankind is both a foundation and a goal in this process. The inner and the outer realms of experience are twined parts of a greater sacred unity of all being. Our new media, and the greater levels of awareness they make possible now give us the ability to discover and to share meaning in unprecedented ways. In so doing, we can explore, and reveal, our essential sacred humanity to ourselves and to each other. As Palmer writes, ‘(b)y recovering the sacred, we might recover our sense of community (emphasis his) with each other and with all of creation, the community that Thomas Merton named so wonderfully as “hidden wholeness” ’ (1999: 27).13 Second, media of reconciliation reintroduce the journalist, media practitioner or communication facilitator into the world as participant, not as neutral ‘objective’ observer. It means that the stories told reveal something of the teller, of his or her humanity in facing the same issues as the people involved in the story being told. It means acknowledging one’s own uncertainties about life’s biggest mysteries while describing others in the same existential crisis, while grounded in a sense of hope. As Parker Palmer writes, ‘I am fearful. I have fear. But I don’t need to be my fear as I speak to you. I can approach you from a different place in me – a place of hope, of fellow feeling, of journeying together in a mystery that I know we share. I can “be not afraid” even while I have my multiple fears’ (1999: 21).14 Third, media of reconciliation are dedicated to reporting on, and sustaining the fundamental unity of all people within a community, and within all communities; that their struggles, while different in kind, are similar in pain, in uncertainty, in the desire to derive some sense of purpose. Thus they are dedicated to ‘the primacy of spiritual harmony, loving relationships, mutual recognition, and work that contributes to the common good’ (Lerner 1996: 56). They draw upon Martin Buber’s contention that, as we move from an ‘I-It’ perspective (in which we treat others as ‘objects’) to an ‘I-Thou’ series of relations (in which we treat others as ‘subjects’ who are as fully equal of love, pain, suffering, struggle, spiritual transcendence and mutual respect as we are), true ‘communication’, i.e., the sharing of meaning between equal actors becomes more possible. This is ‘the highest form of love, which is intimacy that does not destroy difference’ (Keller 1985: 164). Thus, a fourth goal of media of reconciliation is to foster a community dialogue dedicated ‘[t]o create the social, spiritual, and psychological

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conditions that will encourage us to recognize the uniqueness, sanctity, and infinite preciousness of every human being, and to treat them, with caring, gentleness and compassion’ (Lerner 1996: 56–56). People who have suffered great pain and loss, especially, know all too well what it means to be treated as objects. The catalyst communicator becomes a person who ‘acts as a development facilitator putting people together in order to make things happen, to catalyse thinking, motivation, interaction, action, reaction, reflection’ (White and Nair 1999: 38). In a more holistic sense, this participatory communication is a process of ‘establishing and strengthening interpersonal commitment and trust’ through alliances of people who have grievances against each other. A growing sense of interdependence enhances feelings of self-worth, trust and common cause. Out of this sense of interdependence can come a sense of excitement, adventure and hope which motivates and renews faith in self, other, and community producing cohesion of purpose. When a sense of possibility based on a collective vision for the community’s future emerges, true empowerment becomes a reality. (White and Nair: 49) Media of reconciliation can be instruments for people to share their experiences and to find means of respect and transcendence with one another.15 Journalists can act as mediators of conflict when they bring parties to the table to talk, listen actively, assist in moving parties off preconceived positions in the interest of dialogue and compromise, dispel misconceptions and stereotypes, question assumptions and assist in joint problem solving by highlighting what has worked and the processes the involved parties took in getting there (Bamann and Siebert 2001). Fifth, media of reconciliation can foster the creation of a society that gives people the time, resources and support to develop their inner lives and to find the underlying unity of all beings. This, too, can only come from media emanating from within a community, rather than from one standing outside of it. This means that, sixth, media of reconciliation can be tools in the creation of societies where people encourage each other to relate to the world and to one another, in awe and joy. This is the spiritual basis of all existence, which can be found in all the spiritual traditions of the world. As that world becomes increasingly interconnected due to advances in communications and transportation technologies, and with the increasing possibilities for interaction fostered by increased global trade, people can begin to find connections between their own experiences and those of others. This fosters the transcending of barriers, the making of connections

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and the dismantling of exploitation. This is most particularly critical when aggrieved parties attempt to reconcile not in order to recreate a pre-bellum status quo (which most likely was the cause of the crisis to begin with) [Roche 1996, cited in Davies: 230], but rather where ‘a culture of violence has to be transformed into a stable, non-violent normality in which the hearts and minds of the former combatants are convinced of the benefits of permanent peace’ (Stewart 1998: 21). ‘Movements start when individuals who feel very isolated in the midst of an alien culture come in touch with something life-giving in the midst of a death-dealing situation’ (Palmer, 1993: 31). They come in touch with this life affirming force both with themselves and with others in the common search for meaning. The means of this process are the media of communication which serve to share meaning within and between those who wish to reconcile their grievances.

Conclusion No one model fits all circumstances, of course. Each approach to using media as tools for reconciliation needs to emanate from the cultures and locales at issue, as well as from local historical experience. For example, whereas racial reconciliation is the primary concern in South Africa (along, of course, with the reconciliation of class difference), religion and the history of colonial exploitation is a more central concern in Northern Ireland. Neither can the sensationalist, trivialized, insensitive and non-inquisitive media now dominant in the United States be used as models for the kinds of media necessary to report upon, and to promote, the climate and activities necessary to building reconciliation. The answers must come, again, from within, as well as from without.16 Ultimately, media can best serve in the twinned processes of inward and outward reconciliation when they help to give voices to our hopes and our fears, the struggles that separate us and those that unite us in the common experience of being human. We can use media both to speak and to listen, to engage in the unfolding dialogue of our souls speaking with ourselves, as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, as Serbs and as Croats, as women, as men, as oppressors and as oppressed, as universally flawed creatures engaged in our unending journeys toward home, toward wholeness, toward peace.

Chapter 6

Mideast Youth: Can Social Media = Social Change? Rebecca L. Self, Ph.D.1

There is no place like the World Wide Web; a place where youth can meet youth from regions they are at war with, where they can engage in an open, respectful dialogue . . . — Esra’a Al Shafei, Director of Mideast Youth2

Introduction: Meeting Mideast Youth On February 22, 2007, Abdul Kareem Nabil Suleiman (known as Kareem or Kareem Amer) was sentenced to four years in an Egyptian prison for opinions and ideas he’d expressed in blogs. Esra’a Al Shafei got the call in the middle of Media Law class. ‘Professor, I need to take this’, she said, and stepped out the door into the hallway. When she returned, Esra’a explained the charges and Amer’s sentence to her classmates. She used our course that semester to explore and explain how various governments approached her online activities as founder and director of Mideast Youth3; we all learned from it. I’d first heard about Mideast Youth when one day the previous semester Esra’a raised her hand and asked, ‘Professor, can I leave early? I’m being interviewed by Al Jazeera and the BBC’. The class that time? Journalism. In response to her, I said I supposed we could count her interview toward course credit, but I asked her, ‘Esra’a, what exactly are you doing in your dorm room’? While her classmates in Lugano, Switzerland were sightseeing, skiing and studying, Esra’a was building a formidable interfaith online presence for youth across the Middle East. A brief look at Mideast Youth, its sites, services

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and campaigns, uncovers a superlative example of the growing body of literature on youth and their use of new media.4 From Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society’s recent ‘Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent’, the Mideast Youth example highlights the promise and potential as well as challenges and pitfalls at the intersection of spirituality, new media and social change. A look at Mideast Youth also illustrates many of the key themes of this book: It is the story of one young Bahraini woman, a college student and self-described cyberdissident or cyberactivist, creating an unprecedented Web portal and community from her dorm room. The creation of Mideast Youth is inseparable from Esra’a Al Shafei’s personal identity. A look at Mideast Youth reveals first a call to social action for one young woman and, second, the development of a growing, global community at once real and imagined. The story of Mideast Youth illustrates myriad ways new media technologies facilitate social change and allow for expressions of religion and spirituality. New public spaces and types of dialogue, crossing what were impenetrable social, national and class boundaries have emerged. Youth across the Middle East are actively communicating with each other, working together and influencing policymakers. Many of them break the law and risk their lives to communicate with one another. NGOs, educators, mainstream media and political leaders around the world are taking notice. Their discourse and its impact are not limited to the blogosphere; CENSEO, the media production wing of Mideast Youth, produces viral YouTube videos (mashups), and cartoons that have run in newspapers across the Middle East.5 The intersection of online communication and interfaith youth of divergent national and ethnic backgrounds marks a cultural shift, challenging existing institutions and creating new spaces for struggle and discourse. The mere existence of these discussions marks social change, and Mideast Youth calls for far greater, lasting transformation. This chapter is a brief introduction, a snapshot of Mideast Youth, its challenges and the possibilities it signals for media, spirituality and social change. It posits that Mideast Youth and the rise of a moderate mediated public sphere across the Middle East represents real social change and authentic challenge to existing political and social institutions. Much more in-depth study of the Mideast Youth, its activity and community is warranted.

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Grown Up Digital in the Middle East Describing his daughter’s late-night forays into the earliest instant messaging systems, Don Tapscott wrote in Grown Up Digital: For Niki, her link to the Internet was a sweet taste of freedom. She could talk to whom she wanted, find out whatever she wanted, and be who she wanted to be, without interference from parents and other adults. . . . We all want that sense of freedom, but this generation has learned to expect it. (Tapscott 2009: 73–74) That is true increasingly around the world, even in places where freedom is not a socially accepted or legally guaranteed right. Esra’a Al Shafei got her first email address when she left Bahrain to attend an American liberal arts college in Lugano, Switzerland. She was 17 years old. In her first two years of college, as she explored the blogosphere, she saw the potential of blogging platforms for groups and individuals in countries ‘back home’ with little freedom of expression. She noted that blogs tended to be individualized reports, people were divided, and that the technology served only those who could afford Internet access. She says: I’m interested in what all people across Middle East are thinking and we can’t find out. I cannot associate myself in any way with Israelis. Relying on the mainstream media is unacceptable and that left me thinking, ‘What are Israelis actually thinking about us’? The same was true of people in Iran, and other countries across the region. Esra’a’s family emigrated from Iran, where they were a persecuted religious minority, to Bahrain. She created Mideast Youth specifically to talk about and to talk with underrepresented groups. On her introduction on the website, she writes: I saw an opportunity for many things we can’t do [in Bahrain]. We can’t express ourselves. We can’t publish without examination by the Ministry of Information. Our audience is limited only to locals. There are so many linguistic barriers. I wanted to provide a platform that allows us to express ourselves without any form of censorship and to express ourselves in a way that’s global. I wanted a place where the entire Middle East can

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connect with each other despite ethnic differences, religion, even sexual orientation. There are a lot of taboos in the Middle East that we aren’t able to discuss. Even online it’s extremely controversial. To create that place, Esra’a invited bloggers she read and respected to engage in dialogue at mideastyouth.com instead of or in addition to blogging alone. The rules were simple: engage in civil, (primarily) unmoderated discourse with people from around the world on topics of your own choosing. The conversations range from banal to life-and-death. She calls it a cyberdemocracy. The guiding feature of the network is commitment to freedom of expression and open discourse. This makes Esra’a the penultimate bridgeblogger.6 Bridgebloggers reach across traditional boundaries of language, nationality, ethnicity and religion to enable communication between individuals in a variety of positions and contexts. Esra’a’s intention from the outset was to create a space, a place, a bridge – where new forms of communication could happen between people who’d been silenced or otherwise forbidden to communicate with each other or anyone at all. Three years after its inception, Mideast Youth is a platform shared by over 180 member authors (149 are listed on the site) from all over the Middle East representing every religion, even atheists. From soldiers to peace activists, sometimes even to people who justify extremism – it’s all represented. Esra’a said of the platform in December 2008: It’s a very realistic platform. The idea is to have all these different people come to the same platform and share their opinions in a respectful manner, to be educated and aware of what everyone else is thinking. The idea of Mideast Youth is to include all persecuted minorities . . . so it’s not just a dialogue between elites, and so that people who want to participate with the majority can do so. As of May 2009, mideastyouth.com had over 1,500 visitors per day, including at least 300–400 ‘regulars’. Additional readers communicate via email, still afraid to post openly on subjects considered taboo or controversial. During targeted campaigns, the site has as many as 100,000 visitors per month. The organization’s Free Kareem7 and Baha’i Rights8 campaigns have attracted as many as 15,000 visitors per day. There is no other network that provides such diversity of perceptions and backgrounds. It’s okay to be homosexual and it’s okay to be a conservative

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Muslim who doesn’t agree with homosexuality and still be on the same page. It’s okay to be Baha’i and it’s okay to be a Kurd or a Turk or an Arab or a Zoroastrian and still share the same platform. It’s okay to be a single Saudi mother and want to be heard in a society that doesn’t respect that. The most common reason people cite for wanting to join Mideast Youth is to be part of a diverse network in dialogue.9 Esra’a also indicates that many bloggers just want to be heard. New technologies and Mideast Youth’s tireless volunteers make that possible. The group publishes in multiple languages (English, Arabic, Farsi and French) and extensive volunteer translation services (even from Hindi) address linguistic hurdles.

Mideast Youth: It’s not Just for Bloggers What’s most powerful and remarkable about Mideast Youth is that it’s not just a blogging platform. The group provides Web development, hosting, cartooning, multimedia production services, and PR campaign development to groups across the Middle East. A Kurdish Mideast Youth member working in an Iraqi orphanage even set up two donated computers, a service Esra’a says Mideast Youth will not focus on in the future because it’s too costly and time-consuming. It falls outside Mideast Youth’s proven expertise: ‘Internet cafes are common. People don’t have the knowledge and tools to be represented, though, so we give them that – the knowledge and tools to get people represented online’. From Web design and hosting to global PR campaigns, a small handful of dedicated volunteers produced astounding results within months. Free Kareem was their first campaign. Kareem was 21 when he joined Mideast Youth. He was one of the first five or six bloggers invited. The campaign to free Kareem began on November 6, 2006 when Esra’a received a text message (in a political science class this time) from Kareem’s attorney. She says: I registered FreeKareem.org within 5 minutes and called a Web designer friend in Canada. I remember it was really early there. I said, ‘You need to get online right now.’ ‘Can I do it in the morning?’ ‘No, we need to do this now. Kareem has been arrested.’ We started a blog and started sending news releases to all the agencies. I wrote my phone number on the press releases and I kept getting all these phone calls, like from the BBC and Al Jazeera!

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Esra’a built support for Kareem through global media coverage. Traditional print and broadcast journalists relied on Esra’a and the community of bloggers at Mideast Youth as sources of a compelling, important story. That’s when I realized that Mideast Youth is more than just a place where we can express our opinions. We’re doing something that’s against the law here . . . in fact many different things that are punishable by death across the Middle East. For us to associate with each other, to discuss the things we’d like to . . . it takes courage to be a part of Mideast Youth. I felt guilty . . . are we the reason he’s imprisoned? I thought, ‘We’re going to have to lead the best campaign for a blogger ever’. Esra’a and her team initiated global rallies to free Kareem. She explains that they used Facebook to find University groups dedicated to human rights and free speech. They’d select an individual member in Paris, Rio, San Francisco, etc. and ask if he or she’d organize a rally to free Kareem. If that individual declined, they’d select another, and so on. Rallies were held in over 21 cities in India, United States, Brazil, France, New Zealand and Bahrain. I felt like I was running an NGO out of my dorm room. I started calling media outlets around the world myself, telling the story of Kareem. ‘The question for me wasn’t, “Are they going to write about it?” ’ They were not going to not write about it. I just needed to get them to do it. I remember I shot a video of myself for Al Jazeera. You know CNN has iVideo? So I put myself out there – you can get them to tell your story. We wrote press releases. We were publishing 30 posts per day, working sometimes 16 hours per day to free Kareem. I called University Deans around the world and got them involved. Thirteen U.S. Congressmen signed a joint letter to the President of Egypt. They sent it twice. It appeared in the Washington Post. [laughs] The Washington Post didn’t know we were a bunch of college students, they thought they were dealing with a big PR office. Though Esra’a does not consider the campaign a success because Kareem is still imprisoned, the campaign surprised everyone by generating so much international interest. The campaign illustrated that a small group could impact politics globally at the highest levels and demonstrated ways in which new media and traditional media rely on one another.

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What fuels this conviction, this dogged persistence? A deep commitment to freedom of expression, representation and justice. One of the things people find most surprising about Mideast Youth and Free Kareem campaign is that it’s run primarily by Muslim women who do not agree with him. Even though I am a Muslim, even though I don’t agree with many of Kareem’s opinions . . . they were even offensive at times, but that’s no excuse to put him behind bars. I mean, what’s the big deal? A lot of young people believe or don’t believe . . . As a Muslim, as part of the majority, I should stand up for things that my religion doesn’t stand for. That’s the crux of what is new and unique about bridgebloggers in the Middle East, Esra’a and Mideast Youth in particular. Alongside deep faith many participants in this discourse hold freedom of expression and human rights as guiding values that do not contradict or conflict with their religion. They see themselves as having the power and the responsibility to exercise that freedom, to use the technologies at their disposal, to model this behavior because of the radical social change it can bring to their families, communities and homelands. Jeremy Stolow rightly pointed out that faulty assumptions and conclusions characterize Eurocentric discourses on religio-politics, namely pitting religion against forces said to manifest secular modernity (Stolow 2004). Mideast Youth highlights the folly of this distinction. This is clearly not a clash of civilizations. Instead, this is a movement of young people, operating in a networked public sphere, standing for universal human rights, for whichever religious doctrine (if any) they hold dear and against limiting state doctrines. They now have the means, and increasingly the courage, to express themselves in ways that challenge the status quo. For Mideast Youth, the Free Kareem campaign was just the beginning. She says, ‘The Free Kareem campaign got so much attention, we realized we were really good at this and so we created Baha’iRights.org’.10 Other Mideast Youth campaigns include: – In the third year of the Free Kareem campaign, to keep Kareem on people’s minds, they kicked off the Letter to Kareem campaign. Kareem received over 2,300 letters from around the world. Esra’a says, ‘He is being tortured; the Letter to Kareem campaign helped keep him alive. They have put him behind bars but they have not silenced him. We publish his letters’.

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– Baha’iRights.org is the first Web site in Middle East that openly addresses the human rights of the Baha’i minority. Three hundred and fifty thousand Baha’i in Iran are denied rights to education and to free speech. Within two weeks of launching the Web site and a viral video campaign, it was documented on BBC Persia. Highlights of the Baha’i Rights campaign have included viral videos on YouTube: ‘Egyptian Tourism Ad’,11 ‘Iran’s New Voice’12 and ‘Persepolis 2 (Trailer) – Safeguard the Innocent’.13 In these videos, Mideast Youth volunteers have taken existing images from an official Egyptian Tourism ad copied off CNN, various news clips of Iranian leaders, and a 2007 film, Persepolis, edited them and dubbed them with alternative audio tracks. The future of Mideast Youth lies in the production of mashups. Tens of thousands of people view them on YouTube: There’s a cartoon called Persepolis by a comic artist from Iran. She writes about her life as a young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. We thought, ‘We can use this to promote Baha’i human rights. We saw the whole video, edited it to two minutes, and portray the young girl as a Baha’i . . . We made the Iran’s New Voice video to give the people of Iran hope. The Egyptian government has changed the policy we critiqued in the Egyptian Tourism Ad’ video. On the YouTube pages for the videos, Esra’a repeatedly explains fair use clauses to commenters criticizing the use of others’ images in satirical, nonprofit, social critique. What a treat for this former professor of Media Law to see young people debating copyright online! The videos highlight Mideast Youth’s fantastic sense of humor and ability to employ humor in matters of grave public concern. ‘We started doing this with comics, too’ she says. ‘An Egyptian newspaper started publishing our comics. In Lebanon, Egypt and Iran we’ve been published in newspapers. I think we’re the first people to use these kinds of fun tools’.14 The individuals who produce this vast body of video, audio and written content do so in voluntary collaboration with one another. The total budget for all Mideast Youth activities in its first two and half years was around $15,000 USD (that includes a $10,000 award in May 2008 from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society). This is Tapscott’s Wikinomics, or open source, unpaid, voluntary mass collaboration in action. This is the Middle East that’s grown up digital.

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Challenges and Conclusions One of the greatest challenges to Mideast Youth, especially in the first year or two, was to insure that they did not become the mouthpiece for any particular organization or perspective. Lobbyists, think tanks, NGOs and other larger, more powerful groups frequently sought to fund, claim credit for, subsume or influence Mideast Youth’s activities. The core group of the most active producers behind Mideast Youth was adamant that no single group or funder should have direct input on their activities. Independence is another of the platform’s guiding principles. One of the core challenges and most remarkable traits of this group is that they act independently and in their own voices. Part of the attention and fascination with Mideast Youth is the assumption that the primary use of the Internet in the Arab world is by terrorists organizing and mobilizing against Western nations. Mideast Youth and the Berkman mapping of the Arabic blogosphere unveil an entirely different, active, blossoming reality – a rich, varied, moderate Middle East where young men and women engage in dialogue on a wide variety of topics, where freedom of expression is valued alongside religious beliefs and national identities. The comprehensive Berkman report indicates that there is still a paucity of pan-Arab dialogue, and Mideast Youth’s mission is to model and foster that discussion now (Etling et al. 2009). This is an online public sphere where global and local, traditional media and new media, human rights and repressive regimes, men and women, and people of many languages, religions and nationalities meet. New kinds of connections are formed, new alliances and associations are possible, new kinds of conversations can occur. Participating in the discourse can be punishable even by death in some parts of the Arab world. This kind of freedom of expression signals a social change in itself. The number of jailed and interrogated bloggers shows that the risks (and government attempts to halt social change) are real: In 2008, online journalists were the largest category imprisoned for their work.15 Esra’a adds, ‘I get a lot of death threats. I’ve been banned entry to Egypt’. One challenge for these bloggers is safety; another is hackers. The latest attack came in June 2009, just two days after Mideast Youth launched its campaign for Kurdish Rights. The group speculates that Turks opposed to that campaign shut down all Mideast Youth sites. It took nearly two weeks to restore them.

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Esra’a’s idea of what she is doing online has evolved with Mideast Youth. From creating a space for interfaith dialogue to freeing Kareem and giving voice to underrepresented groups, Esra’a now says: Moderates are dying every day for doing this kind of work, and moderates in the Middle East are rarely highlighted. We invite US soldiers to speak with Iraqis and that offends people. We highlight Kurds and that offends Turks. We are competing with well-funded Jihadi Web sites. In their Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere, Etling et al. point to two very different kinds of publics in the Arabic blogosphere: public publics and hidden publics. ‘Public publics’ are characterized by open participation in a public sphere; support of violent extremism does not thrive here; there is surprising diversity: ‘discourse appears varied, thoughtful, and for the most part moderate’ (Etling et al. 2009: 33). In contrast, hidden publics are places where like meets like, and where extremist groups gather. One of the things we’re seeing in the Arabic blogosphere, and it’s reflected in changes in Esra’a’s characterization of Mideast Youth over the last few years, is not a clash of civilizations, but a now familiar clash within civilizations between moderates and progressives on the one hand and conservatives or fundamentalists on the other. Etling et al. indicate that these new public publics, their online spaces and discourses do ‘not itself constitute a one-way road toward political liberalization’ (2009: 49). Groups like and including Mideast Youth do indicate or mark, however, greater social change than the authors recognize in their study. Likewise, Lynch (2007) critiques bridgebloggers’ limited participation in local politics. Will these burgeoning public spheres translate to real political action and power? Filtering, censorship, jailing of bloggers and widespread protest after the July 2009 Iranian elections indicate that though moderate youth across the Middle East do not yet correspond to political parties, they cannot and are not being ignored. Political discourse is shifting. Mideast Youth and the widespread online public publics across the Middle East may not act in ways we’d expect; they may not look exactly the same as imagined communities in Creole communities of the eighteenth-century Americas; they may not signal a shift that looks the same as Enlightenmentera transformations in communication and politics in Europe and North America. They are, however, sites of significant social change right now, before our eyes, and surely will remain so in the future. Some of these public publics are organized and strategic; others operate loosely and in

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ad hoc ways. The social change at hand in the Middle East is one that this generation, grown up digital, will shape in their own ways, with new technologies not yet created, in their unique cultural contexts, in their lifetimes. It will feature a focus on human rights, religious freedom, tolerance and free speech. It is already characterized by what Don Tapscott has identified as the eight norms of the net generation. In the FAQ page for Mideast Youth, Esra’a wrote, ‘Diversity is powerful and positive’.16 Social change underway in the Middle East, as highlighted here with the Mideast Youth example, is characterized by commitment to freedom of expression and outright challenge to limits on it, by independence and by remarkable, powerful, positive diversity.17 And what do Esra’a’s parents think about the work she’s doing online? They didn’t know. They’d tell people, ‘Esra’a’s studying . . .’ Then they saw me on Al Jazeera and the BBC! . . . They bring me all these job applications and ask, ‘Can’t you just be normal?’ My political science Professor said, ‘What are you doing online? It’s never going to change anything.’ He’s old; he doesn’t understand. My parents support me now because they see I have to do this. It’s hard for them to be my parents; I sympathize. . . . I continue because we get results. What we’re doing is making a difference. We’re putting thousands of people online; we’re giving millions of people a voice.

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Chapter 7

The Politics of ‘Empowerment’ in Oprah Winfrey’s Global Philanthropy Janice Peck, Ph.D.

In 1987, Oprah Winfrey created her namesake foundation with a mission to ‘support the education and empowerment of women, children and families in the United States and around the world’ (Oprah Winfrey’s Biography 2009). A decade later she launched Oprah’s Angel Network and invited her followers to contribute to that mission. In 2007, she opened the doors to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls – a $40 million boarding school in the South African countryside designed to turn girls from ‘deprived backgrounds’ into ‘leaders’ like their world-famous benefactress. These and other well-publicized charitable endeavors have earned Winfrey acclaim and honors. Howard University made her its 2007 commencement orator, citing her ‘lifetime achievements and stellar contributions to the global community’ (Oprah Winfrey Named 2007). Those achievements have also moved the talk show star’s fans to donate millions to domestic and international causes that promise to ‘empower’ women and children. The Angel Network, for example, has raised some $80 million in individual and corporate donations since its inception, providing funds in the U.S. to repair and build housing for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and in South Africa to stage a Christmas party for 50,000 poor children in 2002, buy 18,000 school uniforms in 2005 and build the Seven Fountains Primary School in 2007 (Oprah’s Angel Network Fact Sheet 2009). Commenting on the purpose of the Leadership Academy, Winfrey said the most important lesson she hopes to instill in its students is ‘that we are responsible for ourselves, that you create your own reality by the way you think and therefore act’ (Gien 2007: 160). The girls, she said, must learn that ‘you cannot blame apartheid, your parents, your circumstances, because you are not your circumstances. You are your possibilities. If you know that, you can do anything’ (217). This positive-thinking message has been Winfrey’s mantra from her debut as a daytime TV talk show host in the

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1980s to her ascent to multi-billionaire media magnate today. Although Winfrey’s record of economic beneficence might seem to exempt her from critique, critical examination is the aim of this chapter, which examines Winfrey’s charitable activities in relation to an ensemble of practices that have proliferated during that same period: celebrity philanthropy, ‘charity TV’ (Ouellette and Hays 2008), ‘cause-related marketing’ (Stole 2008, King 2006) and social entrepreneurship (Bornstein 2007). I suggest that these activities can be understood as consequences of and responses to the transformation of the role of the state in the economy under neoliberalism, and as ideological practices that help legitimize a political-economic order that favors private initiative and individual self-improvement over public funding and collective responsibility for societal needs. Neoliberalism emerged in the 1980s with the elections of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom as a response to the slowdown in economic growth that signaled the beginning of the end of the post-World War II ‘long boom’ (Brenner 2006). Confronted with mounting debt from the Vietnam War, competition from the recovered economies of Europe and Japan and political challenges from Third World national liberation movements, the United States was losing the competitive advantage it had enjoyed for more than two decades. These changing material conditions provoked questions about the Keynesian model that had guided American economic policy throughout the postwar era. Based on the belief that economic and political stability were ensured through the state’s management of the economy to achieve full employment, economic growth and citizens’ welfare, the Keynesian system began to falter in the late 1960s and early ‘70s as unemployment and inflation increased together. Neoliberalism can be understood as a particular response to this constellation of challenges to U.S. capitalism’s global political-economic supremacy. That response entailed both a makeover of the American economy, through deindustrialization, growth of the service sector and a shift of investment from goods to finance, and of the role of government within the economy, through tax reduction for corporations and the wealthy, deregulation, privatization and drastic cuts in spending on public infrastructure and social programs (Pollin 2003, Harvey 2005, Brenner 2006). Hester Eisenstein identifies the following components of the shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism: attacks on labor and the right to organize; de-legitimizing of the welfare state and the concept of progressive taxation; devaluing the role of government in stimulating economic growth and full employment;

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a preference for privatizing public functions and organizations; and an emphasis on deregulation, seeking to roll back the constraints on corporations imposed by government policies in such areas as environmental regulation, affirmative action, banking, utilities and the media. (Eisenstein 2005: 492) Successful institution of the neoliberal political-economic agenda has also depended on cultivating forms of subjectivity compatible with its objectives. Hence, the ideological work of creating a semantic unity among the ‘free market’, unfettered entrepreneurship, ‘personal responsibility’ and individual ‘empowerment’. On-the-ground consequences of ‘neoliberal restructuring’ (Kotz 2003: 15) include reductions in tax rates for corporations and the wealthy1; shrinking public infrastructure and social safety net; a collapse of job security2 and a corresponding decline in the number of ‘good jobs’ – those that pay $17 an hour and include employer-paid health care and retirement benefits (Fremstad et al. 2005: 4); marked upward redistribution of wealth and a polarization of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in what some have called America’s ‘new gilded age’ (Uchitelle 2007)3; and the development of what Klein calls ‘hollow government’ (2007: 371) and Christopher Clapham (1996) terms the ‘hollowed out’ state, where dwindling resources and departure of competent staff has led to outsourcing government functions, such as education, disaster response, even fighting wars, to become for-profit ventures. In this political-economic context, philanthropy has come to play an increasingly important role in addressing problems arising from economic polarization and the decimation of the public sector. Paul Kivel proposes that tensions arising from the widening U.S. class divide require a ‘buffer zone’ (2004: 114) to keep the system running without serious problems or significant change. He identifies three key tasks of that ‘buffer zone’: Taking Care of People: providing minimal services to those in need through low-paying jobs done primarily by women, along with volunteer work (e.g., nurses, social workers, teachers, childcare workers, counselors (114). z Controlling People: maintaining order with state and/or private means in jobs held primarily by men (e.g., police, FBI, CIA, security guards, wardens, immigration officials, etc.) (117). z Keeping Hope Alive: distributing opportunities for a relative few to gain access to jobs, housing, health care, or educational opportunities ‘so it seems like there is opportunity for all’ through institutional practices such as testing, tracking and financial aid programs (116).

z

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The notion of the ‘buffer zone’ is useful in thinking about the political and economic implications of philanthropy. Kivel argues that a major portion of the ‘taking care of’ and ‘keeping hope alive’ tasks of the ‘buffer zone’ now fall to philanthropy and the nonprofit sector (2004: 120). The nonprofit sector, comprising ‘religious, charitable, scientific, or educational organizations whose receipts are tax-exempt and whose contributions are tax-deductible’, is the site of the major recipients and distributors of charitable donations (Roelofs 2003: 16). The United States is one of only a handful of countries that allow tax deductions for charitable donations, and only about half of all taxpayers who itemize are eligible to claim such deductions, which in effect means the American public permits a small minority of ‘private individuals to decide how to allocate money on [its] behalf’ (Strom 2007). Contrary to perceptions that philanthropy’s primary purpose is to reduce the suffering of the unfortunate and the burden on government, the majority of large charitable donations go to universities, private foundations, think tanks, hospitals and cultural institutions, while ‘less than 10 percent of the money Americans give to charity addresses basic human needs, like sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry and caring for the indigent sick’ (ibid.). Further, for every three dollars the rich give to charity, the federal government loses ‘a dollar or more in tax revenue’ due to the combined tax deduction and loss in estate taxes (ibid.). Charitable giving has economic and symbolic benefits for wealthy donors. Besides the material advantage of tax deductions, philanthropy has significant public relations value: facilitating the deployment of ‘admiration’ and ‘emulation’ frames in media coverage of wealthy donors (Kendall 2005: 35–40), providing a means of ‘reputation laundering’ (Kivel 2004: 123), and serving as indirect advertising and promotion. Joan Roelofs argues that the nonprofit sector is ‘largely devoted to activities that directly or indirectly protect and promote capitalism’ (2003: 21). Philanthropy thus contributes to ‘the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States’ (Odendahl 1991: 4) while also ‘help[ing] diffuse public frustration about current economic crises and the excesses of capitalism’ (Kendall 2005: 37). The past quarter century has witnessed the emergence and proliferation of several phenomena that have incorporated and capitalized on the notion of individual ‘empowerment’: an expansion of the therapy and self-help industries (Rapping 1996, Epstein and Steinberg 1998, McGee 2005); z a revival of ‘New Age’ forms of spirituality that prioritize individual spiritual growth (Roof 1999, Heelas 1996, Satter 1999); z

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the rise of ‘cause marketing’ – a ‘business strategy that integrates a social issue or cause into brand equity and organization identity to gain significant bottom-line impacts’ (e.g. breast cancer awareness) (Cone/ Roper 1999: 18; qtd. in Stole 2008: 26); z the emergence of ‘social entrepreneurship’ or ‘venture philanthropy’ – a hybrid of non-profit sector goals and a for-profit business model that employs entrepreneurial principles with the aim of creating social change (e.g. fair trade businesses, microcredit) (Leadbeater 1997/2001, Roelofs 2003, Bornstein 2007); z the growth of celebrity philanthropy and ‘celebrity diplomacy’ (Cooper 2008); z a resurgence of ‘charity TV’ – a subsection of reality television programming (e.g. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) that provides help to the ‘deserving’ needy through a combination of ‘cultural commerce, philanthropy and TV-viewer volunteerism’ (Ouellette and Hays 2008: 6). z

Oprah Winfrey has been prominently involved in each of these developments (Peck 2008). Since the launch of her program in the 1980s she has promoted therapeutic experts and practices organized around notions of self-help and ‘personal responsibility’. She has supported various New Age figures and spiritual practices, including Marianne Williamson’s ‘psychospiritual’ take on ‘A Course in Miracles’; her embrace of The Secret, a self-help/mind cure manifesto (‘Secret’ 2007, ‘Secret Behind the Secret’ 2008); her promotion of ‘spiritual teacher’ Eckart Tolle (‘New Earth Phenomenon’ 2008); and her ‘Soul Series’ featuring ‘leading spiritual thinkers, teachers and authors’ who ‘talk about matters of the soul’ (About Oprah’s Soul Series 2008). The Product RED campaign, a marriage of cause marketing and celebrity philanthropy created by rock star Bono and Robert Shriver, was unveiled at the 2006 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and had its American launch on the Oprah Winfrey Show, where Winfrey and Bono cruised Chicago’s upscale Michigan Avenue snapping up RED-labeled products from the Gap, Apple and Motorola (Oprah and Bono Paint the Town Red 2006). Winfrey’s website offers Fair Trade African goods with the slogan ‘Supporting these vendors empowers the work force’ (African Crafts). Her show has also featured Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus – founder of Grameen Bank and pioneer of micro-credit – very small loans given to poor people, mostly women – to start small businesses and chang[e] the world one family at a time (Hope Springs International 2006, Yunus 2007). Yunus appeared in an episode promoting the film

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Blood Diamonds and its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, one of many celebrities who have lobbied for a cause with Winfrey’s blessing, including George Clooney (Darfur), Andre Agassi (education), Madonna (adoption in Africa), Alicia Keys (AIDS/HIV in Africa), Don Cheadle (Rwanda), Elie Weisel (human rights), Bill and Melinda Gates (education) and Bono (AIDS/HIV in Africa). Winfrey also produced and appeared in her own ‘charity TV’ venture: Oprah’s Big Give, a 13-episode primetime reality show broadcast in spring 2009 on ABC, in which teams competed to give away money to the deserving needy. All of these developments are predicated on the economic polarization, hollowed-out state and withered public sector that are the hallmarks of neoliberal restructuring – a relationship that comes into focus through an examination of Winfrey’s patronage of education. Winfrey’s website states her belief that ‘education is the door to freedom’ and cites the millions she has donated to ‘students who have merit but no means’, to international schools for ‘underserved children’, and to scholarships for youth ‘determined to use their education to give back to their communities’ (Oprah Winfrey’s Biography, Philanthropist 2009). The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy would appear to fulfill all of these aspirations and epitomize her empowerment mission. But the launch of her namesake school did not win the unvarnished praise Winfrey had come to expect. Instead, she found herself having to justify spending $40 million on an exclusive school for a few hundred girls in a country with the distinction of being the most unequal in the world, with nearly half the population living on less than $2 a day, nearly 20 percent of those aged 15 and older infected with HIV/AIDS, and an average life expectancy of 47 years (Economic Policy Institute 2006, Population Reference Bureau 2006, United Nations Development Programme 2007). Noting the project’s ‘excesses’ – among the school’s amenities are a yoga studio, a beauty parlor and two theaters – the Boston Globe reported the school was under attack from international aid groups in the United States and leaders of grassroots organizations in Africa. Critics reproached Winfrey for spending ‘so much for so few’, for failing to ask local communities to identify their own development needs, and for fostering an ‘atmosphere of privilege’ that divides the school’s students from their communities (Donnelly 2007). By way of contrast, for $80,000 the Catholic AIDS Action program provided meals, school uniforms and after-school programs for 1,500 orphans and vulnerable children in northeast South Africa in 2006, and the Rwanda Women Community Development Network, with an annual budget of $300,000, supported 40 grassroots groups that care for

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50,000 orphans (ibid.). The South African government initially planned to partner with Winfrey in building the school, but got cold feet as criticism mounted. A school official admitted to a Newsweek reporter: ‘The country is obviously poor, and so few children have a chance at education. It is hard not to see that many feel that what Ms. Winfrey is doing is too much’ (Samuels 2007). In response, Winfrey conceded that many in South Africa ‘feel that I’m going overboard’, but asserted, ‘This is what I want to do’. She argued that the school was ‘a symbol of leadership for all of Africa’ that would inspire children across the continent. She also defended the cost. The school was designed to turn poor girls into future ‘leaders’, mirroring her own trajectory; to that end she had put ‘everything in this school that I would have wanted for myself’ (Gien 2007: 156). The girls, she said, would ‘have the best – the best campus, the best curriculum, and of course, the best opportunities’ (Statement 2007). Winfrey also justified her investment in poor children in South Africa by criticizing poor children in the United States. She told Newsweek she decided to build her academy in Africa, rather than in poor urban neighborhoods in the United States, because American youngsters did not value education enough. She stated: I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there. If you ask the kids what they want or need they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school. (Samuels 2007) Winfrey had displayed similar sentiments during a 2006 visit to Baltimore to give the keynote address at a fundraiser for a private school. Speaking to a crowd that included Baltimore’s mayor and Maryland’s governor Winfrey declared: ‘I think the state of education in Baltimore is an atrocity, an atrocity. What is going on is a crime to the children of the city’ (Oprah Sounds Off 2006). Local TV news coverage of the event said Winfrey had ‘taken on public education with her usual passion’ and noted she could single-handedly ‘solve the Baltimore school system’s financial dilemma with one paycheck’. However, when the reporter asked Winfrey if she intended to help Baltimore’s schools, she replied: ‘What I’ve learned from my philanthropic giving is that unless you can create sustainable change, then it’s a waste, you might as well pee on it’ (ibid.). Days after her condemnation of Baltimore’s school system, Winfrey devoted two episodes of her program to ‘the disastrous consequences

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of America’s failing high school education system’ (What Bill and Melinda Gates Want You to Know 2006; Oprah’s Special Report 2006). Joined by Bill and Melinda Gates, Winfrey declared public schools to be in a ‘state of emergency’. Evidence for this verdict included statistics about high-school dropout rates and declining student performance relative to other nations; a segment illustrating the dramatic difference in resources of two high schools – one in a low-income, largely black neighborhood in Chicago’s south side and the other in the well-heeled, predominantly white suburb of Naperville; and a segment showing serious overcrowding, lack of resources, and high dropout rates at a low-income Los Angeles high school. After displaying the problems in episode one, the second installment featured ‘bold steps to turn things around’. In keeping with the basic tenets of neoliberalism, every solution on offer was some variation of privatization. Former NBA player Kevin Johnson explained how he developed a six-school private system in Sacramento. CNN’s Anderson Cooper contributed a report on KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools – a national network of charter schools founded by ‘two Ivy League grads’, and a favorite target of Gates foundation money. Also featured was another Gates-supported solution: High Tech High, an experimental charter school launched by a group of San Diego business leaders and educators. Significantly, the effect on public schooling of three decades of tax cuts, privatization and the gutting of the public infrastructure and social services was never raised, much less addressed, in this two-part treatment of the ‘crisis in American public education’. This same blindspot characterized Oprah’s Big Give. In one episode the contestants, grouped into ‘Team Forgotten Christmas’ and ‘Team Field of Dreams’, competed to raise money for two public elementary schools in central Houston. With help from celebrities Andre Agassi and Tony Hawk and the show’s main sponsor, Target, one team threw a Christmas party at its school; the other team bought its school new computers and basic supplies and replaced a concrete lot with a playground. Through the entire process, a Toronto Star columnist observed, ‘not one contestant turned to another and asked how such bleak Dickensian conditions could exist in American schools in the first place’ (Diebel 2008). Nor did Winfrey raise that question, in this or any other episode of the program. The absence of such inquiries testifies to neoliberalism’s global success, which is responsible for the linked plights of children poorly served by America’s destitute public schools and children in South Africa who cannot afford to go to school at all. Shortly after the end of apartheid in the 1994, the new South African government under the direction of President Thabo

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Mbeki embraced neoliberal restructuring, including privatization, cutbacks in social spending, disciplining of labor, and loosened control of money flows (Bond 2004, Klein 2007). Without adequate state funding of education, South African children must pay annual school fees, buy their own uniforms and books and supply their own transportation, which puts an education out of reach for millions (Hanes 2006, Hjort and Ramadiro 2004, Bond 2004). In the United States, cuts in public funding and the privatization of education through charter schools have expanded and intensified segregation in schools. For example, Baltimore’s public school system, which Winfrey considers a ‘waste’ to put money into, is one of the most racially- and class-segregated in the United States (Frankenberg and Lee 2002, 19) – a fact that is not unrelated to decades of neoliberal restructuring, but rarely acknowledged. Seemingly positive, ‘empowering’ activities, such as Oprah’s Angel Network, the RED campaign, and Oprah’s Big Give, have come to play an increasingly prominent role in managing the fallout from the upward redistribution of wealth and decimation of the public infrastructure – both in the United States and worldwide. In their analysis of the RED campaign, Lisa Richey and Stefano Ponte observe: It has positive spin wrapped all around, and gives the impression that corporations can be major contributors to development aid, without suggesting that they pay a larger portion of their profits in taxes. Product RED . . . takes funds from consumption – not taxation. It is an individual effort, the result of consumer power – not of collective/public will. (2008: 724) Similarly, Linda Diebel (2008) wrote of the schools episode on Oprah’s Big Give: Of course the schools benefited from the experience. Winfrey works magic; nobody would argue students were better off before she hit town. But nothing fundamentally changed. There was no revelation that decent education and health care are rights in a developed society, not privileges to be bestowed by charity or through Winfrey’s good graces. In the process, philanthropy and charity keep the ‘buffer zone’ in place – they help ‘mask the inadequate distribution of jobs, food and housing, and hide the full impact of the concentration of wealth’ (Kivel 2004: 114). Further, as Janet Poppendieck notes, celebrity philanthropy, cause marketing

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and charity TV can operate as a ‘moral safety valve’ that attracts the attention of people concerned about the poor, while turning their energy away from ‘the larger issues of distributional politics’ (1998: 5–6). The ideological power of cause marketing, charity TV and celebrity philanthropy depends on our willingness to accept these enticing gestures of generosity as reasonable substitutes for genuinely democratic social policy – and to buy into the idea that individual ‘empowerment’ through charity and philanthropy is the same as, or even better than, organized political action on behalf of the collective, public good.

Chapter 8

Branding Compassion: How Corporate America is Co-Opting Social Causes and Redefining Service Mara Einstein, Ph.D.

On October 13, 2006, The Oprah Winfrey Show presented the ultimate shopping spree in the name of a good cause. On that day, Oprah devoted her entire one-hour show – providing millions of dollars of free promotional time – to a new social responsibility campaign called Product (RED). This marketing effort, which was created by U2’s Bono and Kennedy family member Bobby Shriver, is a branding campaign that marries upscale consumer products – everything from Starbucks coffee to iPods to American Express cards – with a charitable organization, the Global Fund. After Bono provided a short explanation of this initiative, Oprah took the pop star by the hand and the two celebrities went walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago – one of the world’s wealthiest shopping thoroughfares – and began purchasing numerous (RED) products. The shopping trip for red parentheses’d items (the parentheses are meant to represent a hug) included everything from T-shirts saying ‘inspi(red)’ at the Gap to iPods at the Apple store to phones at the Motorola store (where shopping was assisted by yet another celebrity, rapper Kanye West) and ended with a purchase of sunglasses and a watch at the Armani store. Like the millions of consumers who would follow in Oprah’s footsteps, a portion of the proceeds from the sales of these (RED) products would go to funding AIDS medication in Africa. Product (RED) is just one example of a marketing initiative that marries products with social causes. Known as Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) and increasingly more broadly as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), these campaigns have been proliferating exponentially over the last decade. This growth has been fueled by marketers’ need to give consumers a ‘reason to buy’ while simultaneously providing a goodwill halo to companies that

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associate their products with charitable works and environment issues, the so-called green initiatives. Hundreds, if not thousands, of corporations have created marketing campaigns that tie social causes to consumer products and ultimately corporate profits. These campaigns are the next step in the commercialization of faith and spiritual practice. They represent the corporate takeover of service, what many religious institutions traditionally called the social gospel.1

Marketing Religion in a Consumer Culture Over the last decade, an increasing number of scholars have examined the correlation between faith and the consumer marketplace. These studies have presented how ‘religious consumers’ shop for faith (Cimino and Lattin 1998, Roof 1999, Twitchell 2008), how religion and spirituality is being commodified (Beaudoin 2003, Miller 2004, Einstein 2008) as well as the interactions among religion, media and the marketplace (Clark 2008). In examining the interplay between these cultural institutions scholars have demonstrated the blending of the sacred and the secular with market aspects making inroads into the religious sphere. However it is not only the commercialization of faith itself that affects religious institutions. It is also the commercialization of the attributes that define these institutions. One of those key attributes is service. Products and services, of which religion is one, define and differentiate themselves by the attributes and the benefits they provide for their consumers. For example, religion’s attributes could be described as written texts, a place to go on Saturday or Sunday, a source of information from a leader and other tangible elements found in most organized religions. Religion’s benefits include fellowship, interaction with likeminded people, a better sense of well-being, and, perhaps, salvation. In addition, religious institutions provide a place where people can demonstrate their commitment to a higher purpose, specifically through service. Service, however, is not an attribute that religious institutions advertise. They don’t say, ‘Come volunteer your time and give us your money’ when they want people to join their congregation. Rather, to attract new members, they tend to fit into the consumer marketplace mindset. They emphasize shorter services, entertaining music and a chance to network through small groups that provide everything from 12-step programs to information on parenting skills to aerobics classes. At the same time that religious institutions have de-emphasized the social gospel (not that they aren’t doing service work), corporations have taken

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ownership of more and more social causes. As this trend continues, corporations become the communicators and definers of what service means in our culture – a definition much different from that of service within a faith community. For example, corporations promote a sense of service that is focused on consumerism, not on ameliorating suffering, transforming political inequalities or answering to consequences. In the case of the (RED) campaign, $100 million was spent promoting the campaign but only $18 million was generated for the Global Fund, a fact unknown by the vast majority of Gap T-shirt purchasers (Frazier 2007).2 Moreover, in selecting commercialized social causes, preference is given to some charities because of their appeal to target demographics that are of interest to marketers. Finally, celebrity tie-ins play an important role in the promotion of these campaigns. Charities or products that can associate themselves with one or more well-known people provide built-in promotional opportunities that can help reduce marketing expenses. This combination of corporate narcissism, consumer appeal and celebrity promotion has made Corporate Social Responsibility and Cause-Related Marketing nearly ubiquitous today. While in the past religious institutions have had to compete against popular culture for sheer numbers, today they must also compete against Corporate America in the area of service.

CSR and CRM: The Defining and Blurring of Marketing Concepts There is considerable confusion in the literature, and in the workplace, about how to define Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Cause-Related Marketing (CRM). Sometimes cause marketing is referred to as a subset of CSR; sometimes these concepts are envisioned as completely different strategies, and at still other times the terms are used interchangeably. Though these definitions continue to be negotiated, the prevailing differences between the two can be described rather simply. According to the marketing research firm Mintel, CRM ‘is when companies partner with charitable organizations to help non-profits better achieve their goals. Cause-related marketing is attached to a media campaign, with money generated for the cause through the sale of products’. An example that many of us may be familiar with is Procter & Gamble’s support of the Special Olympics. Consumers buy P&G products and a percentage of the sale goes to the nonprofit. CRM began in 1983 when American Express launched its campaign to raise money to restore the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Under this

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promotion, Amex agreed to contribute one penny for every card transaction and one dollar for every card issued during the final quarter of 1983. The campaign was incredibly successful by any measure. Not only did Amex collect $1.7 million for the restoration project, but also use of its credit cards increased 28 percent and the company received enviable press coverage for their groundbreaking campaign. Soon other businesses jumped on the CRM bandwagon and began to spend increasing amounts of money to support their own social-good campaigns. In 2007 American corporations spent $1.34 billion on CRM campaigns, up from $733 million in 2001 – an increase of 83 percent. More recently (Forbes suggests 2006), organizations have rediscovered a much older concept: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This is largely in response to the ‘green’ movement, where seemingly every company wants it known that they are doing something to help the environment.3 CSR, however, began in the 1950s, predating cause-related marketing by 30 years. According to Harvard’s JFK School of Government, Corporate social responsibility encompasses not only what companies do with their profits, but also how they make them. It goes beyond philanthropy and compliance and addresses how companies manage their economic, social, and environmental impacts, as well as their relationships in all key spheres of influence: the workplace, the marketplace, the supply chain, the community, and the public policy realm. (Corporate Responsibility Initiative 2008) Thus, CSR institutionalizes what we used to call being a good corporate citizen – something corporations did, not something they promoted. Today, though, it is not enough simply to be green. Corporations must also broadcast that they are green and for good reason. In Cause for Concern: Results-Oriented Cause Marketing, Stephen Adler (2006) states that ‘77% of consumers polled changed their purchasing habits due to a company’s green image’. But consumer interest is not limited to the environment. Corporations have discovered a wealth of categories from food to clothes to text messaging through which they can combine commerce with ‘compassion’, and ultimately sell more products. There is a fundamental difference between CSR and CRM, however. To put it simply: if a media company decides to stop advertising junk food to children and instead commits to promoting healthy eating, that’s corporate social responsibility. If Media Company X partners with Food Company Y to help feed hungry children, that’s cause-related marketing. The difference lies

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in the underlying motivation – serving the community for the overall good (usually in an area unrelated to the company’s core business) versus selling goods to (perhaps temporarily) lead to a social good. Today, those distinctions have been all but eliminated with CRM (a more profit-based orientation) taking precedence over CSR (an orientation that more closely parallels the sense of service traditionally found in a faith community).

The Rise of CRM and the Reemergence of CSR CRM and CSR have increased substantially in the last decade in large part because they work. According to Advertising Age, ‘Consumers are willing to pay more for purchases from a company they know to be doing good’ (Kelleher 2007). In fact they are willing to spend 6.1 percent more for a product that is cause-related. And when it comes to young Americans (those aged 13 to 25), 89 percent claim to be more likely to buy from companies that associate themselves with a good cause according to the Cone Millennial Cause Study (Cone 2006). Moreover, 84 percent of Americans are likely to switch brands to help a cause, when price and quality are equal (Arnoldy 2007).4 Another contributing factor in CSR growth is consumers’ changing expectations in the wake of September 11th. When consumers were asked if ‘a company’s commitment to social issues is important when I decide which companies I want to see doing business in my community’, consumer agreement with this statement jumped from 58 percent before 9/11 to 84 percent nine months later, and that this trend remains intact (Cone 2006). Driving these initiatives is the need to appeal to important consumer demographics. Women make the majority (80 percent) of consumer product purchases from food to clothes to cars. They are the most profitable consumer segment representing $3.3 trillion in household spending (Skoloda n.d.). This consumer cohort is the one most likely to be affected by social campaigns. In addition, affluent psychographic groups like ‘Influentials’ – socially and politically active trendsetters – and ‘Millennials’ – the children of the baby boomers – find CRM initiatives to be appealing. These groups are important to marketers because they are most likely to generate word of mouth for consumer products. Not only is CSR gaining popularity in the marketplace, but also it has achieved increased visibility in the academy. The number of CSR-related courses in American business schools increased substantially since 2001

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such that ‘54% of business schools require a course in CSR, up from 45% in 2003 and 34% in 2001’, according to the Aspen Institute (Weiss 2006). Some schools, notably UC Berkeley and George Washington University have opened centers devoted entirely to CSR. As these students graduate from business school, they bring their learning into America’s corporations. While there may be good social reasons for corporations to partake in these programs, there appear to be far better marketing ones. Consumers don’t watch the same TV shows any more and brand loyalty – where people buy the same product religiously – is virtually a thing of the past. Research suggests that a company’s connection to a cause will generate a higher premium than brand loyalty, meaning it is more important than the customer’s past experience with the brand. To compensate for decreasing brand loyalty, marketers differentiate themselves by using a charity as a product benefit – a trend that is expected to grow. One of the key conclusions coming out of a special CSR issue of the Journal of Marketing Communication determined ‘the need for more emphasis on CSR communication directed towards the customers . . . Companies are . . . increasingly issuing special CSR reports or employing other corporate communication tools such as web sites, booklets, etc. to provide customers and other stakeholders with CSR information’, (Podnar 2008). This push for promotion suggests that corporations are using CSR increasingly as CRM – a means to promote their products while providing goodwill for their company.

Marketing Issues with CRM and CSR Because CRM and CSR are about marketing, the organizations that are most likely to be funded are those that appeal to specific consumer audiences, particularly female ones. The most popular categories of CRM sponsorships are: health-related issues, such as breast cancer (68 percent), education (62 percent), children’s welfare (60 percent), the environment (57 percent) and poverty (50 percent). It is most likely that a cause is selected because of its ability to generate strong emotions in the target demographic (and by extension – market) thus motivating them to purchase products while increasing sales, improving corporate image and benefiting a charity. An example of this type of promotion is Procter & Gamble’s ‘Protecting Futures’ promotion for Always pads and Tampax tampons. When girls and women buy these products, they are supporting the work of HERO,

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a United Nations Association campaign that works with organizations to provide school-based support for girls in Africa. As a P&G (2007) press release states: According to research, 1 in 10 school-age African girls do not attend school during menstruation or drop out at puberty because of the lack of clean and private sanitation facilities in schools. And, if a girl has no access to protective materials or if the materials she has are unreliable and cause embarrassment, she may be forced to stay at home while menstruating. This absence of approximately 4 days every 4 weeks may result in the girl missing 10 to 20 percent of her school days. The Protecting Futures program will provide products and services to help keep girls in school as well as help foster the overall health and well-being of every child in the targeted school communities. The basis of the program is the distribution of P&G products to girls in South Africa. In addition, the company has committed to building ‘classrooms, dorms, toilets and wash stations’ as well as ‘providing desks, chairs, uniforms and school meals’. From a marketing standpoint, this campaign works on a number of levels. First, the campaign targets mothers – the most important and agreeable cohort for these types of campaigns. Second, the campaign not only incorporates education, but also children’s welfare and by implication poverty. Finally, there is an online component which stimulates brand loyalty and provides opportunities for moms and daughters to talk about the issue while generating additional sales for P&G.5 Initiatives like these that work on multiple levels for corporations are understandably becoming the norm. In addition to charities that appeal to target audiences, corporations prefer ones that are noncontroversial. This is another reason why educational programs are particularly popular. An early example of this is Visa’s ‘Read a Story’ campaign with ‘Reading is Fundamental’. More recently Target supports local schools, and more elaborately Upromise has created a Web of close to 70,000 affiliates plus more than 350 online retailers to raise money for college. Finally, celebrity tie-ins bolster the appeal of one charity over another. The more celebrities attach to a campaign, the more corporations want to be connected to it. We see this in the Product (RED) campaign and in the growing number of green initiatives, which have been connected with stars like Leonard DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz. In addition, celebrity-based

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events support the most popular charities. A good example of this is American Idol Gives Back, which included The Global Fund, the same organization supported by (RED), as one of its five beneficiaries. Charities that don’t have the promotional power that these celebrities generate are more likely to be ignored.

Limitations for Corporatized Service While watching Bono on Oprah, my twenty-plus years of experience in the marketing industry cried out: ‘This is brilliant!’ The goal of any promotional campaign is to get people moving in the direction in which they were already heading. People are already shopping, so why not use that activity for a good cause? I wish I had thought of it. But after a chance to reflect, I felt a sense of unease about Product (RED). Could shopping really be the best way to ‘change the world’? Is spending a little extra money on a T-shirt or buying a Nano going to make a difference? Even more broadly, if we buy into the idea that caring for others can be easy, then what happens to real compassion, to real change, to real lives? I began to think of what service from a religious or spiritual practice has traditionally entailed and I couldn’t help but think of Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was a major force in the Twentieth Century Social Gospel, and I began to consider how people carry on his legacy today. This brought me back to Bono, who is widely recognized as a social advocate and activist. Like Dr. King, Bono has successfully used the media to promote his causes, many of which preceded the (RED) campaign and gained him such stature that he has regularly met with world leaders, including the late Pope John Paul II. Moreover, Bono in some circles has achieved a stature close to that of Dr. King. When Michael Gerson (2006) of Newsweek asked young evangelicals on campuses from Wheaton to Harvard who they view as their model of Christian activism, their answer is nearly unanimous: ‘Bono’. Unlike Dr. King, however, Bono uses the media to sell a product like a T-shirt or an iPod – ultimately, we hope, for a higher purpose, but a highend consumer product nonetheless. This is some distance from Dr. King, who promoted the idea of equality for human beings, struggled to right the wrongs of an unjust system and espoused a global vision in which people will be valued for who they are, and not what they are. People who believed in King’s words died in the streets. Forty years later, Bono has suggested that we go shopping.

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The question then becomes: Would Gap wage the ‘good fight’ if it meant not being able to use cheap overseas labor? Would Apple commit to social justice if it meant selling fewer iPods and the plethora of subsequent 99-cent downloads? Would any company take on a politically divisive issue if it had the potential to make consumers angry and ultimately have a negative impact on the bottom line? The answer, of course, is no. This is the fundamental reason why the idea and the practice of service should not be ceded to the market: within a corporate context profit will always take precedence over service. In religious institutions, service itself is the goal. In a corporate context, profit takes precedence over politics. In religious institutions social justice is the goal and therefore social issues are not separated from politics, where the roots of many social causes reside. Religious institutions have shown themselves to be better providers of service than Corporate America and even the government, which is now attempting to make inroads in this area as well. We saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example, that it was religious institutions that came to the aid of New Orleans and the Louisiana coast when the federal government fell short. Moreover, because of their connection to their communities, religious institutions are uniquely equipped to deal with local issues. The concern about Corporate America’s interest in social causes is that corporations, and even nonprofits, have turned service into a commodity, making it a product to be bought and sold, a marketing tool for business. Moreover as Inger Stole suggests, ‘Non-profits [including religious institutions] have traditionally served the needs of people unable to obtain goods, services, and political redress’. These people may well go unserved, or at least under-served, if this trend continues. Religious institutions should not allow Corporate America to take over the social gospel uncontested. Many religious organizations have over recent years learned the rules of marketing as it relates to their congregations turning their congregations into what I have elsewhere called faith brands (Einstein 2008). These methods and skills might well be applied to service, creating what we might call ‘brands of caring’ in a faith-based community. A good example of this approach is Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics, who has an established record in promoting service initiatives. Another example is the National Association of Evangelicals’ turn toward environmental consciousness. Shopping – even for what appears to be a good cause – is quite simply not the solution to society’s ills. It wasn’t on the days after September 11th when

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then President George Bush told us to go out and do it and it isn’t now when celebrities have taken up the call in a different register. Just as faith requires sacrifice, sacrifice is needed to make the world a better place. This is something that religion and faith can and has taught that Corporate America simply cannot do as authentically or as well.

Chapter 9

Nutrition and Branded Wellness in the Medicated Public Square Claire H. Badaracco, Ph.D.

Introduction In examining how media, spiritualities and social change converge today in the health and wellness field, I want to make the case for connecting the Slow Food and Slow Medicine movements, and to suggest how both of these imply social change. Slow Food refers to a movement focused on two aspects: eating healthier foods in a manner that resurrects traditional mealtime dynamics including sitting with family or community to share a meal. By Slow Medicine, I refer to what is known as the Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) or Integrative Medicine field. The American search for wellness is embedded in cultural history, but it could become associated in the public mind with the political and spiritual in such a way as to educate the population about rational food choices, including the link between what people eat and what others have to eat. The crux of my argument is this: the global pharmaceutical industry that sells pills as panaceas for every imaginable ailment through Direct-ToConsumer advertising and the industrial powers of agribusiness (that gave us King Corn and genetically modified grains) often operate as equals, partners, and even as codependents in the mediated macroeconomy of health and wellness. The manner in which the public receives messages about illness through Direct-To-Consumer advertising while eating dinner has everything to do with how they conceive of wellness as part of the food they are eating. The implication for future social change then has to do not only with what is consumed, but also with the relationship among food, medicine, media and the social economy beyond the individual and the family (Badaracco 2007, Glassner 2007, Hawken 2007, Hoover 2006, Michaels 2008).

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The disconnection in the public mind between American affluence and the ability to make rational choices that will contribute to longevity is at the same time cultural, historical and ephemeral; it is both rooted in our history and constructed through mass media interpretations of religious ‘faith’ as linked to the outcomes of these choices. Popular religion in America is about people putting their trust in a higher authority based on shared assumptions about values, knowledge and the consequences of belonging to the same class or group validated by the unseen. Over time, the site of trust has shifted from belief in the healing power of preachers and in Christ, to pharmaceuticals in television advertising and medical news reported by the popular press. Mass media, particularly broadcasting, provides the dissonance that contributes to this disconnection about food. Mediating individual personal health by dramatizing physicians giving advice about ailments such as indigestion and serious disease states such as diabetes through Direct-To-Consumer print and broadcast advertising – in the same media that celebrates cooking as competitive ‘art’ by star chefs – undermines Awareness. I am using Awareness in the Buddhist and Christian senses of the term to suggest that there is a collective social responsibility for universal wellbeing. Moral responsibility dictates that the well fed need to understand and to connect with the contemporary world food crisis. Some of these types of connections exist in segments of society, for example, in the burgeoning grassroots movements in sustainable environments and in the body of knowledge about nutrition, particularly that located in the field of Integrative Medicine.

Hunger in the Headlines To begin, let me trace the mediated issue of hunger as a headline, a ‘Catastrophe Playing Out Around the World’, as U.S. News and World Report mapped it in 2008. The global news bulletins in recent years about famine and hunger are continuous, so the following are cited as representative examples of a hunger landscape and the potential for global political unrest: Thousands of Mexicans took to the streets to protest the cost of tortilla flour. z Food riots led to the resignation of the Haitian prime minister. z Argentinean farmers blockaded the main highways to protest a soybean tax. z

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Egyptian police dissolved a planned strike against doubling food costs. In Somalia, two died when police opened fire against hungry protesters. Afghanis blocked roads when Pakistan ended wheat exports. India banned rice exports. In Thailand, rice costs tripled in the first quarter of the year. In Vietnam, rice shipments were stalled by triple-digit inflation. A six-year drought reduced the Australian rice crop by 98%. (U.S. News and World Report 2008: 39)

Meanwhile in the United States, the paradox is glaring: millions of children go hungry while others are part of an obesity epidemic that public-health physicians warn will bankrupt the national healthcare system if left unchecked. The market for plus-size children’s apparel has remained steady, and the market for psychoactive drugs for children under age five continues to outpace growth for other demographic groups. Celebrity chefs on the ‘Food Channel’ thrive, hawking multimedia-branded products from grills to cookbooks. And, while fast food surely serves the hurried worker who is too busy to cook, it is clear that it also serves the unemployed because it is cheap and filling. This list illustrates the disconnect in our mediated collective consciousness between the ideas about food – specifically, ideas about an individual’s diet, what constitutes rational food choices and how food affects the public well being – and the need for an Awareness of good nutrition as a fundamental human right. Without the benefit of Awareness and Compassion for the Others who remain without food (or with nutritionally deficit food), the imbalance in American society that leads to the manufacturing of the conditions for ongoing anxiety about illness, war or terrorism will dominate the news cycle, as headlines ricochet from ‘hope’ to ‘fear’. Without the benefit of Awareness and Compassion for the Others who remain without food (or with nutritionally deficient food), media headlines will continue to ignore the elemental and foundational problems that are affecting the global hunger and nutrition crisis. As headlines ricochet from ‘hope’ to ‘fear’ in the ongoing coverage about illness, war and terrorism, the media continue to ignore basic food issues that are, I argue, partly responsible for manufacturing these conditions in the first place. That is, food could be the instrument for peace. Healthful food in the proper quantities made available to all can help to restore balance to a society imbalanced across the dimensions of existence, from the individual’s health to that of nations and societies. By improving overall nutrition, we ultimately might decrease the incidence of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular ills caused by the high salt, high fat, excessive consumption of

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high fructose corn syrup, and, subsequently, our dependence upon the drug industry for its treatments for these conditions. There are possible solutions out there. Existing on the periphery, receiving far less media attention than pharmaceutical solutions for disease, is the evidence-based, culinary medicine called Nutrigenomics. This is part of the Integrative Medicine movement in which agriculture, slow food and the understanding of the politics of food play important roles. Integrative medicine itself represents an important convergence of media, science and social currents that argue for integration of mind and body as a physical and spiritual reality and for the body’s innate balance, wellness and potential ability to heal itself (Challem 2007, Heber 2008, Heber and Bowerman 2001, Holick 2007).

The Science and Religion (dis)Connection Narratives about the science-religion and mind-body connections are embedded in American culture. But, the larger discussion about these connections among neuro-immunologists, neurobiologists and brain scientists is not, as New York Times columnist David Brooks argues, occurring among these ‘Neural Buddhists’ – the neuroscientists whose investigation of the power of meditation to calm the mind and its neurochemistry is congruent with the beliefs of practicing Buddhists, and whose investigations could undermine the collective narrative shared by Christians embedded in the storyline of the Bible. Brooks’ understanding of the science-religion connection illustrates the problem media have generally when it comes to deconstructing the science of mind: the forces of science and religious belief once considered opposites in American culture have a great deal to say today about spirit as well as science being the nexus that makes for possible universal Awareness (Brooks 2008: A23). The way out of this quandary is the way in: that is, contemplation or meditation engages the mind to sustain the homeostasis that is the body’s source of wellness; disease is caused by the anxiety that disrupts homeostasis. Monastics and religious adepts such as the well-known monk-poet of the twentieth century, Thomas Merton, and the twenty-first-century neurobiologist-philosopher Antonio Damasio have written about the stillness that grounds the mind in realism. Damasio argued that: The neurobiology of emotion . . . tells us . . . that joy is preferable to sorrow . . . and more conducive to health and the creative flourishing

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of our beings. We should seek joy . . . regardless of how foolish and unrealistic the quest may look. If we do not exist under oppression or in famine, and yet cannot convince ourselves how lucky we are to be alive, perhaps we are not trying hard enough. (Damasio 2003: 271, Sternberg 2001) Illustrating the burgeoning partnership between religion and medicine, the Dalai Lama is a founder and active supporter of the Mind Life Institute of New York, along with Richard Davidson, the University of Wisconsin brain researcher popularly known for his work in magnetic-resonance imagery of meditating monks. This science articulates convincingly a connection between the emotions and equanimity, a central tenet of Buddhist philosophy. The Dalai Lama has said that ‘anxiety is a global pandemic’, and a number of Buddhists have recommended media fasting as one means through which to reduce anxiety (Badaracco 2007). Why should this be? One has only to look at the production of branded sickness and the creation of the ‘worried well’ – those individuals who are healthy outside of their level of anxiety and worry – to understand the macroeconomic connection between what the Dalai Lama called the anxiety pandemic and the fear-based appeals in news and advertising that sustain the ratings so necessary to media. The conclusion of scientists, physicians and researchers that emotions govern the neurochemistry of the brain is accepted broadly in the medical literature; the impact of anxiety on the body’s homeostasis is well established by a body of scientific evidence. The scientific literature linking emotions, feeling, health and consciousness is generally accepted in Ayurvedic and Asian medicine, but is only gradually being accepted in allopathic Western medicine. The Integrative Medicine field is just that – integrative of elements of Eastern and Western modalities.

Slow Food, Slow Medicine and Nutrigenomics For purposes of my argument here, the advance that links the Slow Food and Slow Medicine movements is Nutrigenomics, which is part of the Integrated Medicine field that has established (a) how nutrition governs the emotions, (b) how emotions govern the brain’s neurochemistry, and (c) how the brain governs both mind (psyche and spirit) and body. This research reiterates that nutrition contributes to the body’s innate ability to heal. Nutrigenomics suggests, for example, that the color of vegetables and fruits is an indicator of their vitamin content and eating the correct

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combinations of these can help regulate our moods, even control or prevent the onset of depression (Heber 2008). As another example, Nutrigenomics questions highly processed foods such as high-fructose corn syrup, which is found in everything from breakfast cereal to fruit juices and has been connected to ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder), obesity and pediatric illnesses. Even though this information has been available for half a century, corn syrup is still prevalent in foods. There are many such commonly used foods that have questionable health effects. In her 1971 best seller Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Lappé challenged what she called ‘The Great American Steak Religion’, arguing that eating beef in America was associated with ‘status’ and ‘masculinity’ (Lappé 1971: 142). Over time, heart disease – the leading cause of death in the United States for both men and women – ‘became linked in the public mind’ with a high intake of fat (Lappé 1971:142). This awareness took decades of advocacy by the American Heart Association and cardiologists, but was effectively countered by the beef industry. After 1997 – the date when Congress made Direct-To-Consumer advertising legal – there was an unseen presence at many American dinner tables, specifically, the subjects of ailments as ‘common’ to everyone in DirectTo-Consumer advertising. It was the advertising that constructed a vernacular about illness as commonplace and the news media (supported by advertising revenue) that introduced anxiety about health, healthy food and food safety. Today, consumers choose from a blizzard of ‘heart healthy’ labels applied to all types of foods as part of the same marketing economy within which labeling operates outside of media ethics and under government regulation. Book titles such as French Women Don’t Get Fat (Mireille Guiliano), the Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollan) and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver) are on best-seller lists. Even though Michael Pollan’s questions about what the label ‘organic’ on food really means was asked by Rodale Publishing as early as the 1940s, his best-selling books about the quality of the food we eat has brought this issue to the forefront and to the top of the book market (Pollan 2006: 142, Pollan 2008, Schlosser 2001, 2006). What has remained consistent over the decades as pertains to food, however, is American detachment from the problem of world hunger. Similarly, popular ideas about fat are not a barometer of health, but of social class. As Pollan and other sociologists and cultural critics have observed, the cultural shifts surrounding food have been ‘violent’, signifying a ‘national eating disorder’. ‘Lipophobia’ (fear or avoidance of fats) followed the 1977 Senate committee ruling that issued dietary goals for America warning

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against red meat. That was followed by ‘carbophobia’ represented by the Atkins diet in which dieters give up carbohydrates in favor of proteins (Pollan 2006: 2). Authors and scholars Pollan and Marion Nestle along with a number of others have questioned the political logic that lets the U.S. government, particularly the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), debate dietary goals and construct a graphic called the food pyramid, which is taught in every elementary school’s health program. This is the same FDA, by the way, that told Americans to eat margarine, until evidence-based clinical medicine made clear that margarine held unhealthful trans fats. This is also the FDA that legitimates Direct-To-Consumer pharmaceutical advertising. The branding of nutrition associated with countercultural politics and the book Diet for a Small Planet were important parts of the evolution of the twenty-first-century ‘organic’ foods movement, linked with what Paul Hawken described as the explosion of more than 100,000 global nongovernmental organizations associated with ‘Green’ politics (Nestle 2007, Hawken 2007). The American search for wellness is part of our culture, but it could be fruitfully associated in the public mind with the political and spiritual in such a way as to educate the population about rational food choices, including the link between what we eat and global hunger issues. Media is the agent through which are cultivated popular ideas about longevity and anxiety about death, alleviated by the consumptions of pills. The terms ‘Natural’ and ‘Antioxidant’ like those of ‘Anti-Aging’ and ‘Heart-Healthy’ have lost their significance, melding into the process of branding that medicalizes food. Similarly, ‘Free-Range’, as Pollan astutely observed, is now a kind of public ‘ritual space’, referring to nothing geographically: it is a ‘nutritionism’, a brand term that spiritualizes our protein (Pollan 2001, 2006). The normalization of these words means that we do not apprehend their full and deep meanings. We are not Aware or Mindful of the real reason we choose these foods. Mindful Eating is the antidote prescribed by Mind-Body and Integrative Medicine. It is rooted in evidence-based culinary medicine, the leading proponents of which include Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Dean Ornish and Deepak Chopra. The concept of Mindful Eating functions on three levels: medical, philosophical and sociological. On the medical level, the attitude is summarized by Nutrigenomics. On the philosophical, it is best expressed by the concepts of Buddhist Awareness. On the sociological, it is aptly described by social-class analysis. Beyond these three levels is that force of branded wellness marketing as well as public relations mediation epitomized by the medicated public square that brought us the demographic of the

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‘worried well’. The power of choice is an economic force to be reckoned with, undermining the potential for social change through grassroots movements. Contrary to the branding and marketing forces that medicalize food, however, Mindful Eating calls for an examination of the politics of food beyond the regulators of the FDA and public-policy level: it entails rather an examination of why we eat what we do and how the choices individuals make about food determine other aspects of their being, within the context of an ethic of Universal Responsibility. Weil began his academic career by studying botany before he entered medical school. Thus, his is an educated bias toward plant-based culinary approaches to wellness, focusing on macronutrients and phyto-nutrients in food. But Weil emphasizes that Integrative Medicine is not ‘Alternative or Complementary’ practice: it does not substitute for traditional pharmaceutically based medicine, but rather integrates knowledge about nutrition to prevent disease and knowledge about pharmaceuticals to treat disease that cannot be reversed (Weil 2006). Whereas Mind-Body Medicine sees the neural having an impact on the biological, the argument among those practicing in the field of Integrative Medicine and Nutrigenomics implies that this is a two-way street, that the body’s nutritional profile and eating and exercise patterns can influence how the emotions work within the brain. Weil supplants the notion of diet with the idea of eating living food, which forces us to think about our diet as choosing food that supports the body’s natural healthful state. Living food is colorful and whole, as close to its original form in nature as possible. Heber summarized why color matters in the daily diet: ‘Plants evolved complex defense mechanisms to protect themselves . . . the hundred thousand phyto-chemicals in plants modulate metabolic pathways in humans involving inflammation, oxidation, cell cycle control and detoxification’ (Heber 2008). By eating living food, Weil argues, we obtain more disease-fighting macronutrients and phyto-nutrients, which can reduce inflammation and cell proliferation, both significant in the onset of disease (Weil 2006). Eating living foods assists the body to heal itself and to avoid disease. Weil describes three main categories of macronutrients in living foods, all contributing to the goal of an anti-inflammatory diet: (1) carbohydrates – which have an impact on blood sugar; (2) fats – the good fats known as Omegas 3, 6 and 9 are essential to mental and emotional health and must be in balance in the diet. They are synthesized in the central nervous system; (3) protein – Weil favors fatty fish, but the disappearance of fish such as wild salmon and

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others that contain Omega 3 is implicated in global nutrition problems. Thus, Weil advocates a balance of grain-based proteins and fatty fish. But food is merely one part of building health in Weil’s view; he instructs physicians that it is important to see people holistically – as body, mind and spirit in balance. Weil advocates health practitioners take ‘thoughtful action to reestablish order in the body, not only to apply pharmaceuticals’ (Weil 2006).1 In his lifework to redefine the practice of Western medicine and advocate for Integrative medicine, he has branded wellness through a range of multimedia products from face creams to energy bars, and he has collaborated profitably with a number of ecologically minded ‘green’ companies, with a high percentage of his substantial profits returned to the educational foundation he established, the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. The lack of public information about the nutritional content of food has an impact on the overall health of not just the individual’s fitness or leanness, but also on the collective mind with regard to Awareness of health, world food quantities, and nutrition. Mass media, driven by Big Pharma’s global public relations including product championing by celebrities, is part of the syndrome that places too much emphasis on messages about illness rather than healthful eating. Even clinical trial results published in medical journals, Hadler asserted, are often tainted by food or drug industry sponsors, and research has demonstrated that such published results differ from clinical trials on the same materials that are not supported by industry (Hadler 2008: 158).2 Author Marion Nestle, whose scholarship over the past decade in several important books has focused on the role of government in shaping American food policies, observes that the FDA, the agency charged with dissemination of public information about food, has made serious errors in its declarations about food. There is reason to question the lack of independent judgment about the pharmaceutical industries the FDA governs. In fact, Gardner has argued that there is a good reason to anticipate the continuing intrusion of government misinformation into the American food supply. American popular belief or blind trust in government as a higher authority with the power to make declarations about what is a good diet and the politics of food policy as described by Marion Nestle, can be connected to ideas about wellness (Nestle 2006, 2007; Patel 2007).3 Gardner argues that the Slow Food USA (trademark) movement is tapping into the growing social movement around food and says he ‘envisions a future food system that is based on principles of high quality and taste,

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environmental sustainability, and social justice – a food system that is good, clean and fair’ (Gardner 2008). Wright and Middendorf’s analysis of the global activism over food concluded that food and agriculture ‘have to move beyond the elite Tuscan-inspired kitchens graced by celebrity chefs like Rachel Ray and Emeril Lagasse’, and the branded goods that suffuse the shelves, from salad dressing to pots and pans (Wright and Middendorf 2008: 279). While critically observing the limits of human agency that must pertain to contemporary movements in Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS), Wright and Middendorf argued that food and agriculture ‘must leap from the pages of the New York Times and the domain of high-profile writers like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver’, and permeate the national dialogue to create . . . a ‘new agriculture’ that can balance the market and society and can ‘serve multiple social needs’ (Wright and Middendorf 2008).4 In their excellent edited volume, they cite Lyson’s work as their source for the term ‘civic agriculture that embeds social and economic relations’, balancing profit-making and community-building in a production paradigm (Wright and Middendorf 2008: 279).5 If we look at the trends in wellness medicine today and at the progressive side of Mind-Body and also Integrative Medicine that balances Self and Society as measures of wellness, it is possible to integrate the ideas inherent in Nutrigenomics with the public debate over the environment, human rights, hunger and global civic agriculture – concluding that a balanced daily food supply is a fundamental human right without which we cannot begin to construct a world where peace could flourish. Now the tipping point is before us: how can rational choice trump media logic? How will grassroots movements disseminate their justice and sustainability goals effectively from the perimeter to the center? That is an unknown variable to be determined by a global economy where there is an unprecedented need for something, maybe even anything, to eat.

Chapter 10

Spiritual Tourism – Promise and Problems: The Case of Sedona, Arizona Curtis Coats, Ph.D.

Introduction In 1999, the Pacific Area Travel Association (PATA) noted the growth of travel for the purposes of physical and mental rejuvenation. The Association predicted, ‘Spiritual rejuvenation is quite likely to be next’ (PATA 1999). Indeed, this appears to be the case. Kevin Wright (2007), president of the World Religious Travel Association, claimed that religious travelers numbered 300 million worldwide, creating an $18 billion per year industry.1 In 2006, the Travel Industry Association noted that ‘one-quarter of [US] travelers said they were currently interested in taking a spiritual vacation’. This, the association noted, was a 12 percent increase from 2001 (TIA 2006). Each ‘new’ trend in tourism elicits old questions regarding the sustainability of travel practices and the environmental, economic and cultural impact of travel. Of course, traveling for religious or spiritual purposes is not new, but it is taking new forms and (re)emerging in a variety of places and practices, whether as cruise vacations to the Holy Land or as New Age tours to Mayan ruins in Mexico. Given the changing nature of spiritual tourism and its growth as a travel industry, questions about its sustainability need to be continually addressed. This chapter aims to engage the question of cultural impact, albeit from a different direction than is often taken. That is, I approach the question of cultural impact from the construction of meaning and identity, rather than from the more common analysis of cultural appropriation or consumption.2 I take for granted that all forms of travel appropriate practices, places and objects and that, indeed, these appropriations often objectify people and culture (Gregory 2001, Hollinshead 1996), foster spectacle and gazing (deBurlo 1996, Urry 1990), and force Others to sell their spaces, practices

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and beliefs, many of which are sacred (Hall 1996, Harrigan 1974, Mugerauer 2001, Povinelli 2001). However, I hold open whether this appropriation must produce ‘myopic ethnocentrism’ (Smith 1989: 81), Orientalism (Said 1978) and/or cultural cannibalism (MacCannell 1992). Indeed, might it also be possible that cultural, and, in this case, sacred, appropriation produces meaningful encounters that can produce relationships of solidarity? Certainly, this is the hope of many spiritual tourists and spiritual-tourism professionals. To critically engage with this question, analysis must move beyond whether appropriation through consumption occurs and to an analysis of how these appropriations lead to the constructions of Self and Others and to the mediation of Self with Others. My intent in this chapter is to offer such an analysis through a case study of New Age tourism in Sedona, Arizona. Certainly, spiritual tourism is much broader than New Age tourism, and the particularities of Sedona as a New Age tourist destination suggest that the following analysis might only fully apply to New Age tourism in Sedona. However, I suggest that much, if not all, of the following comments may be transferable to other places of New Age practice, and I suggest that the approach taken here can be replicated in other places of spiritual tourism. This chapter will develop in two phases. First, I will introduce Sedona and discuss the ways in which Self and Other are constructed and mediated there. This will focus on a web of mediated interactions that are central to the pilgrim-tourist experience in Sedona. This section will focus on the content and contours of this web of mediated interactions in an effort to understand (a) what meanings are in circulation and (b) how these meanings become embedded in Sedona and embodied by its pilgrim-tourists. In the second phase, I will examine the implications of the meanings and interactions in play in the Sedona New Age pilgrim-tourist experience. This examination will focus particularly on the potential for social change through the formation of community and relationships of solidarity between Self and Other.

Method This research is based on a mixed-method qualitative analysis involving participant observation, in-depth interviews and text analysis. I interviewed more than 30 pilgrim-tourists and practitioners, attended two spiritual conferences (Four Directions Wisdom Gathering and Prophet’s Conference Sedona), participated in four guided vortex tours and observed pilgrim-tourists at the four major vortexes. I also coded and analyzed

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63 spiritual brochures; 14 websites3; one issue each of Sedona Journal of Emergence! (June 2006), Awareness (June 2007), and Four Corners Magazine (May 2007); and one book, The Secret (Byrne 2006).

Sedona: New Age Destination Sedona hosts between 224,000 and 560,000 New Age seekers per year.4 According to the 2005 Sedona Visitor Study (Behavior Research Center 2005), Sedona’s typical tourist tends to be White, female and affluent, with a median annual income of $94,200. Many tourists come to Sedona on day trips, but 24 percent stay an average of three nights and spend between $190 and $400 per day. While these numbers are for all tourists in Sedona, my research gave no reason to suggest that the profile of the New Age pilgrim-tourist differs in any significant way. Sedona’s ‘spiritual magnetism’ (Preston 1992) began to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Page Bryant began channeling about ‘vortexes’, which her channel guide, Albion, called ‘special places on earth where the life force of the planet was particularly strong and is coagulated into funnels of energy’ (Bryant 1991: 4). Self-help guru Dick Sutphen had actually talked about ‘mysterious power spots’ in Sedona in 1976, but Bryant is often credited with naming and starting the popularization of the vortexes (Ivakhiv 2001: 174). Motorized tours to vortexes began in the 1980s and continue today, and the vortexes helped Sedona become a site for the Harmonic Convergence in 1987. Since then, Sedona’s spirituality and its vortexes have been highlighted in the New York Times, Frommer’s and USA Today.5 The Los Angeles Times called Sedona ‘the Vatican City of the New Age movement’ (as cited in Ivakhiv 2001: 173). In this New Age Vatican City, spiritual seekers will not find a Pope or even a singular St. Peter’s Basilica. Instead, they will find a marketplace bazaar of spiritual goods and services. An article in USA Today Life (December 4, 1997) noted: Sedona’s pilgrims can photograph and cleanse their auras, browse for quartz crystals and Tibetan bowls, and choose among several jeep tours of area vortexes – power spots that ancient Native Americans consider sacred, and modern believers say emit an energy from deep within the earth. These goods and services converge into a one-stop, spiritual shop, organized and legitimated by market dynamics and accommodated by

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government-sponsored entities, e.g. the Sedona Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Forest Service, Arizona Office of Tourism and Arizona State Parks.

Sedona: Encountering Self Though Sedona is very much a decentralized market bazaar, it is not without its unifying logics or themes.6 One of these themes, and, perhaps the most important, is the focus on Self. Of course, this theme is not unique to Sedona. Scholars have noted a shift toward the Subject,7 or what Heelas (1998) called an ‘inward turn’ to the Self for ultimate authority and meaning in dominant, late modern, Western culture. Marketing efforts position Sedona and its spiritual practitioners as powerful resources for the exploration of Self. For example, marketing materials created for Doris Terra Lee’s Creator’s Path (2007) promised a Sedona experience that allows a person ‘to embrace your full potential and to allow the creative flow of beauty and joy’. The Crysalis website said, ‘Red rocks assist in creating a unique energetic environment to support your journey of self-discovery, healing and realization of your True Self’. Finally, the website for Sacred Stones Therapy noted that the therapist ‘offers you the best in supporting yourself physically, mentally, spiritually and energetically’. These marketing materials were only part of the web of mediated interactions that produced a particular desire for Sedona and aspirations for self-transformation. These marketing efforts scaled up to broader cultural discourses and media products and scaled down to micro-level interactions on the spiritual tours. For example, the language of self-transformation, i.e. a focus on personal choice, empowerment and intention, was consistently repeated on each spiritual tour, reinforcing the promotional materials above and connecting to cultural scripts of individualism and particular media products like The Secret.8 Further, tourists and practitioners alike embodied the discursive practices of self-transformation in ritualized practice. Each tour that I took followed a basic pattern of guided self-discovery, whether ‘guiding’ our own tour, choosing our own place in a medicine wheel, or connecting our energy to the energies in the vortexes. At each turn, we were encouraged to invoke self-transformational language and asked to encounter Self through ritualized practice and through the power of Sedona. These ritualized interactions formed a multilayered web of mediated interaction that (a) drew upon and legitimated the spiritual goods and services for sale, (b) reinforced the spiritual magnetism of Sedona and (c) perpetuated the broader public script about the ultimate concern for the Self.

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Sedona: Encountering Others Of course, the emphasis on the Self in the New Age experience in Sedona does not occur in a vacuum. This requires interactions with others – other tourists, other guides, and what Said (1978) called ‘Low-Others’, in this case Native Americans. Part of Sedona’s ‘spiritual magnetism’ draws on its uniqueness as a spiritual community. Like the emphasis on Self, the emphasis on community is embedded in media products and in other interactions on tour. Visitsedona.com (2006), the official tourism site maintained by the Sedona Chamber of Commerce, sets the stage for this element of Sedona’s mediascape. It stated: Vortex sites are interwoven with the real world of a growing city. As a result, seekers have experience in how to live their spirituality as they go through their daily lives. Rather than having an escape from civilization to find peace, visitors can discover that Sedona’s splendor gives them insights for how to create an inner harmony they can maintain once at home. In short, Sedona’s marketing efforts spiritualize the goings-on in the city. Thus, Sedona is extraordinary, following Urry (1990), but not because of its removal from civilization. Instead, it is extraordinary because civilization intermingles with the sacred, because the profane is made sacred in this place through the spiritual community. Since this quote comes from the virtual mouthpiece of the Chamber of Commerce, it could be written off as simply a marketing effort to integrate Sedona’s spirituality with its growth as a tourist destination. But, in fact, the spiritual practitioners in the area embraced the influx of tourists and the growth of the spiritual community as validation of their worldview and Sedona’s power. My informants attest to this. For example, Scott (names have been changed) said, ‘You have 5 million people coming a year, and you have thousands of people that live here. . . . And so that consciousness of the human elevates these vortexes beyond their natural state’ (personal communication 2007). Paul took this even a step further, suggesting that it is the power of the people not the power of the rocks that creates Sedona’s spiritual power. He said, ‘Now whether the vortexes are real or not doesn’t matter if people have stood and thought, I think I feel something. It becomes’ (personal communication 2007). There is a clear sense, then, that Sedona, as spiritual place, needs people. Also, there is a clear sense that

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as much as people are longing for self-transformation, they also long for community with others. For example, Daniella said: I think spiritual people are drawn to this area because we sort of, in a way, create our own vortex . . . what happens is we come together and work together and we’re doing a lot of things to create a better environment and more interlocking environment with . . . people. (personal communication 2007) The idea of community is not simply for the residents either. Instead, it becomes integrated into what Sedona offers to New Age pilgrim-tourists. Sedona becomes a place of powerful energy with guides to help pilgrimtourists navigate that energy. As importantly, Sedona becomes a safe haven in which to find like-minded spiritual people. Jason said, ‘I think a lot of people . . . come in to town – they have permission to be whoever they want to be but also to explore different parts of themselves . . . it’s kind of like permission here that I think is outside the norm’ (personal communication 2007). Daniella said her clients are longing for a connection, looking for a place and people with whom to share. This idea was reinforced repeatedly in my experiences with New Age pilgrim-tourists. Nearly all of them were drawn to Sedona (in part) because of its place as an imagined spiritual community, an imagined place of like-mindedness, where they could interact and connect freely with others, without fear of being ridiculed or ostracized. This sense of community and the necessity of shared experience came to bear in the tourist experience itself. The ritualized, mediated practices of the tours were designed to create bonds among us (Taylor 1985). Thus, the tours are not simply a personal experience of the vortex energies; rather, they are shared experiences. On each of the tours, it was necessary that we experienced Sedona together. This shared experience included interacting with our guides, doing ceremony with one another, hugging trees, sharing stories of spiritual longing and aspiration, and even sharing confessional space. This sense of community and need for others was central to the Sedona experience and to the exploration and even transformation of the Self. But it wasn’t simply like-minded tourists and guides that were needed in this experience. Instead, Sedona’s power as a spiritual place depended upon a particular, and largely imagined, Native American presence. This presence involved an invocation of ancient wisdom and mythology, an appropriation of place and practice and a mythical connection between Native and tourist grounded in the landscape of Sedona.

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In marketing materials and in conversations, I was told that Sedona has always been sacred, that Native Americans have held it sacred for millennia and that, in fact, Sedona is the womb of the Earth. This Native mythology was incorporated into a particular Sedona New Age mythology that created the place’s uniqueness. Marta, a New Age tour guide, said: ‘It’s the womb of the Earth because every thought, prayer, invocation and ceremony goes out from here immediately on the ley lines to the rest of the planet, and, of course, to any other sacred site around the world’ (personal communication 2007). This mythology not only solidified Sedona’s spiritual magnetism, but it also cast Native Americans as keepers of ancient wisdom, wisdom that they graciously shared with others. For example VisitSedona.com noted, ‘Our native brothers and sisters are sharing their tribal wisdom, showing us how to live in harmony with the earth and all our relations’. Yet the relationship between Native American Other and Self is not simply one of sharing; rather, it is one of belonging and being. These ideas of being and belonging get grounded in Sedona and embodied by the New Age community through the steady invocation of shamanic healing and teaching, as well as specific invocation of Hopi mythology, the Mayan calendar and Incan practice. These invocations occur in brochures and websites, in interviews and during conferences and tours. For example, at the Four Directions Wisdom Gathering in Sedona, the opening ceremony included the thought, ‘The ancients are alive in all of us’. Another elaborated on this by suggesting that race, color or creed are not as important as our common humanity from Mother; ‘we’re all natives’. Also, at the Prophet’s Conference, guests were treated to Alberto Villoldo’s invocation of Mayan and Incan mythology and our part in the fulfillment of prophecy. Later, during a small-group session, a conference attendee said, ‘All of us can be Maya. Maya is consciousness’. Of course, all of this talk is grounded in practice. At the Four Directions Wisdom Gathering, attendees watched, listened and participated in Incan dance and song performed by Wachan, Martika and their daughter, Shiqwarkenti, giving us a part in the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor, a prophecy among indigenous groups in the Western hemisphere that predicts reunification and oneness, we were told. At the Prophet’s Conference, attendees participated in indigenous ritual with Alberto Villoldo. Elsewhere, during tours, my fellow travelers and I were invited to participate in a medicine wheel ceremony. On a different tour, Thomas used ‘native’ language, followed with English translation, to describe our ‘releasing’ ceremony with his Native shamanic herb blend.

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In short, at each turn, the language of sharing with and belonging to the indigenous Other is grounded in experiences of watching Native dance, listening to Native song, participating in Native ceremonies and walking on sacred, Native ground. These experiences are the tissue that connect ancient past to present, Self to Other. They are the experiences that create the desire to ‘be Indian’9 – in Self and in community.

New Age Pilgrim-Tourist Practice in Sedona: Implications As should be evident, the web of mediated interactions embedded in the Sedona New Age pilgrim-tourist experience helps construct a desire for self-transformation, reproduce a concern for the self as an ultimate ‘life good’ (Taylor 1989: 93), perpetuate a longing for community and spiritual connection, and (re)imagine a particular connection to Native Americans. What, then, are cultural implications of these experiences? First, the web of mediated interactions in Sedona constructs a particular moral space embedded in a social imaginary. Charles Taylor (2004), in his description of social imaginaries, said, ‘Ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends.’ It is this imaginary, Taylor argued, ‘that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (2004: 23). For the New Age pilgrim-tourist, Sedona becomes a physical place in which a spiritual imaginary is embedded, a place imagined as powerful, a place where like-minded individuals can be found, a place where people feel at home, where they can feel validated, where they can belong, where they have, following theologian Paul Tillich (1952), the ‘courage to be’. Further, this is a moral space where the Self is the source of ultimate authority and where oneness, interconnection and harmony are its highest goods. Frankly, the fact that New Age followers generally champion the Self as the ultimate source of authority is often used to highlight the negative aspects of New Age practice (Carrette and King 2005), e.g. as being individualistic as well as materialistic. Yet, my research indicates that, at the very least, the moral space constructed in Sedona helps people construct narratives of aspiration that express a desire to live in harmony not discord, to find meaning more than money at work and to connect with family and community. The cultural impacts of such longings and desires should not be so quickly discarded.

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Second, there is a genuine desire in this moral space to connect with Native American Others. There is a strong discourse in this imaginary of sharing and a belief that ‘the Native way’ is the way ‘to live in harmony with the earth and all our relations’ (Sedona Chamber of Commerce 2006). This, combined with a moral space based on oneness and harmony, suggests possibilities for the building of relationships of solidarity and understanding between New Age pilgrim-tourists and the Native American Others from whom they appropriate and like whom they long to be. Yet, there are undercurrents in belief and practice that cause pause before crowning this type of tourist practice as ‘the answer’ for socially responsible, culturally sensitive tourism. Two of these undercurrents will be discussed here – the reduction of ends to means (and subjects to objects) and spirituality as the marker of difference. Sedona’s community and its Native presence are each billed as a resource for the exploration and transformation of Self. Because of this, the place and its people can lose inherent value and only maintain (market) value as long as they can reproduce themselves as a desirable commodity or resource. This is detrimental to the place and people, and it is particularly detrimental to Native Americans in the area because they are reduced to a particular type of object – an ancient, heroic sage. In Paulo Freire’s terms, Native Americans in the Sedona New Age experience are not subjects – ‘one who knows and acts’ – but objects – something that is ‘known and acted upon’, which, according to Freire, is the root of oppression (2008: 36).10 Thus, Sedona New Age tourist experiences involve the perpetual appropriation of practice, myth and place of the Native American Object with little or no encounter of modern, acting and knowing Native American Subjects. The Native American Objects are perpetually frozen in a particular, ancient time and solidified as a giver of ancient knowledge and wisdom. This problem of objectification is compounded by a sense of entitlement embodied by New Age practitioners and pilgrim-tourists, an entitlement connected to their longing to belong to Native Americans. This entitlement stems, in part, from the idea that spirituality is the marker of difference. Ulrich Beck wrote, ‘People are set free from the social forms of industrial society – class, stratification, family, gender . . .’. This, he said, led to a ‘social surge of individualization’ (1992: 87). Beck was quick to point out that the social forms of industrial society had not disappeared. This was not ‘freedom proper but a recession of these to the background’ (1992: 87). In their place, new ‘self-selected and self-created hierarchies and forms of

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stratification formed on the basis of interests, ambitions and commitments’ (1992: 97, 98). One such self-selected commitment, in the case of New Age tourism in Sedona, is spirituality. The longing to ‘be Indian’ can be seen in these terms. The embrace of the Native American Object in the New Age Sedona experience is based on spiritual identification, not on material solidarity that engages Native Americans as Subjects struggling to know and name their world. This spiritual identification builds on slogans of ‘sharing’ places and practices, not on dialogue, using Freire’s term, and the critical recognition of oppression. In fact, this spiritual identification allows New Age pilgrimtourists to be set free, they believe, from their own social positions and from any complicity in Native American oppression. This ‘freedom’ creates a sense of entitlement, causing pilgrim-tourists to believe it is their right and destiny to ‘be Indian’. Thus, spirituality becomes the connective tissue, the primary source of identification and belonging, causing material relations of power and oppression to recede to the background. In the final analysis, there is certainly possibility for social change created through the web of mediated interactions in the New Age pilgrim-tourist experience in Sedona. Quests and explorations of Self led to narratives of aspiration that expressed desires to live, work and be differently. Further, the moral space created in Sedona posited oneness, interconnection and harmony as ultimate life goods, which led to genuine attempts to create an open and affirming community. Finally, this was a moral space that expressed a longing for solidarity with Native American Others. Yet, these were interactions and experiences that also supplanted inherent value with instrumental value by objectifying Sedona and its people, reducing them to a resource for the Self. Further, this objectification was exacerbated, particularly in relation to Native Americans, by a sense of entitlement built on a spiritual solidarity that veiled material relations of oppression. Only by working through such contradictions can New Age tourism in Sedona fulfill its potential for solidarity and social change.

Chapter 11

[Re]Vision: The Role of Graphic Design[ers] . . . Samantha Lawrie, Ph.D.

Abstract This chapter explores the role of graphic designers as facilitators of societal well-being, stewards of community values and agents of spiritual growth. Graphic design is a broad practice that intersects all areas of visual communication, and is primarily concerned with the interpretation, creation and transmission of images, symbols and stories. As a discipline, graphic design traces a history from the caves of Lascaux to the most recent Web portal. Philosophically, the discipline came into its own between World War I and World War II as European designers sought social healing through the application of a rational, scientific objectivity to human communications. Current concerns focus on the development of sustainable design practices and human-centered, as opposed to commerce-centered, design strategies. Within this context it is my position that the discipline of graphic design requires a metaphorical revision. Graphic design may represent a current evolutionary state of a spiritual tradition that encompasses the interpretation and communication of information, the mastery of symbol-making, and the maintenance of balanced human and ecological relationships: a tradition recognized as shamanism. This chapter will compare the roles of shaman and graphic designer and introduce evidence that, through the exploration of a new metaphor, the discipline has the potential to effect significant social and spiritual change.

Introduction Graphic designers engage in a broad practice that intersects all areas of visual communication but are primarily concerned with the interpretation, creation and communication of images, symbols and stories. These images,

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symbols and stories in turn function as cultural catalysts; they help construct and shape reality. Within traditional communities the figure associated with the structuring of communal reality is the shaman. The shaman is an individual trained to act as an ‘intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field’ (Abram 1996: 7). His or her role is to maintain a balanced relationship between the human community and the earthly context within which the community exists and, in doing so, care for the spiritual welfare its members (Abram 1996, Ripinsky-Naxon 1993, Schmidt 1987, Van Deusen 2001). Like the graphic designer, the shaman also practices the skillful creation of images, the meaningful interpretation of symbols and the art of story telling. The shaman uses these techniques to convey spiritual truths and show us new ways of looking at the world (Abram 1996, Ripinsky-Naxon 1993, Schmidt 1987, Van Deusen 2001). By comparing the roles of graphic designer and shaman, this chapter explores the potential role of contemporary graphic designers as facilitators of societal well-being, stewards of community values and agents of spiritual growth.

Nodes of Intersection Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all arts. It responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by many disciplines including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature and language, politics and performance. Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, . . . [Graphic design] is complex combinations of words and pictures, numbers and charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to succeed, demand . . . a particularly thoughtful individual who can orchestrate these elements so that they all add up to something distinctive, or useful, or playful, or surprising, or subversive, or in some way truly memorable. . . . — Jessica Helfand (2001: 137) Connecting the roles of designer and shaman might seem like a stretch; yet the precedent exists within some histories of graphic design. Both Meggs (2006) and Drucker and McVarish (2009) suggest that the visual and cultural foundations of graphic design were established by paleolithic artists: individuals that created ritual imagery on behalf of their communities. Drucker and McVarish (2009), in particular, argue that because cave imagery resulted from deliberate processes and shared visual vocabulary, it functioned not only as representation but also as communication.

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Although early interpretations of cave art viewed it as a representation of sympathetic hunting magic, cave art as communication suggests more complex motivations. Clottes and Lewis-Williams (1998) argue that the decorated caves of Europe are both expression and evidence of shamanic practices and that these practices formed a framework for conceiving reality. If, as Ripinsky-Naxon (1993) suggests, visual imagery is ‘a more effective method for exchanging information between the conscious and unconscious dimensions of the mind’ (191), then the shaman’s skillful manipulation of visual forms would play a vital role in the formation of such a framework. According to Burenhult (1993), these visual and ritual forms of expression ‘represent one of the key ways in which people came to terms with a . . . socially more complex way of life . . . [and] . . . were a means of binding the society together, protecting it and preserving its values . . .’ (116). In simplified terms, visual forms of expression evolved to include written, printed and mass-produced media. Yet, as we leap forward in time, the role of the shaman becomes remote within Western culture. The production of visual media was no longer the intermediary role of a designated individual within a small community, but a service provided by a collective of anonymous, skilled tradesmen for institutional and commercial interests. By the start of the twentieth century, modern visual expression in the form of mass media was part of everyday life. Its images and symbols were a jumbled confusion of historical styles and technological novelties. In Europe of the early twentieth century, the cacophony of visual culture was accompanied by sociopolitical unrest and a revolutionary spirit. It was within this climate that the efforts of avant-garde artists returned the roles of graphic designer and shaman to closer proximity. As an individual possessing both considerable knowledge of the natural world and significant insight into human behavior, the shaman is capable of restructuring the worldview of his or her community (Abram 1996, Ripinsky-Naxon 1993, Schmidt 1987, Van Deusen 2001). Generalizing the initiation experience of a shaman-to-be, Schmidt (1987) writes that: He makes a quantum leap and sees how arbitrary cultural distinctions are: he understands then that he may not only read but also write society. He can enter the amorphous realm beyond categories and emerge with a structure different from his culture’s conventional one. (66) With similar intention, avant-garde artists consciously explored the technical innovations of the nineteenth century and the rhetoric of mass media

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in an effort to ‘find a visual language to translate the social meaning’ of these developments (Drucker and McVarish 2009: 189). Their formal and conceptual experiments sought to expose the inner workings of visual form, language and social convention and their efforts were fueled by a conscious belief that design could be an agent of social change. The stories of the past, discarded as flawed and invalid, were replaced by the search for a universal language of visual form that could spark the formation of new, utopian social orders. World War II marked the end of the avant-garde experiment and its visual innovations, shed off their social idealism were absorbed and exploited by commercial interests. However, the avant-garde artists ‘invented the graphic designer as a figure both formally and conceptually skilled, for whom [design] was the expression of a point of view on the world’ (Drucker and McVarish 2009: 206).

Mixed Metaphors . . . shifting from artists and visionaries to ‘problem solvers’ and ‘communication managers,’ the design profession continuously de-evolved to meet the increasingly narrow requirements of business and industry. — Tucker Viemeister (2001: 228)

While in Europe the discipline of graphic design emerged from the visionary efforts of the avant-garde, in the United States it was fostered within the market-driven constraints of advertising. Graphic design in the United States has, over time, endeavored to distinguish itself from advertising, but such separation is far from complete and efforts toward separation have resulted in some undesirable consequences. On the one hand, graphic designers have, until recently, cut themselves off from the study of the social, political and psychological role of advertising and design in American culture (Drucker and McVarish 2009, Heller 1997). On the other hand, graphic designers have been seeking separation and selfdefinition through an outworn and misunderstood metaphor – the notion that graphic designers are ‘problem solvers’. The ‘problem solver’ metaphor emerged sometime in the mid-twentieth century as an effort to describe and legitimize graphic design as a ‘scientific’ practice. For the science of that time, problems were abstracted from the living world into the laboratory to eliminate (or at least minimize) the effects of uncontrollable variables. For graphic design, problems also were

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abstracted from the living world and defined only within the context of the client’s needs. While researchers working from a broader perspective of design (inclusive of industrial design, architecture, engineering, artificial intelligence, etc.) continue to define and refine ‘problem solving’ as a design methodology (Buchanan 1992, Cross 2007, Dorst 2006, Simon 1973; to name but a few), within the day-to-day practice of graphic design the problem-solver metaphor is used with far less precision. Terms such as ‘problem’ and ‘needs’ suggest a sense of necessity if not urgency that often seems disproportionate to the task at hand – i.e. updating a logo or developing a new package design (problem) so that company X can sell more Y (need). Furthermore, the narrow parameters of the client brief seldom take into account the ways in which media shape societal values and mediate communal transactions and communications. In her essay, ‘Mediating Messages’, Seval Yavuz concludes that advertising, and by association graphic design, ‘enables the continuity and transformation of society and culture because it helps shape human cognition, conduct, and interaction. It maintains and transforms socio-cultural reality by using and making meanings’ (2006: 288). This statement reiterates two important ideas. First, that graphic design functions within our communities in a manner similar to the paleolithic cave paintings within their respective communities – it helps people come to terms with social complexity while binding society together and reflecting shared values. Second, it suggests that while culture is technically human-made, it operates within our lives as if it were a more-than-human power. What is missing is the implication that such a function is overseen by a recognized individual responsible for the well-being of his or her community. In his essay, ‘There Is Such a Thing as Society’, Andrew Howard writes: Recent trends reveal a growth in intense pseudo-religious movements, in nationalist and neofascist ideas, in young people embracing directly oppositional lifestyles. Few would deny that at the center of this is a search for something to believe in, a vision of ourselves as empowered human beings able to act upon our needs and desires as we define them. (1997: 199) Howard characterizes issues of relationship, power and balance in terms of dialogue. Graphic design, as a form of social production, is capable of constructing a dialogue between community and culture, but at this point in time there ‘is not a dialogue on equal terms, if [there] is a dialogue at

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all’; rather there is ‘an intervention into our consciousness [within] a social context that . . . [we] cannot control’ (Howard 1997: 199). Again, what is missing is the mediating figure whose role is to maintain a balanced relationship between the community and the web of relationships within which the community is embedded. This figure could be a graphic designer fully aware that the choices he or she makes affect the well-being, shared values and spiritual growth of her community.

A Practice in Transition I’ve noticed a split between how creatives define what they do . . . Marc describes himself as a storyteller, so I wanted to know if he sees a difference, which he quickly explained this way: ‘If you take the whole problem solver idea, what you get is a story.’ He goes on to note that storytelling is giving something a voice. Making it relevant. Everyone loves stories; problem solving, on the other hand, starts with a negative – a problem. He sums it up, ‘A problem solver sounds like someone who fixes your tire’. — Angie Sailo interviews Marc English (2006)

There is evidence that movement toward such awareness is underway, primarily through the introduction of human-centered research methods to design practice. For graphic designers, conventional research is clientcentered; it includes defining the client’s needs and perspective, conducting aesthetic research to determine a visual voice and reliance upon the designer’s personal intuition and style. In contrast, human-centered research methods focus on the observation of people within the context of their everyday lives: learning how people interact with and relate to other people, environments, products, situations, etc.; learning how people make sense of their world (AIGA 2007). A human-centered approach to graphic design begins to reposition the designer’s priorities in significant ways. For example, story-telling alters direction and purpose. Within the discipline, the notion of graphic design as story-telling is commonly accepted, but the stories told are the client’s stories: stories that ‘relentlessly [offer] goods and services as the only solutions to our most deeply felt needs and wants’ (Soar 2006: 207). The international design consultancy IDEO, however, uses graphic design to tell stories to their clients: stories that highlight the practical needs of an audience; stories that reinforce insight and ideas grounded in hands-on research; stories that enable the designer to build relationships

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with clients and with communities through the shaping of meaningful content (Givechi, Groulx and Woollard 2006). A designer’s relationship with content also becomes a priority that shifts as design practice moves from a client-centered to a human-centered approach. From a humancentered standpoint it is no longer possible to give form to (a client’s) content without considering the ethical, social, political and environmental implications of that content.

Why a Shaman? It is the major function of . . . design to fit the true purpose of man and help him to perceive life as an integrated, balanced flow of activity in which his sensuous, emotional, and ideational levels coexist harmoniously . . . We must find those feelings in which and through which man’s bonds to nature and to man can again be experienced. — György Kepes (1999: 103–104)

We probably all can agree that human-centered design strategies that foster more socially aware graphic designers and more socially responsible design practice are a good thing. Within the context of real people with real needs and problems, the designer-as-problem-solver metaphor becomes functional. So, why pursue the designer-as-shaman? Because, the shaman metaphor explicitly recognizes both the practical and spiritual dimensions of humankind. But then, why should graphic design be concerned with the spiritual? A common theme in the literature cited here concerns the relationship between graphic design, culture and meaning. ‘Meaning is essential to human beings. We continually need to make sense of our outer and inner worlds, find meaning in our environment and in our relationships with other humans, and act according to that meaning’ (Capra 2002: 84–85). According to Ripinsky-Naxon (1993), the ‘shaman structures the perennial quest for purpose and metaphor. He formulates meanings, relevant on both the individual and the social levels, which afford ideological worth and ecological possibility to human existence’ (65). Within the stories they tell, graphic designers both use and transform existing shared meanings as they endeavor to communicate with an audience of people. The audience of people in turn uses and transforms experiences of these meanings into personal and shared beliefs, values, ideals, rules of behavior, and notions of

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self. Meaning is the media through which we connect and build relationships. Where we find meaning and what we find meaningful define who we are and determine how we act within the world. Given this context, meaning is spiritual. Because graphic design mediates an exchange of meaning between communities of people and between culture and community, graphic design is concerned with the spiritual.

A Return to Sources The role of culture in human societies is to provide a system of interlacing all the variable conditions of a people and a place in a way that supports harmonious living where all needs are met. The problem that seems to be arising within modernizing/globalizing places . . . is that choices and realizations enabled by design often distort people’s perceptions of what they need. Powerful technology and pervasive networks begin to lift society off its land into a conceptual bubble of fragmented information, virtual places, commodified identities and arbitrary purposes. What is occurring . . . throughout the world is the emergence of non-places that become social pockets into which flow designed products . . . —Peter Martin (2006: 264).

Thus far I have attempted to quickly illustrate a plausible ground for comparing the roles of graphic designer and shaman by describing two historical nodes of intersection: the paleolithic and the avant-garde. I have suggested that the graphic designer, like the shaman, uses the media of images, symbols and stories to perform her role, and that these media do more than ‘solve’ a client’s ‘problem’. I also have suggested that the graphic designer, like the shaman, could be a recognizable individual within a community that consciously acts as intermediary between her community and a more-than-human world: for the shaman a world of spirits and powers, for the graphic designer a world of unpredictable and often disruptive effects created by technological and social change. The shaman not only heals physical disease, she also acts to correct social, spiritual and ecological imbalance. Spiritual and cognitive capacities merge within the shaman, enabling her to cross boundaries between worlds of spirit and everyday reality (Schmidt 1987, Van Deusen 2001). Through story-telling and the manipulation of visual imagery – the creation and transformation of meanings – the shaman ‘shapes forceful metaphors from his people’s experiences in order to give them a handle for the numinous’

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(Schmidt 1987: 73). Ripinsky-Naxon (1993) maintains that ‘[s]hamanistic practices have not ceased, but by becoming modified, augmented, and transformed, . . . continue to exert the impact of their efficacies by manifesting themselves in different modes, through which many societies today aspire to attain some of their cognitive ends’ (207). Graphic design could function as a shamanistic practice if designers both recognized the spiritual component of their practice and expanded the sources of the meanings they mediate. In 1976, the MAN transForms exhibition marked the reopening of the Cooper-Hewitt as the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Design. Describing the exhibit, George Nelson writes: In this opening statement of the National Museum of Design, the visitor has to join the designers in their play with the non-rational, subconscious, primeval, religious elements. The exhibition is a return to sources . . . we are back in the world of the poet, mystic, child, seer, philosopher. (1976: 7) These sources are sources of meaning that, when expressed and experienced through design, become sources of communal values. As problemsolvers, even as human-centered problem-solvers, most graphic designers draw upon cultural, rational, human sources of meaning. But these sources of meaning are not those of the poet, mystic, child, seer, philosopher; they are not those of the shaman, and they are not deep enough. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully explore sources of meaning for the graphic designer, philosopher and ecologist David Abram suggests a place to begin. In his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram writes: By denying that birds and other animals have their own styles of speech, by insisting that the river has no real voice and that the ground itself is mute, we stifle our direct experience. We cut ourselves off from the deep meanings in many of our words, severing our language from that which supports and sustains it. We then wonder why we are often unable to communicate even among ourselves. (1996: 263) For the traditional shaman, the land, the plants and animals, ‘the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined’ (Abram 1996: 9) are deep sources of meaning: sources of meaning that can keep ‘human discourse from rigidifying’ (256) and can balance our fixation with our own cultural and technological creations.

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Current calls for sustainable design practices suggest that graphic designers must find a way to rediscover and mediate those meanings that connect human endeavors to place, to the land and to other living beings. We cannot continue to promote our expertise within the realms of business and culture while ignoring the impact our work has on our spiritual wellbeing. We must do our part to keep human discourse flexible, balanced and capable of crossing the boundaries between the cultural and the ecological, the virtual and the real. George Nelson concluded his description of the MAN transForms exhibition writing that ‘with this opening, the National Museum of Design could well become the spearhead of an international movement to bring design back to the spiritual dimension of Man’ (1976: 7). I would like to conclude here by suggesting that now is the time to bring the spiritual dimension back to graphic design.

Chapter 12

Media, Religion and Citizenship in the Mosque-Building Debates in Europe Sharif Islam

The Salman Rushdie controversy,1 l’affaire du foulard,2 the killing of Theo van Gogh,3 the Madrid and London bombings, the Danish cartoon controversy – these events have saturated print and electronic media coverage of Islam and Muslims in Europe for the past two decades. Despite the often simplistic representation of these events in the media, these controversies serve to produce and reinforce popular (mis)perceptions of Islam as a violent ideology shared by Muslims living in Europe in contrast with the European values of democracy and secularism (Fokas 2007). Missing from this media representation is the historical complexity of Islam in Europe and interrelatedness of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilizations. ‘Islam’ might have produced the killer of Theo van Gogh but that same ‘Islam’ gave us Ibn Rushd (or Averroes in its Latinized form, 1126–98), one of the most prominent Islamic philosophers and jurists born and raised in Cordoba, Spain, whose philosophical and legal works and commentaries on Aristotle influenced generations of Islamic, Catholic and Jewish scholars in different parts of Europe. Also missing from the public purview are the intricate realities and tremendous diversities of Muslims (both immigrants and citizens) currently living in Europe. For example, Muslims in Thrace, Greece, and Muslims in Stockholm, Sweden, face different challenges in different historical trajectories and political situations. This is to say that these varied histories and variations in the everyday lives of these populations must be taken into account to truly understand the recent controversies because these events are rooted in and related to a number of factors extending well beyond culture and religion. As there is no monolithic Islam, there is also no single understanding of Europe – even though it would seem that simplistic categorizations of both in the media have tremendous perhaps even universal appeal for various

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reasons. In dealing with the recent controversies, then, media plays a vital role not only in creating public opinion but also in establishing a balance between universal representations of Europe and Islam and the particularities and complexities of the everyday lives of Muslims living in Europe. This article deals with one such controversial issue – debates concerning mosque-building activities in Europe. I provide some recent examples from different media outlets and suggest that the issues surrounding mosques in Europe need to be understood within the broader context of media, citizenship and the public sphere. European society needs to acknowledge the public presence of ‘Islam’ – culturally, politically and, obviously, religiously; at the same time Muslim communities that are part of European society need to acknowledge the dynamics of European society. On the surface, the entities of Islam and Europe may seem to be at odds with each other. However, if we go beyond the headlines, it is clear that ideas and concepts are always contested and negotiated both by insiders and outsiders. The role of media is crucial in this respect as it can help us find a space to carry on a critical yet respectful dialogue about controversial issues.

Dreaming Spires vs. Wailing Minaret The mosque-building controversy has been at the forefront of coverage of Islam in Europe for the last several years. For example, a headline from the UK newspaper, The Telegraph reads ‘Religions Collide Under the Dreaming Spires’. The article reported: Senior members of the Oxford Central Mosque are seeking permission to broadcast a two-minute Adhan, the traditional Muslim call to prayer, through loud speakers in the minaret three times a day. However, rather than being welcomed as a sign of multi-culturalism, the proposal has outraged many East Oxford locals. There are dire warnings of ‘Islamic dictatorship’ and the destruction of Western culture. The ethos of Christianity is being undermined, some argue. If it starts here, they say, where will it end? Others just don’t want the noise disturbing them. The Bishop of Oxford has entered the fray appealing for calm. (Britten 2008) News reporting from another UK paper, the Independent, described the same incident in the following way: A small metal cross in Oxford’s Broad Street marks the spot where one of the worst acts of religious bigotry in English history was perpetrated: the

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burning of bishops Latimer and Ridley – the Oxford Martyrs – during the reign of Mary I, Bloody Mary, the last Catholic ruler of England. Four hundred and fifty years on, a row has now flared in the city, which threatens to pitch Muslims and a few Christian allies against an outraged coalition of both secular and non-secular figures. The issue in question is whether the cry of Muslims being summoned to prayer should be allowed to resound over Oxford’s dreaming spires. The Muslims say they simply want what they see as their right as British citizens to practise their faith. (McSmith 2008) This report stirred several contentious online postings such as this on the British National Party’s website entitled: ‘The Dreaming Spires or the Wailing Minaret? The Oxford Mosque Row Rolls On’: The row over the application by Muslims in Oxford to have the call to prayer sounded over the city of Oxford rolls on, and has sharply divided the city. The row blew up after the Oxford Central Mosque said it would apply to the city council for permission to broadcast the call to prayer from loudspeakers in the minaret in a newly built mosque, three times a day. The proposal has attracted so much opposition that it has prompted the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev John Pritchard, to issue a plea for tolerance, in one of his first public statements since taking up his new office. Later that year, a BBC report4 provided some more information regarding this story. The report interviewed Masood Ahmed, the Oxford mosque’s treasurer: He told the BBC: ‘All we did was just inquire what the planning applications involved, and that was all, there wasn’t any formal planning application whatsoever. ‘We have a very good relationship with our neighbours, and if any application was to be put in place, then we would have consulted our neighbours first before we went ahead.’ Since that report was filed, there has not been any follow-up reporting either in the Telegraph or in The Independent regarding this incident. This next example concerns the mega-mosque project near London. Tablighi Jamaat, a worldwide Islamic missionary group based in Pakistan with millions of worldwide followers, proposed the construction of the giant mosque project (that would hold 40,000 worshippers) next to the 2012

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Olympic complex in Newham, London. In protest, more than 250,000 people have petitioned on the website of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to abolish the plan (Perlez 2007). The mega-mosque plan was sent back to the drawing board to be scaled down. In Newham, where the mosque would stand, Councilman Alan Craig, the leader of the Christian Peoples’ Alliance party, started a one-man campaign against the mosque several years ago, which, for a while, gained national prominence. His website, www.megamosquenothanks.com, provides several reasons for opposing the building of the structure. First, Craig emphasized the size of the mosque, but later he shifted his focus to the mosque-project sponsor, Tablighi Jamaat. In response to such controversies, Tablighi Jamaat hired a public relations firm, which created a website about the mosque.5 The Muslim News, the ‘only independent monthly Muslim newspaper in the UK’,6 interviewed Alan Craig on March 30, 2007. That report posted on their online outlet states: Leading the campaign against the mosque is Alan Craig, a Newham councillor for the Christian People’s Alliance Party for Canning Town South ward. In an interview with The Muslim News, Craig voiced his objection on various grounds but it was primarily based on what he alleges is the group’s ‘radicalisation of youths’ and ‘Saudi Wahhabi’ funding. Craig described TJ [sic] ‘intolerant, separatist and isolationist on geographic term sect within Islam that radicalised young men like shoe bomber Richard Reed and Siddique Khan.’ Leading researcher into Muslims in Britain, Dr Sophie Gilliat-Ray, of Cardiff University’s Islam-UK Research Centre, dismissed allegations that TJ is an extremist group. Citing the work of renowned Islamic scholar, Yoginder Sikand, Dr Gilliat-Ray described TJ as a ‘loosely structured non-political, pietistic, Muslim missionary movement’ with the aim of ‘developing God consciousness, or taqwa among Muslims.’ Former CIA official Graham Fuller described TJ as a ‘peaceful and apolitical preaching-to-the-people movement,’ and according to Jamal J Ellias, Professor of Religion at Amherst College, ‘the Tablighis formally and actively believe that traveling to engage in missionary activity fully discharges any religious obligation to engage in Jihad.’ On a domestic level, Dr Gilliat-Ray questioned the ‘Saudi Wahhabi’ link insisting the majority of TJ’s British followers were from the Indian subcontinent. (Baurus 2007) Although The Muslim News was able to interview both Alan Craig and Muslim scholars, it is evident, at least from the news excerpts, that there

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was not much communication between Tablighi Jamat and the wider nonMuslim community. Despite several years of controversies surrounding this event questions still remain. Was Tablighi Jamat receiving funding from Saudi Arabia? Was there unanimous support from different concerns of the Muslim community regarding this project? Similar to Alan Craig’s endeavor another internet-based movement called SIOE (Stop Islamisation of Europe) also began to oppose several mosque projects across Europe. The group’s slogan is: ‘No more mosques in the European Union until we see churches, temples and synagogues in Mecca’ (http://sioe.wordpress.com/, retrieved December 1, 2007).7 On December 8, 2007, the group organized a demonstration opposing the ‘Grand Mosque’ in Marseille, France, which after much controversy and court deliberation, on November 12, 2007, was approved by that city’s mayor. This mosque is estimated to cost $13.5 million with a scheduled completion date of 2011. It will feature not only spaces for daily prayers but also a library, a bookstore a school and a restaurant open to the public.8 Through this brief glance at such reports on mosque building, we can surmise that media outlets are interested in the contentious aspects – the crying related to prayer and the disagreements that rise around the subject of mosque building. The news is often times presented in a dichotomous framework, which based on the above headlines I call Dreaming Spires vs. Wailing Minaret. On the Dreaming Spires side are thousands of years of Christian heritage and the advent of modern Europe; on the Wailing side are the recent immigrants – veiled and confined in the ghettos and mosques. These dichotomous representations when deployed in the media affect public opinion. Elizabeth Poole (2002) in her book shows that while some media outlets such as The Guardian strive to be inclusive of Islamic representations, most others such as The Times lean toward representations that identify various Muslim communities as backward, overtly religious and misogynist. This is not to say all such reports are falsehoods or misrepresentations; rather, the point is, that the media’s flattening of the differences within Islam contributes to ongoing misunderstandings of Islam and Muslims. Whether the media are reporting on the Rushdie Affair, on the bombings of the London and Madrid Undergrounds or on other events related to Islam, politics and culture, the representation of Islam and Muslims remain shadowy and suspect. Although, there hasn’t been any systematic analysis of the media content related to the mosque debates, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies in 2005 devoted an entire issue to this debate: Through a number of case-studies in which European Muslim groups have attempted to construct a mosque within their local neighbourhoods,

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the authors of this special issue were able to implement an investigation that analysed the visibility of Islam in urban space. The cities in which these studies were initially conducted include Toulouse, Marseilles, Berlin, Bradford, Deventer, Driebergen and Lodi. Based on the same methodology and theoretical assumptions enunciated above, this research was conducted simultaneously in all the aforementioned cities. (Cesari 2005: 1017) This special issue provided stories across Europe, mostly small- to medium-scale mosque projects where Muslims are negotiating with different community members, sometime peacefully, sometime not: Wherever the Islamicisation of urban space is an issue, it confronts the resistance of the community at large. Regardless of the nature of the Muslim community’s request, a refusal – implicit or explicit – from the local municipality or the surrounding community (neighbourhood associations) often constitutes the first step towards a dialogue. Certainly, this resistance is directly tied to the degree of acceptance Islam enjoys in national and local contexts. In countries where immigration has a long history, such as France, Great Britain or Belgium, immediate resistance to the existence of a mosque is gradually losing its force . . . resistance can also vary from one city to another within the same country. Two small cities, Deventer and Diebringen, resisted the creation of a mosque for months, whereas in Utrecht the process went much more smoothly. In France, several mosques have already been built (Lyon, Evry, Mantesla-Jolie); others are in the process of being built; everywhere these projects entail a process of negotiation between the municipality and the interested parties. (Cesari 2005: 1018) It is not surprising that controversies such as the mega mosque in London receive prominent and sensationalist media attention, but what is missing from the media picture is the ongoing negotiations and deliberations in which Muslims community members participate. Muslims are responding to the challenges they face over mosque building projects just as, at the same time, non-Muslim community members are negotiating with their understandings and concerns about the changing faces of European cities. These multiple actors and voices – both religious and secular – is what makes European civil society vibrant. Media should play a more proactive role in relaying stories that reflect how Muslims in various nations and cultures are working to resolve challenges concerning the construction of

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mosques as well as other issues related to the situating of Islam in multicultural societies. While global events dealing with Islam are important and must be covered by the media, local Muslim events, discourses and dialogues must also be taken into account to give an accurate understanding of the individualized and multifaceted dynamics at play in the local Muslim and non-Muslim community. Not all local Muslim-related events can be explained through global news stories of ‘Islam’.

Media, Religion and Citizenship Therefore, it is important to carefully situate the ongoing mosque debate and the role of media within the broader questions of European citizenship. Do 15 million Muslims belong to Europe? Are mosques part of European cityscapes and the public sphere? These questions serve as a starting point for debate. In Europe, unlike in Muslim-majority countries, mosques play more than just religious role – they are also cultural and social centers as well. The supporters of mosques and other religious organizations find themselves in an environment in which they not only must deal with internal conflicts in their communities but also respond to external pressures resulting, for example, from city council meetings, media reports or local protests. Like other organizations, mosques can support a vibrant civil society. Bartels and De Jong (2007) have studied four mosques and related organizations in the Slotervaart district in Amsterdam West. One of these mosques is El Oumma Islamia, a Moroccan organization. Besides offering daily prayers, this mosque also organizes activities such as Dutch and Arabic language lessons, homework assistance, sports activities and sewing lessons. These activities, sometimes organized by mosques, sometimes in conjunction with other organizations, form a crucial part of Muslim identity in Europe. Discussions about Islam and Muslims in Europe often times are analyzed within the framework of immigration and integration. However, if we seriously consider the presence of Islam in Europe and the question of citizenship, we have to find a framework beyond immigration and integration; we need to consider the wider dynamics of citizenship in Europe. Currently European Union (EU) citizenship is reserved for those who hold membership in one of the 27 EU member states. The notion of the EU has been championed as the celebration of cosmopolitan, post-national moment (Hansen 2009). However, Eurosceptics still abound (Lacroix 2009), and as Jürgen Habermas points out, ‘The divisive force of divergent

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national histories and historical experiences that traverses European territory like geological fault lines remains potent’ (Habermas 2006: 81). This is to say the notion of Europe as an overarching, universal and stable identity and entity, is also one fraught with tensions (Dainotto 2007, Nirenberg 2008). Coupled with that is the fact that the ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity of Muslims (among immigrants and citizens) makes it hard to pinpoint the elusive Muslim ummah or ‘Euro-Islam’ (Al-Azmeh 2007). Furthermore, there are growing trends of both anti-Semitism and antiMuslim sentiments across Europe (Bunzl 2005, Silverstein 2008) along with other forms of xenophobia (i.e. discrimination against Romas) and the rise of populist right-wing political parties, which have their own media presence (Statham and Koopmans 2009). These ‘fault lines’, to quote Habermas, point to a different notion of Europe where the ‘differences’ are not turned into xenophobic ‘otherness’, but brought forth into the public sphere for critical engagement. The incidents such as the killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by Islamic extremists and the bombings in London and Madrid are extremely disturbing to all Europeans, Muslim or a non-Muslim alike, because they stand as assaults to the basic values that are cherished by all Europeans. However, at the same time, mass disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities in Europe along with mass unemployment among such minorities poses serious and difficult challenges for all citizens and residents of Europe (Hansen 2009). Europe needs to critically reflect on these issues with the help of media organizations that understand the effort needed to support a truly vibrant public sphere – and that will require thoroughly researching and carefully representing the complexities of the multicultural society, and, in particular, the refusal to haphazardly juxtapose ‘Dreaming Spires’ and ‘Wailing Minarets’.

Chapter 13

The Blogosphere of Resistance: Anonymous Blogging as a Safe Haven for Challenging Religious Authority and Creating Dissident Communities Solomon Schimmel, Ph.D.1

Tight-knit religious communities have historically exercised a strong degree of social control over their members, preventing them from openly questioning, challenging, mocking or denying fundamental beliefs of the group. The development of the Internet, and more recently of blogs, has provided opportunities for some individuals living in these types of communities to voice their ideas, opinions and attitudes with a large measure of safe anonymity, and to create virtual communities of like-minded doubters and heretics. This development has created challenges, to varying degrees and in different ways, to forms and sites of traditional authority in these communities. Many of these skeptics-doubters-deniers have not come ‘out of the closet’, in terms of their positions of dissent, in their actual communities, for fear of the impact of doing so on themselves, or even more so, on their families, who might suffer painful social and psychological consequences. In fact, some of these individuals have not even confided their religious doubts to their own spouses or friends. The Internet and the blogosphere provide them with an opportunity to cathart their repressed frustrations at their religious community and its leaders, as well as to engage in stimulating and open discourse with others, which they cannot do in their homes, houses of worship, religious seminaries and real-life social environments. This phenomenon can have important consequences – for the bloggers themselves as well as for the religious leaders and the members of the communities in which the bloggers reside. These leaders and communities are being critiqued on the Internet and the blogosphere in ways that they have not experienced in the past when they enjoyed exclusive rights in the

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exercise of tight social control. Anonymous skeptical bloggers and participants in forums are to be found in many religious communities such as Mormon, Orthodox Jewish, Fundamentalist Christian and Traditional Muslim. These skeptics openly question, mock, or deny the ‘fundamentals’ of the faith communities in which they live and the behaviors of its adherents and leaders even as they continue to reside in those communities and to behave externally in accordance with their respective religious norms. I am particularly interested in the impact of this phenomenon on the blogger’s sense of personal and intellectual integrity, its influence in spreading and sowing religious skepticism and doubt, and in the reactions to it from the religious establishments being criticized. In this chapter, I focus on the world of Orthodox Judaism in the United States. Similar phenomena are taking place in blogs, forums, and discussion groups in Israel within its ultra-orthodox, haredi and hasidic communities. I have been following at least ten blogs over a period of two to three years, primarily as a silent observer but occasionally posting comments on some of them or submitting a guest post upon the invitation of the blog owner. My choice of blogs follows no systematic methodology but reflects my interest in the subject matter they discuss. The blogs I have followed are written almost exclusively by males (at least that is how the blog owners identify themselves). They are written by individuals socialized as orthodox Jews, ranging from ‘ultra-orthodox’ to modern orthodox, who have either left the orthodox communities and lifestyle in which they were raised, or who, though still living in such communities and conforming externally in word and deed to their norms, are deeply critical of them. Let me briefly summarize what the bloggers criticize, why they blog and the responses of those being criticized by the bloggers.

What Do the Bloggers Criticize? 1. Doctrines and dogmas that they consider to be false, foolish or unethical. 2. Obsessive preoccupation with the minutiae of ritual behavior. 3. What they perceive as the hypocrisy of their communities, including the leadership. 4. Violations of ethical and moral behavior that are ‘covered up’ or whitewashed by community leaders (e.g. sexual abuse of minors; illegal business practices).

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Why Do These Bloggers Blog? 1. To cathart deep feelings and to articulate thoughts that would otherwise have to be repressed because they cannot be spoken of openly. 2. To engage in conversation and deliberation with like-minded individuals because they cannot do so in their real lives. 3. To sincerely criticize their communities out of a desire to see their communities rectify their perceived deficiencies. 4. Entertainment. 5. Revenge or retaliation for perceived hurt or insult. 6. To destroy or weaken the community by exposing to other members of the community (especially its youth) the faults, presumed ‘evils’, and deficiencies of the community. 7. To help others feel comfortable with their doubts and to provide intellectual, emotional and social support.

How Do Those Criticized Respond? The Internet provides opportunities to establish virtual relationships with people from different cultures and backgrounds, which can undermine the mechanisms of social control and isolation from the general society which are so crucial to ultra-orthodox communities and to which they have dedicated extensive resources. Some respondents are laypersons who defend the faith, the community or its leaders in their own blogs or on the blogs of the critics. The religious authorities discourage or ban use of the Internet. For example, Rabbis may sermonize in synagogues and in schools about the evils and dangers of the Internet. The authorities will often attempt to restrict the usage of the Internet. These restrictions might include2: Prohibiting computers in private residences; mandating that a home computer, if deemed an absolute necessity, be situated in a ‘public’ space in the home so that its activity can be monitored; and installing filters and monitors in computers to prevent access to certain websites.

The Elements of a Community There are seven shared elements of a religious community. They are: language; literature; specific linguistic and cultural allusions; culture,

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history, and experiences; emotions, both positive and negative; interests; and interactions. I’ll address how each of these are manifested in the dissident blogs.

Shared Language Although the blogs I have observed and participated in for this study are written in English, there is also a substantial use of Hebrew and Aramaic (the languages of the Talmud, which is the central text of orthodox Judaism) and also of Yiddish, which is spoken by many members of the ultra-orthodox community.

Shared Literature Most of the bloggers I have observed have spent many years studying the classical Jewish texts such as Bible, Talmudic Literature, Jewish Philosophy, Hasidic literature and Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) in confessional, religious settings. As they evolved into doubters, they independently began to read secular literature such as philosophy and anthropology, and academic and scholarly studies of the religious texts of Judaism. These secular and academic approaches to Judaism can challenge traditional ways of studying, understanding and revering the sacred texts. The bloggers who hail from ultra-orthodox Jewish communities (unlike the bloggers from modern orthodox communities) did not receive a secular education, and hence are autodidacts. Nonetheless, it is quite impressive to see the level of knowledge and sophistication about critical religious studies that some of these people have attained given that they did not receive a college or even a decent high-school general education.

Shared Specific Linguistic and Cultural Allusions The language and mode of discourse on many of these blogs involves Talmudic-style dialectical argumentation and the use of and allusions to Talmudic terminology, expressions and content. Most of this discourse would not be understood by an ‘outsider’. The very pseudonyms used by some of these bloggers carry connotations that can only be appreciated by members of the orthodox community, such as elishabenavuya (the name of a prominent 2nd century C.E. rabbinic teacher who became a heretic); daas hedyot (the views and opinions of a layperson, a pun on the expression

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in the ultra-orthodox world of daas torah or daas gedolim, the authoritative views and opinions of the sanctified tradition, or of a great rabbinic teacher); mis-nagid (one who opposes); godolhador (the great leader of the generation, a term often used in the ultra-orthodox world to refer to a great scholar of Torah); and baal habos (householder or layperson, in contrast to a scholarly rabbi). Other names are in English and are transparent to English speakers such as Jewish Atheist, Unorthodox Jew, Hasidic Rebel and Fedup (with religion). Many bloggers are experts in Jewish law and literature and the level of discourse can be very advanced. In some cases, one would need to have studied in a yeshiva (a Jewish parochial school or a rabbinical seminary) at an advanced level to follow the arguments, allusions and references. The postings can also be strongly satirical, mocking and indignant in nature; irony and parody are important tools as well, for example, as when a traditional expression or teaching is used to undermine the very system that gave rise to it. In many of these blogs, supporters of orthodoxy engage the skeptics or heretics in argumentation and debate so that the blog becomes a space where both tradition and its critique are represented in a hard-hitting, virtual debating forum. Such a debate would be unthinkable in an ultra-orthodox school or seminary – it is highly unlikely that those institutions would ever offer a platform to skeptics or heretics through which to present their views about a fundamental belief or religious view. Orthodox, especially ultra-orthodox, educational institutions shun ideas that deviate from what the community considers to be within the boundaries of doctrinal legitimacy. Shared Culture, History and Experiences Many of the dissident bloggers have been deeply embedded from infancy in their ultra-orthodox communities. Because of this, they often grapple with the conundrum of critiquing a community to which they or members of their families are still tethered – physically or emotionally – even if the blogger is no longer so. Even as dissidents, they are linked, however, by the shared experiences of their socialization and participation in an orthodox milieu and environment, and these continue to link them. These shared experiences include, for example, unique dress codes for men and women that emphasize modesty and espouse values and attitudes that differ in many ways from those of secular society. Secularization is often denigrated – including attending college and enjoying general culture such as ‘decadent’ movies, theater or popular music.

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The dissident orthodox bloggers, we can safely assume, have shared experiences of their study as children in a yeshiva ketana, a parochial grade school. Older boys and young men go on to yeshiva gedola, a parochial high-school and post-high-school rabbinical seminary. There are the many shared rituals as well. Boys and men are expected to pray three times a day and to be actively involved in synagogue life. All members participate in numerous rites, rituals and ceremonies of the group, such as the celebration of a brit mila (the ritual of circumcision of boys at the age of eight days), bar mitzvahs, weddings, mourning practices and a host of holiday rituals throughout the year. These include observance of the weekly Sabbath with both its joys and its numerous restrictions on work and other activities; the high holydays Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement); and festivals such as Pesah (Passover) when bread and other products with leaven may not be consumed or used; and Sukkot (Tabernacles) when for eight days males (and sometimes females as well) take all their meals (and might even sleep) in booths built outdoors on balconies and porches, or in courtyards or lawns. Other central observances are strict adherence to the laws of kashrut (which prohibit the consumption of many foods and special preparation of those foods that are permitted to eat); strict separation of the sexes; and strict observance of taharat hamishpaha (laws forbidding any physical contact or sexual intimacy between a husband and a wife during the wife’s menstrual period and seven additional days after her period is over). There are hundreds, if not thousands, of details to all of these laws and rituals, which members of the ultra-orthodox community follow with scrupulosity. They master them from a young age, either by intensive study or by mimesis, by seeing and imitating how their parents lead an ultra-orthodox lifestyle. Members of an ultra-orthodox community also share their understanding of Jewish history from the biblical period to contemporary times (for example that they have a special relationship with God and a responsibility to lead lives of holiness). The horrific events of the Holocaust are especially important to their sense of identity and of obligation to be faithful to tradition. All of these combine to create an intense, close-knit community. Dissident bloggers share this sense of community among themselves, even as they break away from it, whether in thoughts, feelings or practices. Shared Emotions, Both Positive and Negative Many dissident bloggers are ambivalent in their feelings and attitudes toward orthodoxy – they may love aspects of orthodoxy even as they

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criticize it. Positive childhood and adult memories of family and synagogue life, and appreciation of many of orthodoxy’s teachings and values, generate nostalgia even though the fundamentals are rejected. Sometimes bloggers express deep animosity and hatred, derived from the perceived faults with orthodoxy as a cognitive belief system and the perception of the community as narrow minded and parochial. Often bloggers feel that they have been personally injured – emotionally, intellectually or educationally – by the orthodox community in which they were raised. The fact that some of these mixed, ambivalent emotions are shared by many of the bloggers creates an empathy among them which generates a feeling of their being members of a dissident community, even if only an online virtual one.

Shared Interests The bloggers share interests in issues related primarily to Orthodox beliefs, values and practices, but also to nonorthodox forms of Judaism and Jewish life and to religion in general.

Shared Interactions The interactions on the blogs such as that among bloggers or commentators are part of the very fabric of the blogs. Participants spar with and support and criticize one another. In some instances, they establish one-on-one friendships via email, even arranging to meet in person or in a small group setting. If they are members of ultra-orthodox communities they might have to do this clandestinely, however. I would like to show excerpts from several blogs in which individuals who feel ‘trapped’ in their communities express their feelings and articulate ‘heretical’ ideas. There are many bloggers who, while critiquing their communities, continue to live in them. This is not necessarily because they are fearful to leave. Bloggers may stay because despite the faults they find with the communities, they still prefer the overall lifestyle that those communities provide. In other words, the bloggers do not perceive themselves as ‘trapped’, but rather as voluntarily remaining where they are even though they are critical of certain aspects of their communities and can only express their criticisms online. For these individuals, the online prerogatives may even act to reinforce community stability, by providing a safe haven for catharsis, which may alleviate some of the greater tension

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that a critic might experience if he had no venue in which to express his frustrations and anger. I have been in email communication with several bloggers. I’ve posted a section of this chapter on one popular blog,3 asking the audience to reflect on the seven motives listed in this chapter for anonymous blogging and to indicate which were motives for them. Some of these people remain ‘in the closet’ about their skepticism whereas others have by now ‘come out’ in the sense that they have revealed their thoughts in the real world using their real names and, in some cases, giving up some or all orthodox religious observances even in public. Here was one response to my posting: I am a Jew surrounded by Jews and Jewish topics, things about which I’m very knowledgeable, but I can’t ever tell people what’s on my mind. It’s a huge weight on my spirit to never be able to be myself, to never speak aloud what’s in my head. I know a lot about a lot of things, and my nature is to lecture, to teach, to explain. However, in the Orthodox world even little things, tidbits really, are enough to make people suspicious of you. Simply knowing things that aren’t part of the typical yeshiva curriculum makes you stand out. . . . I have a lot of things about Judaism that I want to say and very few outlets to say them. I know Judaism better than I know anything other than my profession. What I want is to be able to talk about the things that interest me, the things I read about obsessively. And that I can’t do, because I’m surrounded by people who live in a fantasy world about these topics. I don’t know if you’d be amazed how hard it is to have a discussion about anything Jewish in a way that doesn’t somehow interact with apikorsus [heresy] . . . The fragile environment this creates deadens the intellectual climate, with its requirement for isolation, ignorance, and conformity (goals much more attainable than a usable defense of the Orthodox beliefs). It’s pure torture for anyone like myself who, as my friend put it, ‘knows things.’ That’s why I blogged, and that’s why I don’t blog anymore. I blogged to have a voice, and it worked. It worked so well that I made friends that I now converse with via email and in person, and that’s enough for me. It’s also a lot less stressful, since it’s less risky . . .4 ‘Littlefoxling’, who has his own blog describing phases of his developing skepticism about orthodoxy, also responded to my posting, but not to the

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specific questions I asked. First, here is an excerpt from his own writing on his blog: . . . Of course, I wasn’t about to start being mechalel shabbos bifarhesya [desecrating the Sabbath in public]. But, I started becoming publicly lax in some of the more public displays of Judaism. Also, I started sharing my views with some very close friends. Of course, I didn’t make a public speech about it. But, I had some conversations sharing various degrees of information with different friends. I was actually quite surprised by the reaction I got. A very small number of friends were shocked and horrified. But, the vast majority expressed approval, jealousy, admiration, agreement, respect, and empathy. Many said they too were in the closet atheists. Some said they were not atheists but they had very nonconventional views about Judaism. Others admitted that they too had some very serious questions about emunah [faith] and wished that they had the courage to make the leap towards atheism but were afraid to do so. Others said they were not atheists but admitted they were simply biased and admired my honesty . . . In response to my posting ‘littlefoxling’ wrote: Blogging has greatly decreased my faith for many reasons, including: 1. Hearing new arguments against religion 2. Social support structure 3. Blogging is a universal enterprise which exposed me to people of all different backgrounds and theologies. Once I realized that there are millions of contradictory religions all with the same basic arguments, they all ended up looking pretty stupid. 4. Writing things up allows you to have more mental clarity. It’s hard to keep a complicated logical argument in your head. Our brains just aren’t wired for that. You need to either talk it through with someone, or write it up. Interestingly, while I never would have dreamt of coming out of the closet when I started blogging, blogging gave me the courage to come out of the closet to a decent number of friends, only to discover that many of them agreed with me all along. The result of all of the above was a boon to my intellectual integrity. On some level, I was aware of the stupidity of religion before I started

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blogging, but I had suppressed it out of fear. This made me feel like an emasculated scaredy cat. Getting it all out was a great emotional relief. Another blogger, ‘Lubab No More’5 (alluding to his having at one time been an adherent of the Hasidic group Chabad, or Lubabitch) wrote that with respect to catharsis: ‘Yes, yes, a thousand times yes’. With respect to my question about using blogging as revenge, he replied: ‘Revenge is certainly not something I consciously think about when blogging. But that said, I do think there is a subconscious element of revenge involved’. As far as educating the community, ‘I hope my blogging exposes members of the community to the faults of the religion but I don’t blog specifically to achieve this goal’. He also added an eighth motive to the seven that I had listed: To ask questions and seek answers regarding Orthodox Judaism. I’m certainly very disappointed that Orthodox Judaism doesn’t hold up to what I was taught and often I blog in the hope that some intelligent person will comment and give a thoughtful coherent answer to whatever question or critique is bothering me. Another respondent responded to my questions and also added a motive: All of the above [Author Note: i.e. the seven motives I had suggested] for me, plus one more. Probably THE most important reason: To help me heal psychologically, from the immense damage Orthodox Judaism has reaped upon my psyche for my entire life.6 Another very thoughtful and widely read blogger, ‘The Hedyot’, responded as follows to each of my seven suggested motives7: 1. To cathart deep feelings and to articulate thoughts that would otherwise have to be repressed because they cannot be spoken of openly. Heydot replied, ‘At one point that [i.e. catharsis] was definitely part of it. It becomes less a factor the more you manage to escape the community’. 2. To engage in conversation and deliberation with likeminded individuals because they cannot do so in their real lives. Heydot replied, ‘Somewhat a motivation. I had people privately who I could discuss issues with, so this wasn’t too significant for me’.

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3. To sincerely criticize their communities out of a desire to see their communities rectify their perceived deficiencies. Heydot said, ‘This truly mattered to me. It bothers me when I see frum [very orthodox] people ruining what could be a meaningful experience’. 4. Entertainment. Heydot said, ‘Not really a factor at all’. 5. Revenge or retaliation against their community for perceived hurt or insult. Heydot replied, ‘I wouldn’t term it revenge, but there is definitely a sense of schadenfreude (taking pleasure in someone’s misfortune) when one can point out the ills and flaws of the community, which has always claimed to be so perfect’. 6. To destroy or weaken the community by exposing to other members of the community (especially its youth) the faults, presumed ‘evils’, and deficiencies of the community. Heydot said, ‘This is too broad. I only wish to change the aspects of the community which I feel are truly unhealthy and damaging. The community as a whole I would not want to uproot. It does much good, and serves the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and social needs of so many and I have no desire to see it totally turned upside down. I just want it to change so that those who don’t find it suitable for their needs can be free to choose another path’. 7. To help others feel comfortable with their doubts, and to provide intellectual, emotional and social support. Heydot said, ‘To whatever degree I can accomplish this, I am glad to do so, but I don’t think it’s a real motivation behind my writing’.

Conclusion My chapter has only touched the surface of the dissident Orthodox, and ex-Orthodox Jewish blogosphere, the reactions to the blogging phenomenon on by the members and leadership of the orthodox communities and institutions being criticized, and the impact of blogging on the bloggers and on those who read and comment on the blogs. I hope my chapter will be useful to others who would like to study more thoroughly and systematically the consequences of blogging and the Internet in general for religious skepticism and the creation of virtual communities of dissidents, not only with respect to Jews and Judaism, but for Christians, Muslims and Mormons as well, with respect to their faiths.

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Chapter 14

Media Representation and the Cultivation of Social Consciousness: Comparing the Discourses of Climate Change and Animal Rights Lionel Wee, Ph.D.

Introduction In October 2007, Al Gore, former vice-president of the United States of America, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in drawing attention to the issue of global warming. Just two months earlier Michael Vick, the star quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, had pleaded guilty to charges of being involved with dogfighting. There were strong expectations that the media attention given to Gore and Vick would help create for a North American public, at the very least, if not for a broader global one, further awareness of and support for the issues of climate change and animal rights. These expectations are captured by the following media excerpts: Excerpt 1: In Washington, political figures said Gore’s Nobel Prize could . . . help spur critical legislation on global warming (Carla Marinucci and Joe Garofoli, SF Gate, October 13, 2007). Excerpt 2: The combination of Vick’s celebrity and the grotesque details of the grand jury report have created a new stage for crusaders against cruelty to animals . . . (Gwen Knapp, SF Gate, July 19, 2007). This makes it useful to compare how the discourses of climate change and animal rights have been represented in the media, and how such representations contribute to the development of social consciousness. In this chapter, then, by drawing on The New York Times (NYT)1, I discuss articles describing Gore’s award and Vick’s conviction, to show how the issues of climate change and animal rights are represented therein. I then examine articles dated about five months after these events, to see if the expectations in the two media excerpts above may have been fulfilled.

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Finally, I look at articles dated about five months prior to both the award and the conviction, to see how these issues are represented independently of Gore’s and Vick’s involvement. Before looking at the articles, however, it is useful to first understand how the stance adopted by the media crucially figures in any cultivation of social consciousness.

Social Consciousness and Stance in the Media Social consciousness is predicated upon the creation of identity links, such that the public comes to identify with the values and agenda of a particular group. This occurs in three ways, through integration, obligation and import. For social activists, such identification and support is facilitated to the extent that the general public (i) sees itself as belonging to the same community as the activists rather than distinct from it (integration); (ii) accepts that the values of these activists are a matter of public concern rather than personal choice (obligation); and (iii) treats the agenda of these activists with seriousness rather than frivolity (import). These three dimensions are not unrelated, since the more the public sees itself and the activists as belonging to the same community (integration), the more likely it will treat the associated values as requiring joint social action (obligation), meriting careful and urgent deliberation (import). Social activists have long realized that the media can play an influential role in cultivating social consciousness by generating publicity and sympathy for various causes. Despite this, the stance adopted by the news media is something that social activists have relatively little control over. And it is inevitably the case that some kind of stance–defined as an actor’s positioning of her (dis-)alignment with an interactional other (Du Bois 2007: 163) – is always conveyed, even though ‘the news story is generally assumed to have a predominantly information-imparting function’ (Khalil 2006: 336, citing Werlich 1976). It therefore becomes necessary to focus on the kinds of stances that are conveyed in the news, and how these contribute to the cultivation of social consciousness. And here, it is critical to recognize the interaction among multiple stances and distinguish three levels of discourse positioning (Bamberg 1997: 337): Level 1 looks at the reported event: how the characters in the news story are positioned, as protagonists or antagonists, as perpetrators or victims, etc. „ Level 2 looks at the reporting event: how the reporter positions herself in relation to the story and to the audience, whether the reporter is an „

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explicit presence or whether her subjectivity is made invisible, as would be in cases of straight reporting. „ Level 3 looks at how the reporter and her report are positioned beyond the reporting event. For example, a reporter writing a specific article presents stances at Levels 1and 2, but the identity of the reporter qua sports or environment reporter extends beyond the individual article. This Level 3 stance can influence how the claims and events in the other two levels are evaluated as being credible or relevant to different categories of readerships. The consistency of stances across these three levels can be consequential for the cultivation of social consciousness, because it can contribute to ‘stance accretion’ (Ochs 1992), where particular discourses coalesce and acquire the status of naturalized perspectives that become difficult to challenge.

Gore Wins Nobel Prize; Vick is Convicted Climate-change activists have had difficulty convincing skeptics that the issue is real and urgent. A NYT article entitled ‘Gore shares Peace Prize for climate change work’ (Walter Gibbs and Sarah Lyall, October 13, 2007) acknowledges this skepticism. But the article presents quotes from Gore and the Nobel Committee that presuppose the reality of climate change (Level 1). When the article does refer to the more skeptical position, this is described using the past tense without any direct quotes from skeptics. Skepticism regarding the phenomenon, while noted, is treated as a nonissue. Since these are all presented as ‘pure facts’ unfettered by the intrusion of the journalist’s own subjectivity, the Level 1 stance (that climate-change activists have prevailed over their skeptics, and that the phenomenon is unquestionably real) is allowed to emerge fully at Level 2. Relevant excerpts are shown below. The Nobel Committee’s statement (excerpt 3) presupposes the reality of climate change, as seen in the phrase ‘to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change’, and the prize itself is described as a ‘validation’ (excerpt 4). The report also describes skeptics as ‘those who disputed the scientific case for a human role in climate change’ (excerpt 4). Excerpt 3: The Nobel Committee praised both [Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] ‘for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change’.

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Excerpt 4: The award was also a validation for the United Nations panel, which in its early days was vilified by those who disputed the scientific case for a human role in climate change. Coming now to Vick’s conviction, the sentencing was reported in a NYT article entitled ‘Vick receives 23 months and a lecture’ (Juliet Macur, December 11, 2007). Unlike climate change, which has had to contend with skeptics, few actually deny the cruelty of dogfighting. As the article makes clear, the sentencing judge, Hudson, as well as activists attending the trial were in agreement as to its ‘inhumane’ nature (excerpt 5). As with the climate-change article, the stance at Level 1 – that Vick’s behavior was indeed repugnant and cruel – is supported at Level 2, in this case, by the use of a direct quote that is also minimally modulated by the subjectivity of the reporter, who remains invisible in allowing the facts to ‘speak for themselves’. Excerpt 5: ‘You were instrumental in facilitating, putting together, organizing and funding this cruel and inhumane sporting activity,’ Hudson told Vick in a courtroom packed with animal-rights activists and Vick’s family and fans. However, there is a problem with focus, since the report also discusses the impact of Vick’s conviction on his career (excerpt 6), and the possibility of his redemption (excerpt 7). Excerpt 6: Based on federal guidelines for good behavior, Vick’s sentence could end as early as the summer of 2009, meaning he may be able to play that season. Excerpt 7: The Falcons’ owner, Arthur Blank, said the sentencing was only one step in Vick’s legal journey . . . ‘We sincerely hope that Michael will use this time to continue to focus his efforts on making positive changes in his life, and we wish him well in that regard.’ Given Vick’s status as a star quarterback, these other issues are relevant to the news report since many readers would have been following the story not because of a concern with animal cruelty but because they were football fans. But these other issues detract from the focus on animal rights, since the report is on balance much more about Vick than about the dogs who have suffered.

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To summarize, in these two articles, statements supportive of climate change and animal rights are quoted with little or no challenge. Opposing positions are either minimized or unrepresented. The difference is that the focus in the case of Vick’s conviction is diffused because the report also covers ancillary (at least from the perspective of promoting animal rights) issues arising from his celebrity. Stance accretion is weakened because of the article’s multiple foci. This indicates that even if stances at one level were allowed to ‘percolate’ onto some other level, the presence of multiple foci is a distraction that can diffuse the impact of particular stances. The effect of foci on stance accretion is actually already signaled outside of the actual articles themselves, by their placement in different sections of NYT. The Gore article appears in the World section whereas the Vick article appears in the Pro Football section. The placements influence stance accretion because the rubric World is sufficiently schematic so that apart from indicating that the articles therein have a global relevance (which works in favor of the climate-change activists), there is no other constraint placed upon the theme of its contents and how readers are expected to orient themselves. In contrast, the rubric Pro Football highlights that articles therein are, first and foremost, written with a sports theme and hence, a sports-oriented readership in mind. This issue of placement is a Level 3 stance that reflects how NYT thinks the reported events are best broadly categorized according to likely readership expectations even before their encounter with specific articles.

Approximately Five Months Later About five months after Gore was awarded the Nobel Prize, NYT reported on a meeting in Bangkok to address climate change (‘Talks begin on new international climate treaty’, Thomas Fuller, April 1, 2008). Unlike the first article that appeared in the World section of NYT, this second article appeared in the Asia Pacific section. It is fair to suggest that NYT’s choice of placement is motivated by the location of the meeting rather any assumption that the issue of climate change has diminished in importance (in the sense of having a regional as opposed to global relevance). This is because the issue of climate change is once again presented as an urgent global issue. The report reproduces a statement from Angela Anderson, director of a global warming program, who expresses optimism that the election of

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a new American president will mean more serious American participation in combating climate change (excerpt 8). Excerpt 8: ‘We have three presidential candidates, all of whom have said they will re-engage in climate negotiations,’ Ms. Anderson said. ‘There will definitely be a new voice in the U.S.’. Like the previous section, the reporting stance is supportive of climate change activists, because Anderson’s statement at Level 1 is presented with little or no Level 2 qualification. Where Level 2 qualification does occur, the report supports Anderson’s optimism by observing that the American public ‘appears more aware of the issue of global warming than at the start of the Bush administration’ (excerpt 9). This observation is immediately followed by a description of a new attempt by Gore to persuade Americans to lobby for reductions in greenhouse emissions. While no overt coherence marker links the two sentences, their conjunction suggests that the increased public awareness referred to in the first sentence can be expected to gain greater momentum with the event described in the second sentence. Excerpt 9: The American public also appears more aware of the issue of global warming than at the start of the Bush administration. Former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental advocacy, is starting a $300 million campaign this week to encourage Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse emissions. In the case of Michael Vick, consider the NYT article: ‘Vick case exposes rift among animal-rights advocates’ (William C. Rhoden, March 12, 2008). Like the Vick article in the previous section, this also appears in the Pro Football section. The focus, however, is on a dispute among animal-rights activists over the treatment of rescued fighting dogs (excerpt 10). Excerpt 10: But there remains a widening divide still simmering within the animal-rights community over the treatment of abused, high-risk animals . . . PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] generally advocates euthanizing rescued fighting dogs, while other groups lean toward rehabilitation. Excerpt 11: Can these groups ever work together? This description of the dispute is highly consequential for stance accretion. While the report is sympathetic to the issue of animal rights, it positions the

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debate over euthanization versus rehabilitation as the concern of a community that is distinct from the readership. This Level 2 positioning (‘these groups’) presumes the validity of the ‘us’ (=reporter and readership) and ‘them’ (animal-rights activists) distinction. The positioning of animal-rights activists as a distinct community further allows the report to adopt a somewhat irreverent tone that arguably trivializes the debate. Thus, the debate itself is described as a matter of ‘sniping’ – a verb that provides an uncomplimentary description of the manner of argumentation (excerpt 12). Such trivialization also implies that animal-rights activists tend to take things too seriously, and this implication gathers force in excerpt 13, where the use of ‘demonized’ suggests that the negative public portrayal of Vick is an exaggeration. Excerpt 12: The folks at Best Friends Animal Society argued that the fighting dogs had been forced to lead brutal lives and should not receive death sentences. The court agreed with Best Friends, and that’s when the sniping really began. Excerpt 13: Vick, demonized by PETA for more than a year, could become the bridge in this divide. Once the possibility that Vick himself might be a victim is raised, the report then segues into a description of Vick’s own subjectivity: his concern that ‘people know that he does care about what he did’ (excerpt 14). Excerpt 14: Newkirk [founder of PETA] struck up a relationship with Vick . . . when he visited PETA headquarters in Norfolk. Vick impressed her . . . ‘He came here and he was very respectful . . . and he wants people to know that he does care about what he did and we talked about that’. The discussion about Vick’s sincerity leads the article to later attempt a Level 2-resolution of the initial debate about the animals’ future by recasting the issue as one that is not really about animals, but instead, about humanity (‘If we, as a society, . . . how can we ever hope to truly care for one another?’) (excerpt 15). In so doing, the article effectively changes the focus of animal rights away from animals toward humans. This Level 2 perspective is conveyed by way of a sudden and overt intrusion of the reporter’s own subjectivity (otherwise absent throughout the report) that explicitly marginalizes the abused dogs when he confesses that they were ‘background music to my perspective on the Vick case’.

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Excerpt 15: . . . I must confess that the dogs were often background music to my perspective on the Vick case . . . But this is not really a dogfighting issue or an animal-rights issue or an overpopulation issue. This is a caring issue: If we, as a society, cannot treat the defenseless with kindness, how can we ever hope to truly care for one another? The articles examined in this section largely continue the patterns previously observed. They are generally sympathetic to climate change and animal rights. But the presentation of animal rights still competes with a focus on Vick himself, which undermines the dimension of import. And because animal-rights activists are presented as constituting a group that is distinct from the readership, this also works against the dimension of integration. Readers are instead positioned as interested outsiders or distant observers of a community that is occasionally described in a trivializing tone, which does nothing for the dimension of obligation either.

Approximately Five Months Before The following are extracts from an article entitled ‘Victim of climate change, a town seeks a lifeline’ (William Yardley, May 27, 2007). The title sets out the Level 1-stance of the article: by characterizing the town, Newtok, as a ‘victim of climate change’, the article simultaneously assumes that climate change is a given and construes it as an active agent. Because the journalist’s subjectivity remains invisible, this stance emerges unscathed at Level 2. This article, placed in the U.S. section of NYT, is part of a NYT series investigating how climate change is affecting American life. This is a Level 3-stance – transcending the specific stances adopted by individual articles–indicating that as a newspaper institution, NYT is committed to the reality of climate change. In excerpts 16 and 17, the Level 1-stance signaled in the article’s title is maintained. Climate change continues to be presented as an active agent and the town an undergoer forced to deal with its effects. Thus, the town has to ‘steel itself . . . to face the frontier of climate change’ (excerpt 16), it is ‘yielding to warming air temperatures . . .’ and ‘storms pound away at the shoreline’ (excerpt 17). Excerpt 16: . . . this subarctic outpost steels itself once again to face the frontier of climate change.

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Excerpt 17: The permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which Newtok and so many other Native Alaskan villages rest, is melting, yielding to warming air temperatures and a warming ocean. Sea ice that would normally protect coastal villages is forming later in the year, allowing fall storms to pound away at the shoreline. Finally, pronoun choice here indexes a more inclusive identity that it did with the Vick article in the preceding section, where pronoun choice served to mark animal-rights activists as a separate community. The present article presents a Level 1 quote from a climate scientist (allowed to emerge unqualified at Level 2), whose use of ‘we’ clearly includes the readership (excerpt 18). Excerpt 18: ‘We haven’t sat down as a society and said, “How are we going to adapt to this?” ’ said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University. Having seen how climate change is represented independently of Gore’s involvement, we now look at how the issue of animal rights is discussed in the absence of any reference to Vick. The following are extracts from a NYT article entitled ‘Bringing moos and oinks into the food debate’ (Kim Severson, July 25, 2007), which appears in the section Dining & Wine. This is a lifestyle section rather than investigative or hard news, and the title of the article itself reflects the relatively light-hearted nature of the section, with animal vocalizations ‘moos’ and ‘oinks’ included as part of a debate otherwise dominated by human language. This playful tone continues in the article proper, with the characterization of sympathetic celebrities as having traded ‘steak tartare’ for ‘vegetable carpaccio’ (excerpt 19). Since it is not necessarily true that some celebrity has literally given up steak tartare for vegetable carpaccio, the choice of these dishes is simply metonymic of the act of becoming a vegetarian. This metonym is a Level 2-trope that contributes again to the light-hearted tone of the piece. Excerpt 19: They have also learned to harness the power of celebrity in a tabloid culture, courting as spokespeople anyone famous who might have recently put down steak tartare in favor of vegetable carpaccio. The article seeks to describe the growing success of animal-rights activists in influencing the food choices of Americans. Consistent with the stances

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observed in the Vick article in the preceding section, animal rights is presented as the concern of a specific group of individuals from whom the readership remains distinct. Thus, when animal-rights activists are presented as having greater control over ‘America’s dinner table’ (20), the latter is a category from which the activists themselves are excluded and to which the readers of Dining & Wine presumably belong. This positioning of animal-rights activists as a separate community continues throughout the article. Excerpt 21 refers to the activists as ‘believers’, thus framing them as a quasi-religious and evangelical group that is out to win converts. Excerpt 20: All these developments reflect the maturation and sophistication . . . of animal activists who have more control over America’s dinner table than ever before. Excerpt 21: But all of these believers have learned that with less stridency comes more respect and influence in food politics. Thus, despite its humorous tone, the article goes even further than the preceding Vick article: it not only treats the activists as belonging to a distinct community, but suggests that their values and goals are sufficiently different from that of ordinary Americans as to require covertly manipulative techniques of persuasion.

Concluding Discussion Having compared the ways in which climate change and animal rights are represented, it seems clear that the former fares better on the dimensions of integration, obligation and import. Level 1 phrases such as ‘planetary emergency’ (excerpt 4), ‘worldwide crisis’ (excerpt 5) or ‘we . . . as a society’ (excerpt 18) all position climate change as an issue that is of immediate concern to everyone. And as we have seen, such Level 1 stances are supported at Levels 2 and 3 so that this perspective on climate change is not restricted to the activists themselves, but is echoed by the reporting media. In contrast, animal rights as an issue fares less well on the three same dimensions. While Level 1 terms such as ‘cruel and inhumane’ (excerpt 9), ‘abused’ (excerpt 18), ‘brutal’ (excerpt 21) are unchallenged at Levels 2 and 3, these are descriptors that highlight the experiences of the affected animals without necessarily implying any obligation on behalf of the public regarding the kinds of social action that ought to follow. Furthermore, in the Vick articles, coverage of how the animals were treated and their

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potential for rehabilitation had to compete with discussions of Vick’s own attempts at redemption, which works against the dimension of import. Also, the Level 2 tendency to position animal-rights activists as a community distinct from the readership does nothing to cultivate integration. And, integration is even less likely to occur when the community is also represented as eccentric. These different fortunes enjoyed by climate change and animal rights vis-à-vis integration, obligation and import find resonance in various other activities and events. For example, travel guidebooks (including Fodor’s and Lonely Planet) have begun integrating concepts of ecotourism and sustainability into their publications – an acknowledgment that many travelers are increasingly concerned about the effects of their carbon footprints on the planet. The increasingly common use of these italicized terms in both specialized and lay vocabulary is testament to how effectively the issue of climate change is now part of a general social consciousness. In contrast, animal-rights activists have initiated television programs (e.g. a short-lived U.S. cable show featuring the Vegan Vixens), protests against whale hunting, and stunts such as tossing fake blood onto fur-wearing models/celebrities. Such activities, arguably, only serve to reinforce the representation that these activists are engaged in a lifestyle that is some distance from the concerns of more conventional citizens.

Chapter 15

Environmental Crisis and Religious Rhetoric in Is God Green? Jen Schneider, Ph.D.

Introduction In the 2006 PBS documentary Is God Green?, Bill Moyers presents the emergence of two key contemporary trends in American political and religious life. The first is the growing popularity of an environmental movement within Christian evangelicalism called ‘Creation Care’. Motivated by biblical passages that suggest humans have been ‘commissioned’ as stewards to care for the earth, or ‘God’s Body’, Creation Care emerged in the late 1970s, gained momentum in the 1990s, and now ‘constitutes the “fastest-growing form of Christian ministry” ’, according to the evangelical publication Christianity Today (Frame 1996: 84, see also Psaros 2006: 20–32). Is God Green? highlights what it sees as the emerging popularity of Creation Care, arguing that evangelicals are undergoing a ‘conversion to green’. Moyers also uses Is God Green? to argue that the emergence of Creation Care in evangelical culture poses a threat to religious conservatives, who depend heavily on the evangelical vote to win elections.1 He argues that evangelicals who are grappling with the responsibility of environmental stewardship may be turned off by the Republican Party’s rather dismal record on environmental issues, and particularly on climate change. The film tells the story of former National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) leader Richard Cizik, and his efforts to release a statement with the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for action on the issue. In this chapter, I aim to contextualize Moyers’s claims about evangelicals and Creation Care. I argue that, in this film and in other texts, Moyers uses ‘god-talk’2 to make an argument on behalf of Creation Care, invoking an environmental justice frame that should theoretically resonate with many evangelical and mainline Christians. I rely on communication scholar

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Matthew Nisbet’s definition of framing, which refers to ‘interpretive storylines that set a specific train of thought in motion, communicating why an issue might be a problem, who or what might be responsible for it, and what should be done about it’ (Nisbet 2009a). The question considered in this chapter is whether Moyers’s framing of environmental issues as fundamentally Christian is effective in Is God Green? I argue that the use of such framing – which often includes the use of ‘god-talk’ and ‘signaling’ (Domke and Coe 2008) – is potentially risky and invites multiple and perhaps contradictory readings, both by evangelical viewers and others, because of Moyers’s commitments to progressive politics on the left. As such, I don’t believe he can function as a believable or effective spokesperson for environmental issues to evangelical viewers. Proper framing of environmental issues – and especially of climate change – is not enough when it comes to communicating with evangelical Christians. The message itself must also be delivered by trusted leaders or members of the evangelical movement.

Is God Green? and ‘God-Talk’: Moyers on Environmental Rhetoric In addition to a decades-long career spent working in progressive politics,3 hosting a number of PBS investigative news programs, producing documentaries and writing books, Bill Moyers is also known for advocating on behalf of the role of independent, investigative journalism in democracy. Many of his thoughts on the topic are captured in his book Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times (2005) and have been backed by the force of his long-held position as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, a foundation that has historically funded progressive democratic and environmental organizations (Schumann Center for Media and Democracy 2009).4 He has made a number of public speeches on the topic, one of which is significant for this chapter: a 2005 speech Moyers delivered to the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) called ‘A Question for Journalists: How Do We Cover Penguins and the Politics of Denial?’ (Moyers 2005a).5 In the SEJ speech, Moyers argued that environmental journalists needed to find a way to reach broader, more diverse audiences with their reporting, especially the ‘conservative Christian audience’: ‘There is a market here for journalists who are hungry for new readers. The conservative Christian audience is some fifty million readers strong. But to reach them, we have to understand something of

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their belief systems’ (Moyers 2005a: 7). Moyers went on to recommend that environmental journalists learn to ‘speak the language of these evangelicals’: . . . fundamentalists and Pentecostals typically speak and think in a different language. Theirs is a poetic and metaphorical language: a speech that is anchored in the truth of the Bible as they read it. Their moral actions are guided not by the newest IPCC report but by the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. (Moyers 2005a: 8) Moyers delivered the SEJ speech not long after President George W. Bush won reelection, believed to have been carried to a ‘political mandate’ on the shoulders of a Republican, and substantially evangelical, base. In this speech, Moyers is clearly grappling with how to reach this evangelical group with environmental messages, arguing that, if environmental stories could be written using more god-talk in a particularly Christian sense, evangelicals would be more likely to care about environmental crises, such as climate change. In the 2006 documentary Is God Green?, Moyers follows his own advice, using god-talk to tell the story of the Creation Care movement in evangelical culture. Is God Green? portrays multiple Christian congregations and leaders scattered across the country who have discovered a biblical mandate to ‘care for God’s creation’. The film is deeply inflected with ‘spiritual language’ and the ‘language of faith’, (Moyers’s terms from the SEJ speech) both of which could also be called god-talk or ‘signaling’. Communication scholars Domke and Coe note that American evangelicals have become acutely cued in to this signaling, which is a way that political leaders ‘speak the language of the faithful’ by using direct references to God or professions of faith. They write that the use of god-talk or signaling has been central to a larger ‘God Strategy’, which politicians use to speak to and galvanize Christian majorities (Domke and Coe 2008: 19). Such signaling is a way of saying to evangelicals, ‘We don’t exclude you . . . I’m not going to judge you, or deny you, just because of your religion’ (qtd. in Domke and Coe 2008: 32). Given Moyers’s advice to environmental journalists regarding god-talk, it makes sense that Moyers introduces Is God Green? by saying, ‘[Evangelicals] are people who take their faith seriously. Their opinions and beliefs matter’. We may read this as a form of signaling to evangelicals that they are neither ‘judged’ nor ‘denied’, and, in fact, Is God Green? is a basically positive portrayal of everyday evangelicals with ‘green’ sensibilities.

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In her work on the greening of evangelical Christianity, Marina Psaros notes that evangelicals are especially sensitive to the language of persecution, and welcome signaling that acknowledges it: ‘Not only does it [the persecution narrative] evoke certain images of perseverance and loyalty from Christian history; but, since the Scopes trial of the 1920s, evangelicals had been smarting from what they perceived as public humiliation and ridicule about their religious beliefs’ (Psaros 2006: 16). Moyers skillfully handles this sensitivity in his opening remarks when he argues evangelicals are to be taken seriously. There are many examples of such signaling throughout the hour-long program. For example, Moyers always establishes the Christian credentials of those featured in the film, making sure to introduce them as devoted to their church and family, as politically conservative on issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and generally as salt-of-the-earth, hardworking, patriotic Americans. He does not question biblical authority on environmental or scientific issues, but in fact emphasizes it repeatedly. He never refers to Creation Care practitioners as ‘environmentalists’ but only as ‘stewards’ or as ‘green’. Christianity Today explains that ‘stewardship’ is more palatable than ‘environmentalism’ to evangelicals because the latter is seen as ‘a secular environmental movement laden with humanistic and pantheistic views’ (Frame 1996: 83, see also Psaros 2006: 27). Moyers is clearly aware of this sensitivity, never mentioning environmentalism in the documentary explicitly, except to explain that evangelicals view it as the domain of liberals and ‘hippies’. Moyers also manages this sensitivity by establishing the conservative bona fides of those he interviews in Is God Green? The following interchange with former NAE and Creation Care leader Richard Cizik illustrates: BILL MOYERS: RICHARD CIZIK: BILL MOYERS: RICHARD CIZIK: BILL MOYERS: RICHARD CIZIK:

You know, I have to ask you. Are you conservative? Yes. Absolutely. What’s your position on abortion? I’m pro-life. Abortion is wrong. Homosexuality? I’m conservative on this issue. I oppose same sex marriage. BILL MOYERS: And yet on the environment you sound like a – RICHARD CIZIK: Well, I happen to think that, you see, to be biblically consistent means you have to, at times, be politically inconsistent. (Moyers 2006a)

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Cizik has been instrumental in bringing Creation Care to the center of current evangelical discourse, and has been the figurehead for media portrayals of the environmental/evangelical debate. He frequently manages his media appearances in this way, by setting himself up as an impeccable evangelical who has been converted to ‘green’ on the basis of biblical authority. 6 Another rhetorical tactic used in Is God Green? has to do with how the ‘green’ Christians portrayed in the documentary frequently frame their turn toward Creation Care as a conversion experience. Psaros’s research suggests that such a frame would be especially powerful for environmentally minded evangelicals, who believe ‘the Holy Spirit helped them [evangelicals] make the link between environmental protection and their Christian values’ (Psaros 2006: 20). Furthermore, evangelicals who were active in the 1990s in defining Creation Care developed effective frameworks for convincing other evangelicals of their duty to protect the environment. According to Psaros, To stop sinning, the faithful needed to align their relationship to the creation and learn to see themselves as stewards. Put in this frame, environmental protection becomes a non-negotiable Biblical mandate. This is a very powerful frame for evangelicals, who strive to understand and obey God’s will. (Psaros 2006: 26) Moyers takes advantage of the biblical mandate frame in Is God Green? when he cites the Bible as authority throughout the documentary. In fact, throughout the one-hour investigative report, only one scientist is cited as an authority on climate change, and that scientist has Christian credentials: he himself is an evangelical.7 Another frame employed in the film is that of melodrama. Moyers casts the evangelicals of Is God Green? – Christians who are engaged in environmental activism or action – in terms of environmental melodrama. Environmental melodrama often relies on a David-versus-Goliath form of storytelling that would be appealing to evangelical viewers who are keyed into persecution narratives (Psaros 2006: 16, for more on environmental melodrama, see Schwarze 2006). The documentary begins with images of exploding mountaintops in West Virginia, leaving huge clouds of dust and debris hanging in the air, before settling in the rivers and valleys below. Aerial footage of lush, green mountains, their peaks removed to reveal the scarred earth below, is coupled with images of Christian activist Judy Bonds.

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Bonds had left the church at one point, but eventually returned to Christianity. She explains: It was the unjustness that I saw that was being heaped upon the people . . . the blasting and children suffering from the coal dust. And the elderly suffering from the coal dust. And the flooding. And I began to pray for help, for guidance. (Moyers 2006a) For Bonds, faith in God functions as a source of strength to fight environmental and social injustice: she frames the mountaintop mining conflict as one between ‘good and evil’, wherein the polluting mining companies are ‘evil’ and the citizens – the children, the elderly and the working class, especially – are the good who suffer. This is a key aspect of environmental melodrama, according to communication scholar Steven Schwarze: ‘The distinctively melodramatic frame typically interprets polarized, sociopolitical conflicts in moral terms. Conflicts are not simply about competing interests; the pursuit of these interests leads to moral wrongs . . .’ (Schwarze 2006: 250). In other words, Is God Green? skillfully takes an environmental issue, makes it a moral one and therefore a potentially religious or Christian, one. Research shows that the environmental or social justice frame is particularly appealing to Christian audiences (Wardekker et al. 2008: 59–65). The images of black water, fish kills and dead-looking coal slurry in the West Virginia mountaintop removal section of the film are persuasive for this reason. Moyers pairs these images of ecological disaster with compelling personal stories of everyday evangelical Christians struggling for their health and livelihoods against large corporate polluters. The viewer is invited by way of monopathy – a ‘unitary emotional identification’ (Schwarze 2006: 244) – to side with these working-class, disenfranchised and often poor Christian victims in a moral, environmental struggle. The same kind of environmental or social justice frame may work for climate change communication with evangelicals. Writing about religious responses to climate change policy in the United States, Wardekker et al., report, ‘Religious groups in the United States frame the discussion on climate change and climate policy mainly as an ethical issue. The implications of climate change – and climate policy – for the poor is the dominant theme’ (Wardekker et al. 2008: 65). Unfortunately, when Moyers turns to climate change and evangelicalism in Is God Green?, he does not frame that environmental issue in terms of ethics or justice, but rather as a partisan issue. His argument about climate change and evangelicals is that

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evangelicals are being duped by Republican leaders, and that they should fight back. This strategy departs from the god-talk, signaling and justice framing Moyers uses in the rest of the film for dealing with other environmental issues, such as mountaintop removal. And, while the partisan frame may tell a true story, it is a frame that is probably less than effective with many evangelicals. Many of Moyers’s tactics in Is God Green? seem right on target, then: they invoke a particularly spiritual language, use a melodramatic social and environmental justice frame and respect the authority of the Bible and evangelical leaders. According to communication scholar Matthew Nisbet, traditional environmentalist frames of ecological crisis have largely failed, and it is time to appeal to alternative frames, such as the public health frame, or the moral/religious frame. This is particularly true for climate change communication, and Moyers may have missed an opportunity by switching frames midstream in Is God Green? In an essay on climate change communication, Nisbet argues Reframing the relevance of climate change in ways that connect to a broader coalition of Americans – and repeatedly communicating these new meanings through a variety of trusted media sources and opinion leaders – can generate the level of public engagement required for policy action. Successfully reframing climate change means remaining true to the underlying science of the issue, while . . . making the complex policy debate understandable, relevant, and personally important. (Nisbet 2009a) Because climate change is a deeply complex, partisan issue, communicators must use frames that will appeal to broad sections of the American population. Strictly environmentalist frames – such as the threat of environmental apocalypse or of partisan-inflected blaming – will not work with many audiences, and may even backfire. A ‘morality and ethics’ frame, on the other hand, might be used successfully by opinion leaders to encourage action on climate change (Nisbet 2009a). Nisbet’s work suggests that a multiplicity of communication frames will be most effective in communicating climate change to sections of the American public who are otherwise resistant to taking action or supporting policy initiatives on the issue. I argue, however, that not only must the message be framed in multiple ways depending on context and supported by research, but also that the notion of ‘trusted media sources and opinion leaders’ is a complex one, even fraught, when it comes to the evangelical

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community and climate change. In the next section, I point out that Moyers’s own communication practices and status as a left-leaning investigative journalist suggest some potential pitfalls of journalists’ embracing the ‘morality and ethics frame’ as a tactic in speaking to evangelical audiences. I suggest that the authority and status of the speaker is as important as the framing of the message itself: Just talking god-talk is not enough.

Potential Problems with ‘God-Talk’ In the 2005 SEJ speech, Moyers admits to walking a fine line when it comes to invoking signals that will be picked up by evangelicals: ‘I wouldn’t give up fact-based analysis’, he argues, ‘. . . but I would tell some of my stories with an ear for spiritual language, the language of parable, for that is the language of faith’ (Moyers 2005a). Moyers, a vocal critic of the presidency of George W. Bush, is careful to make the distinction between spiritual language and ‘fact-based analysis’, no doubt because he himself is concerned about the slippery slope between rhetoric and reality. We know that President Bush’s identity as an evangelical heavily influenced his policy making, and some in the mass media credited his reelection to his ability to rally a predominantly evangelical base. A 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind argues that this sense of evangelical authority had led the Bush administration to an ‘easy certainty’ about complex matters ranging from foreign policy to poverty programs. One senior adviser to the President infamously told Suskind, who belonged to the ‘reality-based community’, that ‘We’re [the Bush administration is] an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out’ (Suskind 2004). Moyers argued against this shot at the ‘reality-based community’ in multiple venues during Bush’s second term in office, most notably in a short New York Review of Books essay called Welcome to Doomsday. In the introduction, he asserts: We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. (Moyers 2006b: 19)

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In Welcome to Doomsday, Moyers is particularly concerned with what he sees as an alarming trend among evangelicals who are committed to a literal reading of the book of Revelations in the Bible. Moyers writes that this group (typically referred to as ‘dispensationalists’)8 are: . . . sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the Rapture [the end times] on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. [. . .] The last time I Googled it, the Rapture Index stood at 144 – approaching the critical threshold when the prophesy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the Son of God returns, and the righteous enter paradise while sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. (Moyers 2006b: 24–25) The upshot for Moyers is that, for these tens of thousands of ‘true believers’, environmental crises like climate change are actually welcome because they signal the approach of the end times. Although the picture Moyers paints of evangelical extremism is a terrifying one, one in which ‘the faithful are relieved of concern for the environment, violence, and everything else except their personal salvation’ (Moyers 2006b: 26), scholarship tells us that this picture of modern evangelical approaches to environmental crisis is far from complete. Environmental philosopher Max Oelschlager lays out a complex history of ecotheology, arguing, ‘. . . there has been growth in interest among the faithful – theologians, ministers, educators, and lay people – in the environmental crisis’ (Oelschlager 1994: 26). This interest, in fact, was born in the 1960s and 1970s, and ‘the ecotheological literature is so large and growing so rapidly that no reader can hope to stay abreast of it’ (Oelschlager 1994: 26). In other words, while the numbers of dispensationalists may seem large, there is also a large group of evangelicals who engage with ecological threats and crises in ways Moyers would no doubt welcome. I also wonder whether the portrayal of evangelicals Moyers presents in Welcome to Doomsday seems to directly undermine his efforts at ‘god-talk in Is God Green? Given that the two were released nearly concurrently, and deal with overlapping themes – albeit in very different ways – it is hard not to compare the positive signaling or evangelical god-talk of Is God Green? with the deeply critical, even fearful, portrayal of evangelical extremists in Welcome to Doomsday. In fact, neither of these two texts accurately portrays the diversity of identities that exist under the umbrella term ‘evangelical Christianity’ and both seem to conflate evangelical Christianity with the Christian Right

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(they overlap but are not the same). Psaros helps to clarify the distinction somewhat. She argues that evangelicals hold three beliefs in common: 1) that the Bible is the literally true word of God, 2) that individuals must be ‘born again’ with Jesus Christ as their personal savior, and 3) that evangelicals who have been ‘saved’ must attempt to save others by spreading the ‘truth’ of the Bible. (Psaros 2006: 10) Yet, she continues, the ‘broad evangelical category contains a diverse spectrum of perspectives ranging from conservative fundamentalists who strive to distance themselves from secular society to more moderate evangelicals who see few problems with engaging in secular institutions and activities’ (Psaros 2006: 10). Furthermore, when it comes to environmental issues and politics, the behavior of evangelicals seems to be dictated less by their religious beliefs and more by their partisan affiliations. For example, a recent survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life suggests exactly this, with Christian Americans viewing climate change similarly to the majority of Americans (Pew 2009), and beliefs about climate change being dictated more by party affiliation than church affiliation (Nisbet 2009c). This suggests that partisan frames may carry as much weight, if not more, as religious frames on this particular issue. Other research shows that climate change is actually receiving increasing attention from religious groups, such as evangelical Christians in the United States. Wardekker et al., argue that while this attention needs to be viewed as part of a general cultural move to consider environmental crises, it also has the potential to transform evangelical culture from within: ‘Where the conventional environmental movement is highly distrusted among evangelicals/conservatives, these church-based initiatives seem to take upon themselves roles similar to environmental groups’ (Wardekker et al. 2008: 66). Because they adopt roles similar to environmental groups does not mean, however, that they are willing to work with environmental groups, a fact echoed by Psaros’s study of religious leaders involved in the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a group of evangelicals who came together to release a statement calling for evangelicals to take action on climate change. She writes that these evangelicals ‘have intentionally avoided any association with mainstream environmentalism. Instead, they work from within their own religious community to reframe environmentalism as a Christian duty’ (Psaros 2006: 8).

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The picture that emerges here is this: while evangelicals typically vote Republican, and have been characterized as the ‘least environmentally friendly bloc out of all of America’s major faith traditions’ (Psaros 2006: 8), interest among Christian groups in environmental issues has been developing for decades, if primarily in contested or constrained ways. Furthermore, the ‘evangelical movement’ is quite diverse, and while it may have made up a powerful voting bloc in past elections, claims that it is monolithic are false. So, where Moyers depicts a new ‘rift’ over climate change or Creation Care in Is God Green?, it can be argued that this supposed ‘rift’ is actually an outgrowth of a diversity of opinions and approaches by evangelicals to the environmental problem (Psaros 2006: 37). In both Is God Green? and Welcome to Doomsday, Moyers presents stark portrayals of two movements in evangelical Christianity: Creation Care activism and dispensationalism, respectively. By not placing either group within the larger context of evangelical Christian identity generally, Moyers potentially exaggerates or misrepresents the power and significance of both movements. Moyers’s depiction of evangelicals in Welcome to Doomsday is particularly polarizing. Nisbet warns that framing controversial scientific topics such as climate change or evolution in such ways can actually shut down dialogue. He writes, ‘. . . for scientists and journalists, a fourth ethical imperative is to avoid using framing to denigrate, stereotype, or attack a particular social group or to use framing in the service of partisan or electoral gains . . .’ (Nisbet 2009b). The tactics of Welcome to Doomsday seem to violate this principle. As we have seen, Moyers – who was raised as a Christian in Texas and who was in fact once ordained as a Baptist preacher – could also be described as a member of the progressive left. It seems possible that when he tries to invoke these competing identities in Is God Green? and Welcome to Doomsday, respectively, he underestimates the connections evangelicals feel with the Republican party because of their stance on social issues such as abortion and gay rights, and may in fact exacerbate the partisan nature of environmental issues. Moyers may know god-talk, but if he is not seen as doing the god-walk by evangelicals, his environmental messages may backfire. Is God Green? also raises interesting questions about audience: Moyers was identified by and targeted for investigation by the Bush Administration for having a liberal bias on PBS in 2005, in what many felt was something of a witch-hunt (e.g. see Eggerton 2005). This, in combination with his outspoken critiques of the Bush White House, solidified Moyers’s reputation as a figurehead of ‘liberal’ investigative journalism. Given this, one wonders about his effectiveness in using god-talk to reach conservative evangelicals

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as an audience, if that is in fact his intended audience. Whether Moyers has any authority – moral, journalistic or otherwise – with such audiences is a question that is open for debate. It seems possible that figures like Moyers – and Al Gore, for example – are polarizing figures, and therefore may not invoke evangelical frames as effectively as others who have credibility with evangelicals might. Such questions point to the risks involved in invoking god-talk as a rhetorical strategy or frame. This does not mean that there can be no dialogue between evangelicals and environmentalists, though as we have seen, the challenges to such conversations are great. It does mean, however, that dialogue on such issues requires not only appropriate framing or signaling, but also an understanding of the complex context within which ‘evangelicalism’ as a movement exists, and of the need for spokespersons or ‘opinion leaders’ (to use Nisbet’s phrase) who can deliver the message in a way that will be received as authentic, persuasive and meaningful, rather than suspicious or manipulative. That said, even evangelicals who are firmly ensconced in evangelical culture and who are seen as leaders there may have difficulty communicating effectively about environmental crises such as climate change. As Richard Cizik – who continues to speak out passionately to evangelicals about Creation Care, despite his 2008 ousting from the National Association of Evangelicals – said in a recent interview, ‘Just giving someone more information doesn’t always change people’s views. We tend to screen out ideas we don’t want to hear’ (Kloor 2009).

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Chapter 16

Spirituality in Flight: Making Meaning around State-Sector Television Commercials Ann Hardy, Ph.D.

‘Nation branding’ – or the creation of attractive images of a country, its people and resources for the consumption of both intra- and inter-national audiences – is an example of one of the ‘genres of governance’ (Fairclough 2003) that contemporary states can use as an instrument of ‘soft’ power in various theaters of politics and commerce. In ideal circumstances the deployment of strategic tropes of national identity can appeal to potential investors and tourists while they also synchronize aspects of the selfperception of a country’s citizens (de Michelis 2008). Since it is difficult to achieve the necessary impact with prosaic concepts, the creators of national branding campaigns are drawn toward materials that have strongly affective, myth-making dimensions. A popular set of symbolic resources for this purpose consists of images and motifs referencing spirituality, especially spiritualities of nature and human community. This chapter reports on a larger project examining television commercials from state-owned companies operating in New Zealand. In particular it looks at two sets of advertisements promoting the electrical power provided by the company Meridian Energy and domestic airline travel with Air New Zealand, respectively. As ‘state-owned enterprises’, these companies are government-owned businesses whose drive toward profit is mitigated by the need to make important services available to the whole population, although they are not sole providers of these commodities in the marketplace. These advertisements therefore have the weight of nationally important agents in the commercial sphere behind them, and at a remove, the resources of the state. In terms of audio-visual style the two products are treated similarly. They were produced by different advertising agencies but share the same composer. Made with high production values, they depict journeys of discovery: employing metaphors of disembodied, psychic, travel through

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iconic New Zealand landscapes. The significance of these quests is underscored by romantic music encouraging emotional yearning for the idealized relationships between human beings and nature that the commercials depict. A number of points are canvassed in researching how these commercials might fit into what Luckmann (1990) has called the ‘secondary market’ that provides resourcing for the often secular spiritualities of late-modern people. Initially, the hypothesis that these texts mobilize a form of spirituality is justified. In theoretical terms, the objects of this research can be understood as examples of the promotion of material goods in a manner that downplays their materiality in pursuit of forms of transcendence that are simultaneously a part of the texture of everyday life and seek to create space for reflection within it. Then, a brief account is given of the discursive choices of those who commissioned and produced the commercials. In the central part of the chapter, the meaning-making activities of audience members are contrasted with these textual- and production-based discourses. Considering all three parts of the mediated communication process – production, text and reception – enables this chapter to sketch the diversity of the discourses surrounding these commercials as well as whatever commonalities may exist in the ways meaning is made from them. The reception of the commercials, in particular, evinces ambivalence in relation to the project of spiritualized nation branding, suggesting that the ‘governmental’ power they exert is indeed adequate, but far from complete.

Description of Commercials The first example, the Meridian advertisement for hydroelectricity, shows a red, native New Zealand flower making its way downriver from snowy mountains. Accompanied by music in classical mode, the flower skims the surfaces of a turbulent waterfall, is passed by a low-flying bird and floats past children trailing their fingers in the water as the river drifts through upland meadows. After surviving an elegantly choreographed dive, the blossom bobs up to suspend itself in a calm lake, on the far shores of which, against more tree-clad mountains, one can glimpse cubic shapes representing a hydro-electric power station. The superimposed text hopes that the viewer has ‘enjoyed this tour through your power generator’ and ends with the slogan: ‘Meridian Energy – keeping New Zealand new’: a complex of elements that positions the viewer as at once citizen, shareholder, vulnerable human individual (akin to the delicate flower) and patriot.

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The second example consists of a pair of similar 30-second advertisements for Air New Zealand in which the imputed human presence of the first example is transformed into actual human activity at the beginning and end of the narrative. Each begins with an individual: a teenage Maori woman and a twenty-something European male, reacting to some (unheard) bad news. After a moment, which the camera spends contemplating their distress, the viewpoint changes and the human being moves forward, subsumed into a tracking movement that becomes airborne and leaves the city behind. As the viewpoint climbs higher, it swoops over a series of sublime New Zealand landscapes, traversing vast tracts of countryside in seconds. In the resolution, which is also a landing, the camera descends toward the back of another individual immersed in his or her everyday routine: an elderly Maori man heading toward the sea with a fishing rod and a female university student in conversation, respectively. The airborne characters rematerialize and embrace the person for whom they have been yearning: all is peaceful as the Air New Zealand logo and the tagline ‘Amazing Journeys. Everyday’ appear. Here, the music, in which longing is expressed through Maorilanguage lyrics, makes a strong contribution to the proposition that the travelers are experiencing something human beings value highly: selftranscendence through relationship with a loved and trusted other.

Advertising and Reflexive Spirituality In the broadest terms, these advertisements assume a secular environment where explicit religiosity is a minimal component of the public sphere.1 They seek to canalize New Zealanders’ needs to have light and heating in their homes and, perhaps, to travel, and to direct them to the territory of their own particular service provision. The commercials are not selling specific products but are aiming to foster generic ‘brand loyalty’ by offering resonant moments of virtual experience. To serve these mercantile goals, the commercials employ metaphors associated with what Robert Wuthnow (1998) has described as a spirituality of ‘seeking’. Similar ideas have been articulated by British sociologists Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas (2000) as ‘spiritualities of life’ and by Wade Clark Roof (2001) as a ‘quest’ culture. According to these theoretical descriptors, late-modern individuals make sense of their lives by choosing from a range of symbolic resources with desirable connotations in relation to formative values, but which are not necessarily directly referential of institutional forms of religiosity. Symbolizations suitable for the evocation

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of these types of ‘reflexive spirituality’ (Mihelich and Gatzke 2006) include expressive representations of natural landscapes in their least modified forms as well as representations of idealized human relationships – particularly depictions of harmonious communities and fully absorbing activities undertaken in private or leisure modes. The advertisements offer viewers images of themselves as members of a utopian community in a construction of civil religiosity inflected by either the special kinship New Zealanders feel they have with their natural environment, and/or, with aspects of Polynesian cultures. The ads are secular reworkings of something called ‘the Kiwi [national] spirit’, which an Anglican media commentator has identified as ‘the strongest single theme of all media coverage, both in the advertising commercials and the programmes between them’ (Bluck 1998: 19). These are representations that depict or allude to experiences of transcendence. These are akin to those that that Luckmann (1990) describes. In ‘Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion’, Luckman wrote of a modern reconstruction of transcendence that involves three possible levels of experience. Minor transcendence involves fleeting alteration of consciousness through moments of pleasure seeking, or mental wandering. Medium transcendence is a state, where one seeks temporary escape from everyday consciousness in the merger of the self with another, or within a collectivity. There is also a third possible, but rarely actualized, level he calls great transcendence that involves, for example, experience of the divine. Luckmann asserts that fewer people in contemporary societies are seeking to experience the moments of great transcendence that traditional religious systems are structured to provide. Rather, they are content to seek transcendence on the first and second, the minor and medium, levels. In looking for evidence of opportunities for transcendence in as commercial a genre as advertising, it is useful to consider a theorization of the relationships between religion and media advanced by Mieke Bal (2001). She suggests that artifacts like these highlight a tension in contemporary society between the desire for spirituality and the desire for authority, in particular, for simultaneously keeping, and moving away from, our veneration of material goods: There seems to be a desire to overcome the dissatisfaction produced by global capitalism without giving up the comfort and luxury it has generated. This negatively defined, hence unspecific craving for a meaningful existence I call a desire for spirituality. Due to the force of cultural habit, this desire cannot simply emerge from a rejection of what

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triggered it. Whereas people crave something other than material goods, the desire for spirituality imitates the self-trained mechanisms promoted by, among other factors, the media. (Bal, in de Vries and Weber, 2001: 242) Viewed from this perspective, these commercials are authoritative injunctions to temporarily detach one’s self from an economically conditioned framework so that during a brief period suffused by loosely defined emotions, one can be induced to add those particular images and themes to a personal storehouse of numinous ‘good’ things. In the process however, due to the provenance of the texts, the remaining divide between economic and spiritual concerns is further blurred. Complex as these hermeneutical negotiations around texts might be in the arena of reception, which is the viewpoint that Bal references when writing of an ‘unspecific craving for a meaningful existence’, the picture is complicated even more when examining discourses concerning the production of such texts. The various registers used by different professional sub-cultures discussing the same phenomenon suggest that this lack of specificity is a basic characteristic of the communicative environment.

The Ambiguous Nature of the Production Environment At the most public level, an understanding of these commercials as promoting the sacralization of the everyday is reflected in statements made by company representatives. Consider, for example, the following statement by the General Manager of Marketing at Air New Zealand at the launch of the new brand campaign in January 2007: Central to our brand promise is a set of beliefs that include our belief that ‘‘the only way to truly say I love you is with a hug’ and that ‘we live in the most inspiring place on earth’. As such, each of the stories in the commercials has been created to capture the scenic magic of New Zealand, the spirit of our people and the character of our airline. They emotionally celebrate the precious human connections we help our customers make every day. (Bayliss in Air New Zealand 2007) While the ‘Amazing Journeys’ campaign was aimed at domestic audiences, the principles of such campaigns are inculcated into staff at many levels of the organization. During that process, components of the discourse are modified to suit varying situations. According to information gained from

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an interview conducted by myself with a former employee around the time of the campaign launch, cabin crew from various sections of the airline were given supporting materials to guide their interactions with customers. These included a brochure resembling a national passport emblazoned with the words ‘Inspiring Journeys’. The latter contained various injunctive mottos such as ‘Welcome like a Friend’, ‘Be Yourself’, and ‘Can Do’ that were designed to help the customer feel that s/he was having a special experience by virtue of the thoughtful service provided by the airline.2 At this level however, it seems the interpretations of ‘spirit’ and ‘inspiration’ conveyed to staff were more prosaic than the reflexive spirituality formulations of either the commercials or the discourses of ‘scenic magic’ and the ‘human spirit’ employed in the public statement. In the training sessions that one employee attended, for example, no explanation was given of the term ‘inspiring journeys’, and instead the emphasis was placed on the development of a repertoire of workplace actions implementing the guidelines for better service: I thought it was just a bit odd, ‘inspiring’, because you’re on there doing a job, so how is it that I can inspire you as a passenger while on this journey? So, I think I just relied mainly on [. . .] being friendly and helpful and doing your job. [. . .] But the whole ‘inspiring people’, I thought maybe that’s the company inspiring people to go on that journey they may have put off. (former Air NZ employee 2009) In interviews conducted with personnel who were involved directly with production of the two commercials studied here, this note of cynicism gains strength and respondents said they preferred strategic and pragmatic discourses instead. For example, the creative director from the advertising company for the Meridian commercial prioritized a professional discourse emphasizing aesthetic achievement in the service of perception-management, saying, ‘We were simply looking for a solution that was elegant and effective [. . .] And what they [Meridian] were saying was – “we might be wanting to flood a valley near you soon so we want you to think nicely about us” ’ (Andrew 2008). It was interesting however, that while discounting the relevance of a spiritual framework, the creative director also stated that he judged the success of the commercials partly by the fact that they had received requests for the music to be used at religious ceremonies such as weddings. The composer of the music for all three commercials is Jim Hall, a man with lengthy experience in audio-visual production. He was also initially dismissive of spiritual significance for the commercials but later began describing

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the process of discursive transfer by which spirituality can be invoked yet simultaneously disavowed in the commercial realm: Spirituality never comes into the job they pass on to me, [. . .] they may talk about emotion. But I’m usually presented with pictures that have already been shot or a storyboard, and I just write some music that I think’ll be right for it [. . .] I would say the brief is always emotional, if it’s going to have some spiritual component then the word ‘emotional’ will be in there. (Hall 2008) Bal writes of how the arousal of a certain genre of emotion – desire – is a component both of consumer-culture and of some forms of late-modern spirituality. In these comments from people involved in stimulating consumer desire, one can glimpse how these ‘training’ mechanisms intertwine desire and spirituality – specifically a spirituality that, paradoxically, highlights freedom from materiality. Does that mean therefore that such spirituality is spurious? Audiences, rather than the production realm, are probably the best place to look for answers, but an anecdote from Hall, who describes himself as, ‘a reasonably spiritual person but I am in no way religious’, provides insight into the complexity of judgments about the issue. To strengthen the emotional appeal of the Air New Zealand commercials, he decided to combine a ‘Gaelic slash Irish tune’ with Maori lyrics, ‘I really grabbed my Maori dictionary which is always at hand and looked for words like “motherhood” and “home” and just looked for concepts and built up phrases that alluded to these things but didn’t build up a story or anything like that’ (Hall 2008). Hall’s account of his bricolage strategy counters a contemporary paradigm enjoining respect for the right of Maori to administer their own cultural and intellectual property,3 an offence exacerbated by his admission that he had used a non-Maori singer to record the lyrics. However, he diffused negative judgment by casually noting that he had also ‘run them [the lyrics] past a friend, to get them sorted out’. This friend, who was Maori, had ‘changed a few words here and there’ and had blessed them: a ritual action with spiritual connotations that suggested that Hall’s publicly nonchalant demeanor did not necessarily express the depth of his engagement with the project.

Talking with Viewers To discover how audience-members might interpret these commercials, I organized three focus groups that included people with various relationships

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or non-relationships to religion. One group included secular school teachers; another group was made up of members of a Buddhist congregation and a third group comprised a mixed-gender group associated with Anglican Protestantism. While the majority of group members were of European ethnicity there were four people who identified as Maori. The groups undertook two activities. In the first activity, the commercials were screened twice and participants provided individual written responses. The papers were put aside for later analysis and then the second activity took place: a group discussion with myself as moderator. This dual approach was based on the assumption that by eliciting written opinions, giving the moderator ‘clues about the participants’ reality’, some of ‘the negative effects of group dynamics can be reduced’ (Kreuger 1998: 24).

Data Analysis From the evidence provided by the discussions there are few grounds for claiming that the commercials resource personal spirituality in the ways proposed above. Rather, participants or respondents distanced themselves from the advertisements by drawing on cynical public scripts (Hoover et al. 2004) about the activities of advertisers. The groups did acknowledge the seductive nature of the commercials but, nevertheless, this statement from a female Anglican represents the ambivalent nature of many responses: The Meridian energy ad; [. . .] it’s a pretty ad, you feel the kind of connection to the beautiful country and the beautiful water and the little flower on the journey, well, I do. And at the back of my mind I’m also really cynical about what they are trying to say about environmental friendliness and that kind of stuff. I don’t really believe them. In addition to generalized skepticism expressed across the groups, the participants cited specific reasons for their disapproval of the ads. One was a reservation on the grounds that the world depicted in the commercials did not correspond with ‘reality’. For example, it was assumed by several participants that the red flower negotiating the river was from the pohutukawa tree, which does not grow in the mountains. This error was evaluated as a sign that the producers were more interested in effect than accuracy. In fact, producers had anticipated that very criticism – the flower was from the similar rata tree, which does grow on lower mountain slopes.4 However, because participants had decided a particular nationalist

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positioning was being constructed, they assumed the flower must be a pohutukawa, since that tree, known as ‘the New Zealand Christmas tree’, is associated with national identity in populist discourse. While the images of communal harmony in beautiful surroundings were appreciated, this utopian framing was also contested by the participants in the focus groups through consideration of other scripts circulating in public-sphere discourse. For instance, there was perceived to be an overrepresentation of Maoriness. Two of the three commercials featured Maori New Zealanders although that group constitutes only 14 percent of the New Zealand population.5 Moreover, it was in talk about this topic that explicit discussion of spirituality occurred among the members of the focus group, since they assumed that Maoriness is considered by cultural producers to entail a natural, widely acceptable form of spirituality, Speaker 2:

Speaker 3: Speaker 2: Speaker 3: Speaker 1:

Well how often would you see that many Maori people in that setting? Like not super-regularly. Like, there is one person there that is white. That’s true. And that’s quite a high – like it’s not a normal scenario. I think they are definitely making a play on the whole, the connection, the spiritual connection between . . . Well, they like to think of themselves as people that would respect that connection and that’s the land and the environment, because being spiritually connected to the environment is nice and romantic and it’s very hip and it’s very non-threatening (Anglican group).

In all of the focus groups, respondents directed considerable energy into critiques showcasing their ability to ‘see through’ the media, to understand the ways in which the material is encoded, and to provide accounts of the imputed motivations of the producers. There were however, occasional nonconformist comments suggesting that aspects of the commercials had connected with the speakers’ own interests. These included comments such as, ‘it made me want to go and see my family’ or ‘there’s a kind of positive fuzziness thing which they’re really trying to suck you into, and I kind of like that’. Generally however, it is justified to conclude that, in public discussions, respondents evaded the personal seductions proffered by the advertisements, concentrating instead on the texts’ status as commodity purveyors in a campaign of publicsphere persuasion.

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The significant exception was in relation to symbols of nationhood. While cynical about the symbolization of national identity, the focus group participants nevertheless felt themselves interpellated by those positionings. Discussion of this interpellation centered on aspects of the myth that the informants too, wished to foster: that is, that the physical beauty of New Zealand is reflected in the character of its people and that the country is uniquely ‘clean and green’. The dissemination of this myth is believed to be at its most valuable however when it is directed to audiences outside the country, to facilitate international trade, whether it be in goods or people. The informants from the focus group wanted to present themselves as too discriminating to be seduced by visions of a spiritualized New Zealand aimed at inducing them to buy certain goods, but, at the same time, they have accepted the necessity, the desirability even, of using similar public relations tropes to encourage consumers in other countries to buy New Zealand exports or to visit on holiday. They hope to find in others a susceptibility to such idealizations that they do not wish to foster in themselves. This qualified reinforcement of a particular concept of national identity gives some support to Bluck’s claim that television functions as an important location for reproduction of versions of a collective ‘Kiwi spirit’. These images of ‘spirit’ may therefore be considered, in Fairclough’s terms, as having a ‘governance’ function since they produce community consensus about the importance of national branding in a globalized market – in the sense that, if ‘spirituality’ is what it takes to sell New Zealand in that market then so be it. So, is that to say that these advertisements fail at resourcing personal spirituality in the manner my reading in this field initially predicted they would? Well, not entirely, since the written comments about the commercials are significantly divergent from the results of the spoken discussions. In a small number of the written responses, what was said in discussion was also what was written on the page. For example, a male Buddhist pronounced in discussion that the ads were ‘propaganda’, ‘phoney’ and ‘nauseating’, and these words were also the bulk of his written communication. A female teacher said in both speech and writing that the ads were ‘feel good claptrap’ that was ‘melodramatic’ and ‘hackneyed’. Otherwise however, a substantial proportion of the written comments indicated more acceptance of propositions offered by the ads than the discussions had led me to expect. The words ‘freedom’, ‘nature’, ‘beauty’, ‘purity’, ‘longing’, ‘happiness’, ‘serenity’, ‘connection’, ‘unity’ and ‘togetherness’ were repeated many times. The words ‘spirit’, ‘spirituality’, and ‘mystical’ each made several appearances, as did the obvious, but resonant, term ‘journey’.

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In addition, respondents were asked for their emotional reactions to the texts. I was surprised by the number of people who wrote about reacting to the texts with appreciation and desire – desire that was typically expressed as a wish to reconnect with people they cared about. These are some examples: Meridian ad I felt deep connection and pride as a New Zealander. I related as a New Zealander because they used the pohutukawa flower. Clean, green, journey, movement, life-giving, sustaining, safe, peaceful. It made me want to swim in that river and travel where the flower was traveling. Air New Zealand ads It compelled me to want to visit friends and family again. It works! Makes me want to go to my family, my loved ones. Makes me miss my family and grandparents. It reminded me of the second [sic] first time I ever saw my wife. This also draws on my feelings of whanaunatanga – the relationships I hold with my family. I must ring my Dad! There is no neat division of public and private in this data since some people expressed appreciation of aspects of the commercials publicly while several of the private notes spoke of mistrust and criticism. Nevertheless, it was the case that respondents provided more responses that expressed positive reactions to the ads in their individual writing than they did when negotiating group conversations. They made more sensual statements that depicted their sense of self as embodied, rather than narrowly verbal or logical, and their politics seemed less sharply defined, in that they could admit to taking pleasure in things of which they might have disapproved in public discussion.

Conclusion With the balance tipped by the inclusion of the private comments, I contend that this report lends weight to Bal’s typification of ‘spirituality’ being produced out of the interplay between dissatisfaction with capitalism and

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appreciation for the comforts it can provide. While the commissioners and producers of the commercials intended in the first instance to advocate for mercantile goals, the ambiguity of their statements demonstrates an oscillation between pragmatic pursuit of that task and uneasiness about wholly embracing it. Some audience members maintained an ascetic view of the ‘good’ life that made no room for the prepackaged, statesponsored spirituality onscreen. Others saw their desires for a meaningful and ‘connected’ life represented by these advertisements. It could be argued that this point of contact was identification with templates of ‘New Zealandness’ that connected with images of land and indigenous ethnicity, even when the representation of that ethnicity was considered problematic. It is significant that these responses contained an element of calculation about the national commercial interest, supporting Bal’s claim that contemporary spirituality and capitalism are intertwined in contemporary individuals’ worldviews. In private responses among focus group participants, however, national pride was augmented as a spiritual resource by the opportunity to reexperience connection to others through bonds of love and responsibility – bonds that were at their most attractive when tested by the acting-out of absence, as in the Air New Zealand commercials. Looking at the production, text, and audience stages of communication and at the responses of audiencemembers from two approaches has helped to make visible the tendencies toward both rejection and acceptance of the status quo that are involved when the mass media attempt to catalyze meaning-making in secularized spiritual modes.

Chapter 17

Media, Citizens and Space Exploration: Conquest and Exploitation or Discovery and Understanding? Linda Billings, Ph.D.

Space is too big to be conquered. — (Janice Hocker Rushing 1986)

There has been a trend in the space community, energized in the Reagan era and reinvigorated during the George W. Bush years, toward viewing the solar system as an environment to exploit, as we have with our own planetary environment. From this ‘dominionist’ or ‘manifest destiny’ perspective, our home planet, and our home solar system, are seen as resources for humans to use as they like. The Bush administration’s so-called vision for space exploration, announced in 2004,1 was a call for human colonization of the Moon and Mars and exploitation of extraterrestrial resources. At the same time that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) worked on advancing this vision, it was also administering an Earth science research program designed to improve understanding of the effects of human activity on our own planetary environment. In addition, the agency administers a mandatory planetary protection policy,2 backed by international law, which requires space exploration missions to ensure against contamination of extraterrestrial environments by terrestrial biology and contamination of Earth by extraterrestrial biology, should we ever encounter it. Thus, the U.S. civilian space program has been committed to the goals of exploiting solar system resources for economic benefit and preserving and protecting our own and other planetary environments. President Obama has made it clear that his administration intends to maintain a strong and expansive space program. The President’s fiscal year

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2010 budget request included $18.7 billion for NASA, and his economic stimulus package – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law on February 17, 20093 – included an additional $1 billion for NASA, of which $400 billion was tagged for ‘exploration’. It is not yet clear whether the tug of war between preserving and protecting and exploring and exploiting will continue, or not, in the U.S. space program. The space community has engaged in some limited discussions of legal and ethical issues relating to human exploration and the possible philosophical and spiritual ramifications of finding extraterrestrial life, but these issues deserve broader attention. Public dialogue is needed to ensure that all citizens have an opportunity to weigh in on prospects for a human future in space. This chapter explores some ethical, philosophical and spiritual considerations relating to space exploration in the twenty-first century and the role the media might play in fostering public dialogue on and civic engagement in planning our future in space.

Space Exploration: What is it (Good) for? The ideas of frontier pioneering, continual progress, manifest destiny, free enterprise, rugged individualism and a right to life without limits have been prominent in the cultural narrative that has constructed and maintained an ideology of ‘Americanism’ – what it means to be American, and what America is meant to be, and do.4 According to this ideology, the United States is and must remain ‘Number One’ in the world community, playing the role of political, economic, scientific, technological and moral leader. From this ideological perspective, liberal democracy and free-market capitalism constitute the only viable form of political economy.5 Official and popular accounts of the U.S. civilian space program place it firmly within this national narrative. Though the contemporary cultural environment is vastly different from that of the Cold-War era, the official U.S. narrative of space exploration today is still intimately intertwined with what feminist critic Susan Faludi (2007) calls security myth and nationalist fantasy, a story of cowboys on the space frontier. Throughout the first 50 years of space exploration, the mass media have helped to perpetuate this national narrative with its themes of conquest and exploitation in their coverage of the U.S. civilian space program. At the same time, the media have also enabled citizens to see Planet Earth from space, an opportunity that has helped to foster the development of environmental consciousness worldwide.

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In 1977, activist Stewart Brand initiated a public debate in CoEvolution Quarterly about expanding human presence into space. Colonizing space ‘will be as momentous as the atomic bomb’, Brand declared. With space colonization: Our perspective is suddenly cosmic, our Earth tiny and precious, and our motives properly suspect. . . . If we can learn to successfully manage large complex ecosystems in the Space Colonies, that sophistication could help reverse our destructive practices on Earth. And if we fail . . . then we will have learned something as basic as Darwin about our biosphere – that we cannot manage it, that it manages us. (Brand 1977: 72) Today national policy promotes colonization, but with a different rationale. In the twenty-first century, national policy advocates ‘the Moon-Mars thing’ as a means of opening up the solar system to private-property claims, resource exploitation and commercial development. President George W. Bush’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Marburger (2006) once said that ‘questions about the [President’s] vision [for space exploration] boil down to whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not, [and] for now the question has been decided in the affirmative’. According to Marburger, ‘the fundamental goal of [the President’s] vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security and economic interests through a robust space exploration program’. Proponents of private-property claims, resource exploitation and commercial development in space heard these words as a call to action. A fundamental goal of U.S. space policy is to ‘strengthen the nation’s space leadership’, and official rhetoric has tended to reinforce the idea of U.S. dominance in space. At a meeting with the Washington space community in April 2005, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, a Bush political appointee, said that when human civilization reaches the point where more people are living off the Earth than on it, ‘we want their culture to be Western’. Western civilization, he asserted, is ‘the best we’ve seen so far in human history’, and the values space-faring people should take with them into space should be Western values.6 Though Griffin later tempered his rhetoric, until he left office in December 2008 he and his deputies continued to describe a human future in space where ‘Americans’ are in charge. Official space rhetoric both conveys the idea that the United States is and must remain Number One in the global space arena and reflects an assumption that the values of materialism, consumerism and hyperconsumption prevalent today are values worth extending into the solar

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system. The popular rhetoric of space advocacy reflects these assumptions as well. The conception of outer space advanced by advocates of settlement, colonization and development embodies the idea of a solar system (and beyond) of wide-open spaces and limitless resources – a space frontier.7 Is this what space exploration means today, especially for that vast majority of people who do not have a role in the space exploration enterprise? Some important questions must be addressed in considering future human exploration of space, questions that space-faring nations have given scant attention. How will extending human presence into the solar system affect society and culture on Earth? What legal, ethical and other value systems should govern human settlements and other activities in space? Do humans have rights to exploit extraterrestrial resources and to alter extraterrestrial environments? Does space exploration need reinvention to meet social needs? What is the meaning, and the value, of space exploration?

Ethical, Philosophical and Spiritual Aspects of Space Exploration in the Twenty-First Century A brief review of the history and status of some issues relating to space law, ethics and culture provides a framework for speculating on possible human futures in space. Issues of space law and ethics have been discussed in international fora since before the launch of Sputnik I in 1957 and the formation of NASA in 1958. The International Astronautical Federation (IAF) first considered issues of space law at its 1952 annual congress. The International Institute of Space Law (IISL) was formed in 1958 as an affiliate of the IAF, which tasked the IISL to study and report on ‘juridical and sociological aspects of the space sciences’ (Pepin 1982: 23), such as property rights in space; rights, responsibilities and liability for space activities; and contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. A considerable body of national and international space law is in place that defines what is permitted and prohibited in outer space. The foundational U.S. space statute is the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act. Other federal space statutes address commercial space applications such as satellite communications, land remote sensing, and space launches (Congressional Research Service 1990). The United States is signatory to six of seven United Nations (U.N.) treaties governing activities in space, including the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer

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Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (known as the Outer Space Treaty), which stands as the foundational international space statute. Article I of the Outer Space Treaty states that space exploration ‘shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries’. The treaty also specifies that ‘outer space . . . is not subject to national appropriation by any . . . means’.8 As a ratified agreement, the Outer Space Treaty stands as ‘the supreme Law of the Land’, according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution.9 In the early twenty-first century, encouraged by Bush’s ‘vision’, advocates of space settlement and development have been advancing their cause to NASA, the White House, the U.S. Congress, and, of course, the mass media. Advocates argue that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty does not prohibit private-property claims in space or constrain commercial exploitation of extraterrestrial resources. Some have even asserted that the United States is not obligated to abide by the terms of the treaty. Mainstream news outlets such as CNN and MSNBC seem particularly fond of these capitalistic perspectives, and Fox News has even hosted its very own spaceexploitation blog. Turning from the history of space law to the history of space rhetoric, it is useful to consider the role of the frontier metaphor in the history of the U.S. space program. Frontier rhetoric, with its images of pioneering, homesteading, claim staking and conquest, has been persistent in American history, and the frontier metaphor has been, and still is, a dominant metaphor in rhetoric about space exploration (Billings 2007). ‘Space frontier’ means different things to different people, however, and consideration of the range of meanings invoked by the metaphor may stimulate thinking about what values are, what they could be, or whether they should be embodied in the human endeavor of space exploration. American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s (1994) turn-of-the-century essay, ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’, is perhaps the best-known articulation of the metaphor. Later historians of the American West have deemed the idea of the frontier a ‘myth’, embodying a worldview in which the United States is ‘a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top’ (Slotkin 1973: 5).10 Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has observed that space advocates have tended to cling to the frontier metaphor, continuing to conceive of ‘American history [as] a straight line, a vector of inevitability and manifest destiny linking the westward expansion of Anglo-Americans directly to the exploration and colonization of space’. Critiquing this vision of a space frontier, Limerick has observed: ‘In using this analogy, space

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advocates have built their plans for the future on the foundation of a deeply flawed understanding of the past, [and] the blinders worn to screen the past have proven to be just as effective at distorting the view of the future’ (What is the Value 1994: 13–14).11 Historian Stephen Pyne has examined space exploration as a cultural invention that ‘reinforces and reinterprets . . . myths, beliefs, and archetypes basic to its originating civilization’ (Pyne 1988: 18, 37). Modern Western (European-American) exploration functioned as ‘a means of knowing, of creating commercial empires, of outmaneuvering political economic, religious, and military competitors – it was war, diplomacy, proselytizing, scholarship, and trade by other means’ (Pyne 2003: n.p.). The postmodern exploration of space is different, Pyne argues. Rationales advanced for space settlement, he says, are ultimately ‘historical, culturally bound, and selectively anecdotal: that we need to pioneer to be what we are, that new colonies are a means of renewing civilization. . . . With neither a rambunctious imperialism nor an eager Enlightenment’, he concludes, ‘the case for space colonization is not compelling’ (Pyne 2003: n.p.).

Planetary Protection: Where Exploration Meets Ethics One place where ethical considerations of protection and preservation intersect with space exploration (and where frontier rhetoric is absent) is in planetary protection policy. NASA and the international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) have long-standing national and international planetary protection policies in place directing solar system exploration missions to take steps to prevent the transport of terrestrial biological contamination to extraterrestrial environments and the transport of extraterrestrial biological contamination (should it exist) to Earth through solar system sample returns. Their rationale is to maintain pristine conditions in extraterrestrial environments for the purpose of scientific exploration. These policies are the product of discussions among members of the international space community that began in 1956. Expressing the consensus of the international science community, Article IX of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty specifies: ‘States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose’.12

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An expert panel of the National Academy of Sciences has suggested that the space community consider expanding this rationale to include preservation of pristine extraterrestrial environments for their own sake – that is, the wilderness rationale: ‘Although ethical issues concerning the introduction of terrestrial organisms into sensitive environments fall outside the mandate of the current committee, the committee believes they should be given consideration at the earliest opportunity . . . the committee recommends that NASA and its international partners address this issue as expeditiously as possible’ (Space Studies Board 2005: 7). Thinking about space as a wilderness provides a means of envisioning exploration in a less invasive way than current frontier rhetoric does.

Time for Civic Engagement? In considering the influence of the visual rhetoric of space exploration on the frontier metaphor, Historian Neil Maher has concluded that while the now-iconic ‘Earthrise’ photograph of our planet, taken from space by an Apollo 8 astronaut in 1968, ‘helped extend America’s Manifest Destiny into the ultimate wilderness – outer space’ the equally iconic ‘Whole Earth’ photograph taken by an Apollo 17 astronaut in 1972 subsequently ‘debunk[ed] the frontier narrative suggested in Earthrise’ by reconfiguring public perception of the home planet as ‘an environmentally threatened home’ (Maher 2004: n.p.). Environmentalist Bill McKibben has also considered the interplay of this visual rhetoric with perceptions of our home planet. NASA’s Apollo images of Earth from space, he said, ‘seemed designed to shock us into seeing that the world we knew was finite, that we had been born onto a lovely oasis . . . we should protect at all costs’. In McKibben’s opinion, however, this view ‘didn’t take . . . we’ve done more to damage the planet in the decades since that picture appeared than in all of human history before that’ (McKibben 2007: n.p.). From a different perspective, political scientist Walter McDougall has tackled this subject as well. NASA’s imagery of Earth from space has enabled people to see the Earth as it really is – ‘finite and fragile’ – and with this new view has come ‘the urgent if obvious revelation that the natural, holistic earth seen from space is free of political, racial, and religious boundaries. The sum of those two perceptions must be a Spaceship Earth mentality transcending mundane considerations of geopolitics and geoeconomics’ (McDougall 2007, n.p.).13

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But McDougall agrees with McKibben: we are not getting the message. ‘No such transcendence has begun to occur’, McDougall concludes, Even after the end of the Cold War, so often blamed for perverting the dream, astronautics has worked no metamorphosis, no paradigm shift, in human behavior. Conceptions of extraterrestrial worlds as our property to exploit and as pristine environments to protect are in competition for a central role in U.S. space policy. While official space policy during the George W. Bush administration highlighted the human colonization and exploitation of space, the U.S. space science program has been following a path of exploration for understanding. The study of the origins and evolution of life on Earth, the origin and evolution of Earth itself and its sister planets, the origins and evolution of life in the universe, and the origins and evolution of the universe itself are intricately intertwined. Exploratory spacecrafts have flown by, orbited around or landed on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and several of its moons, Saturn and several of its moons, and, of course, Earth itself. Comparative planetology is now a thriving field, and Mars, Europa and Enceladus are leading targets in the search for possible habitats for extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology – the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe14 – offers new ways to think about the past, present and future place of human and other life in space. Astrobiologists have learned that life as we know it – carbon-based cellular life – can survive in virtually all terrestrial environmental extremes, from nuclear radiation to permafrost and Earth’s deep, dark subsurface. At the same time that research into the origin, evolution and distribution of life is revealing that life is highly resilient, these same lines of research are helping to reveal how life and its environment are deeply interdependent, improving understanding of life on Earth and prospects for life elsewhere and contributing to understanding of global climate history and evolution. This new understanding of the highly interdependent nature of life and its environment – their coevolution, as it were – has a role to play in defining the human future on Earth and in space. Large-scale human exploration and settlement of the solar system is further off than the aerospace community would like the world to think, but some of the loudest voices in the discourse on our future in space are advocates of frontier-style exploitation. The U.S. drive of the past 50 years to make outer space a ‘Western’ stronghold glosses over the need to deliberate on what sorts of legal, ethical and social structures and values will be most appropriate to extraterrestrial cultural environments.

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The space community’s preferred mode of communication is one-way, expert to nonexpert, following the cognitive-deficit model. Communication between NASA and its public audiences has largely been a matter of oneway transmissions relayed to broad audiences by the mass media. To date there has been no true civic engagement in space exploration, no real public dialogue about the ethics, value and purpose of exploration. It is time to begin that dialogue, accommodating the views of experts and nonexperts. With dialogue may come true public engagement in planning for a human future in space. Engagement of citizens in the making of science and technology policy ‘improves the robustness of decisions by taking into account the diversity of world views and interests . . . stimulates institutional learning’, and ‘can produce research and development options not previously considered’ (Joly and Rip 2007: 174).

Media, Citizens and Space Exploration: Passive or Participatory? The mass media have played a key role in the history of the U.S. civilian space program, conveying to public audiences the official rhetoric of heroic frontier exploration and the necessity of U.S. dominance in space. Throughout the Cold War, this rhetoric was in tune with the dominant national narrative of American exceptionalism. In the twenty-first century, the media continue to frame space exploration as a matter of races, threats and dominance. Communication research has shown how public discourses can, in the process of perpetuating national narratives, also function covertly to legitimate the power of elites (Rushing and Frentz 1991). While some historians and policy analysts have considered the role of the mass media in the history of the U.S. space program,15 few scholars of media and communication have examined this relationship. There has been little collaboration between scholars of space policy and history and experts in media and communication who could enrich understanding of the role of the media in the history and future of space exploration. Critical scholarly analysis of the rhetoric of space exploration – official and popular – and the role of the mass media in its construction and dissemination could advance public understanding of the function and purpose of an $18-billion-a-year public program and stimulate public involvement in mapping its future. Rhetorical critic Janice Hocker Rushing made the case that the postApollo-era focus of space exploration on the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life is a product of a widespread understanding that humankind

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exists in a universe, not only on planet Earth. The narrative of space exploration today might better reflect this understanding by telling a story of ‘a spiritual humbling of self’ rather than ‘an imperialistic grabbing of territory’ (Rushing 1986: 284). Cultural studies scholar Constance Penley (1997, 1992) notes that while ‘the WASP space cowboy version of spaceflight’ has persisted from the Apollo era into the present, at the same time NASA ‘is still the most popular point of reference for utopian ideas of collective progress’. In the popular imagination, ‘NASA continues to represent . . . perseverance, cooperation, creativity and vision’, and these meanings embedded in the narrative of space flight ‘can still be mobilized to rejuvenate the near-moribund idea of a future toward which dedicated people . . . could work together for the common good’ (Penley 1992: 207–208). The media could contribute to engendering a wide-ranging dialogue about possible human futures in space by broadening conceptions of official sources and legitimate voices, soliciting and airing a broader array of views, devoting more time and space to this issue, considering space exploration as a cultural rather than a strictly scientific or technological endeavor. Newer media forms and practices such as social networking, blogging and citizen journalism hold promise for initiating, sustaining and ultimately globalizing such a dialogue. With what one media scholar has described as the ‘worldwide emergence of all kinds of community, alternative, oppositional, participatory and collaborative media practices’ (Deuze 2006: 262) come greater opportunities for public participation in not only news reporting and analysis but also in public-policy decision making. While there has yet been no real public dialogue as yet about the human future in space, the trend of populist media has potential for generating such a dialogue.

Conclusions To sum up, the dominant narrative of U.S. space exploration is deeply embedded in an enduring national narrative of American exceptionalism that justifies unilateral action and the globalization of American capitalist democracy and material progress. But the story of space exploration is also woven into a competing narrative, a vision of ‘utopian ideas of collective progress’ (Penley 1997: 207–208) and ‘a spiritual humbling of self’ (Rushing 1986: 284). This competing narrative may serve as fodder for broad public dialogue on possible human future in space and the spiritual as well as political or economic or scientific value of space exploration.

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‘What is the space program for?’ asks AlterNet writer and political activist Tad Daley. ‘Why should progressives . . . care . . .?’ Daley argues that space exploration does have a purpose: to remind us ‘that we have obligations and responsibilities not just to ourselves . . . but also to the community’. He also argues that space exploration ultimately will enable ‘planetary patriotism’ to take the place of ‘national patriotism’ and perhaps ‘engender permanent human peace as well’ (Daley 2007: n.p.). The dominant cultural narrative of space exploration depicts outer space as a sort of supermarket of resources, open to exploitation by whoever gets there first. A subordinate narrative presents outer space as a pristine wilderness to be studied and appreciated but left unaltered. In public dialogue, other narratives may emerge to explain the human future in space. In the mid-1970s, anthropologist Ashley Montagu told a NASA-sponsored symposium on the subject of ‘life beyond Earth and the mind of man’ that people ‘are no longer humane beings, but sick persons – a sickness induced by the worship of false values’. Montagu recommended preparing for what he considered to be the eventual discovery of extraterrestrial life ‘by becoming what you ought to be, by realizing your evolutionary destiny, which is to live as if to live and to love were one’ (Berendzen 1973: 26). In a similar vein, astrobiologist and natural philosopher David Grinspoon has observed, ‘We can conceive of a truly intelligent, sustainable communicating society. But we don’t know if we can become one. So we search the skies for confirmation of a hopeful image of ourselves’ (Grinspoon 2004: 414). The space community is not inclined to reflect on the nature and functions and meanings of the cultural institution of space exploration in the postindustrial, postmodern (or post-postmodern) world. The question of whether and how space exploration serves society and culture deserves deeper thought. The possibility of extraterrestrial life can help humans to think about how to live together (terrestrials and extraterrestrials alike). The guiding principles that nations adopted at the beginning of the Space Age when they signed the U.N. Outer Space Treaty have brought 50 years of maintaining space for peaceful and beneficial uses. As the Obama Administration is reevaluating policies and programs and spacepolicy issues are in the public eye, it is time to engage the widest possible array of ‘publics’ in dialogue about the human future in space. Improving understanding of and developing new perspectives on our home planet as well as the place of and for life on it is perhaps the only sound rationale for continuing a government-funded space exploration program in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion Stewart M. Hoover, Ph.D. and Monica M. Emerich, Ph.D.

We originally conceived this book addressing relations between media and nonformal, implicit and practiced religion. We anticipated that ‘spirituality’ would both stand in for and, in a way, replace ‘religion’. This would also replace religions-as-institutions and as-doctrines with a category that seemed to function emically as this kind of denatured form or stage of religion within many of the phenomena in this project. However, our experience with our own ethnographic research conducted with our students at the University of Colorado’s Center for Media, Religion and Culture as well as that with the various conferences the Center has sponsored has encouraged a rethinking. We came to realize that segregating spirituality from religion with regard to media and social change introduces an artificial boundary that does little to further either the intellectual work on spirituality or – more importantly for our purposes – on questions of media and social transformation. Thus, we decided that this book must be inclusive rather than exclusive in how individuals and organizations apply the deeper questions of existence in mediated ways to reshape social values in context. We intend to enable, not disable, the complexity of spiritualities; and we intend to enable multicultural voices and polysemic viewpoints and still speak about social transformation in ways that are less concerned with institutions and structures and more with the cultural and political forces bearing down through the media. Alternative spiritualities and spiritual seekers have a legitimate claim on the word ‘spirituality’, particularly in mass media, where this word has become, in commonplace discourse, synonymous with individualized beliefs such as what we find in the ‘New Age’. But it is a term that also has the power to help define ‘the religious’. Spirituality has developed a more elaborated language in contemporary times. The term (conveniently

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or not) sidesteps issues and sensibilities linked to the word and idea of ‘religion’, yet is still able to operate within the broader imaginary in such a way that it denotes ‘religious’ ideals such as ethics and morality. This can allow individuals to address the cultural and political pressures that arise from or are articulated through faith but to do so in new ways that may be less problematic in the public sphere, on the one hand, and more emically satisfying on the other. Spirituality, conceived of in this new, more contingent way, provides a semiotic purchase that can (a) encourage dialogue across differences by avoiding traditional language ‘hotspots’ that can enflame tensions; (b) support logics through which individuals can integrate their multiple identities, locations and roles, including the ‘public’ and ‘private’ and the ‘global’ and ‘local’, and (c) still encourage inclusivity because of the contingent nature of the concept of ‘spiritual’ as used in these contexts, accepting, of course, the critique that such a view of spirituality can be problematic because it is so diffuse. To be able to inject into social issues the deeper concerns of religion – as guiding principles about how to live, about the essence of life – without evoking ‘religion’ allows individuals to frame issues in ways that overcome constraining social or political barriers or biases. Additionally, recontextualizing social events in ethical, moral and spiritual language may invite participants who would otherwise have been overlooked, underrepresented or excluded from important dialogue and practices. These may be individuals who have been denied access to the cultural resources required for participation through other means; this lack of access might be due to such things as restrictions imposed by formal religious institutions, media literacy efforts, discrimination or received notions of distinction and difference that limit rather than promote dialogue and cooperation. There is an inclusive and a regenerative ability of spirituality. This quality is often celebrated as liberating, as useful to resistive movements and alternative voices in benign, progressive or democratic movements. However, these qualities of ‘spirituality’ can be just as useful to reactionary, reductive forces as well. Both the language and practices of spirituality and the media have been integrated into ‘fundamental social processes’, to borrow the phrase from Dyan and Katz. As conveyors, creators and maintainers of culture, media are involved not only in what we talk about but also in how we talk about it, where we do so, and the actions we take as a result. Media are positioned so centrally in the social world that people, cultures, events or beliefs are often thought not to be authentic, legitimate or real unless and until they are mediated

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by modern mass communication. And, in many ways, this same logic holds true for spirituality, in the sense that spirituality can operate to authenticate practices, organizations, products and beliefs, marking these as somehow worthy or more true. While this might indeed be the case, it certainly is by no means always the case and it is of interest to note that ‘spiritualmarketing’ has become a branding technique used to set a type of mood (Pritchard and Morgan 1998) or feeling across a range of practices, from grocery shopping to space exploration. The convergence of media and spirituality is a process of social and cultural change. Populations adopt new technologies and apply new applications for those technologies, including for expression of spiritual life and the spiritualization of political and social life. We live in a media culture – where ‘images, sounds and spectacles help form the fabric of everyday life’, Doug Kellner notes (1995), and we are living as well in a spiritualized culture, where the religious and spiritual inform more and more aspects of our lives. When we speak of media culture, we refer to the way in which media forms and technologies become the sites where we interact, learn, even worship. They provide the raw material by which we form identities, both personal and collective. Media are the arbiters of ‘events’ but can also be events in and of themselves. For example, the recent film Avatar was both a particular text but also a form that represented new instantiations of the filmic through its pioneering use of 3D technology. The rapid development and cultural acceptance of new media shape ‘social conditions by which authority is produced’, says Bryan Turner (2007: 118) and which we have seen in the pages here. Access to new forms of media – from blogging to social networking sites and e-zines – may have not only permanently changed the media landscape, blurring the lines between media producer and media audience and shifting the nature of who decides what is news and what is not, but also challenged hierarchies of power, revealing their fallibilities and fragilities. The authors in this book have challenged us to think about authoritative expression, about the flex of power through a convergence of media and spirituality, and how these become tools through which to probe what Jürgen Habermas has called the ‘fault lines’ of a diverse society: the fissures where social change incubates and erupts. Their work has shown how both spiritualized media and mediated spiritual discourses are put to use to mystify, veil and misrepresent even as they can serve as lenses of disclosure and justice or tools of resistance.

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The authors here have presented these diverse perspectives as they occur through a variety of forms of media and spirituality. Spirituality is examined in a number of ways: as the heart of a religious tradition, as one ingredient of personal identity, as an ethos or as a geopolitical force. These works have used as their media ‘lens’ a range of forms, including graphic design, tourism materials, educational films, public relations, newspapers, magazines, blogs, advertising, television, YouTube and interpersonal communication. The power of media has been generally considered to lie in their ability to generate urgency, authenticity, legitimacy and participation. As conceived here, spirituality has many of the same capacities.

Future Directions As we reflect on the work presented here, we have identified key themes that we hope can guide further work on these questions 1. Spiritualization and commodification. More work needs to be done on the ways in which spirituality is subsumed by and put to work by market capitalism. As the term gains wider application in the world as a depoliticized and distilled articulation of religion, it will likely also become more acceptable and understandable across cultures, even though – and probably in great part because – it lacks clearly defined perimeters. The cultural gain of spirituality hasn’t been lost on marketers; it’s a lucrative conduit for the selling of things. Garry Tregidga and Elonda Clay explored this with the selling of identity. For example, Tregidga’s study of the omission of the spiritual identity of Cornwall, Methodism, and its resultant situation as a resistant identity to the dominance of English culture and the Church of England, revealed how tourism can construct marketable visions for paying clientele, but also how such a project gives rise to a reinvigorated Cornishness. The battle over what it is that constitutes an authentic Cornish identity occurs in great part via media, and spiritual matters. Authenticity is a contested word, nowhere more so than in the marketplace. Commonly used to attribute a historical or legal accuracy to a product, practice or policy, the term has also come to stand for something more difficult to point to, as a quality of being somehow more meaningful and ‘true’. The ‘authentic’ is meant to convey something that has penetrated or superseded market-based superficialities in such a way that it both reveals

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a core essence of human experience and delivers it in ways that claim to increase the user’s satisfaction (Emerich 2006). Ann Hardy’s essay examines how such spiritual identities are put to use in public texts meant for an audience not necessarily even familiar with original contexts and meanings. Mara Einstein touches on this as well in her study of the subsumation of the social gospel by advertising. On the one hand, one might argue that having corporations engage in the extension of social welfare to the general public is a good and necessary thing, especially given their power in the world. On the other hand, however, while popular advertising, for example, the Benetton ‘united colors’ ads and Coca Cola’s ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ may have – to follow a line in Curtis Coats’s argument – served to send bold messages of peace and unity, in the end, Einstein and Claire Badaracco say, marketing interests can never replace social arrangements as that is not their actual purpose. 2. Resisting the religious characterization and stereotypes of the media. As Sharif Islam points out, the ongoing depictions by mass media of a ‘mass’ Islam occludes our ability to understand Islam as nuanced, differentiated and woven into local communities and cultures. Instead, the seeming fascination in the media with an Islam only visible in global events, and even then as violent and antisocial, stands against efforts by communities to craft efforts that might reduce tensions among religions and the religious. Along with this, what impact might alternative media and spirituality, particularly that expressed in humanistic terms, have in these struggles? How can these means further the reconciliation of differences that threaten the stability and safety of all in a community or society? John Hochheimer, Carol Bliss and Lee Gilmore explored these themes, showing us how new media forms can engage with reconciliation, not only among groups but interpersonally as well, and how spirituality can serve as an articulation of personhood. How can we further develop these capacities of media to encourage a focus on the essentials of common human experience? Where can this happen and with what impact? 3. The use of a depoliticized spirituality to nonetheless build collective momentum for change. In her essay on the website Mideast Youth, Rebecca Self describes how a handful of students from diverse religious and political backgrounds in the Middle East used digital media to bring the world’s attention to human rights abuses and religious intolerance, turning otherwise forgotten political

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prisoners into causes célèbre, forcing authorities to publicly discuss reasons for political imprisonments. Similarly, Jennifer Schneider argues that certain sorts of ‘God talk’ enable a meeting across the divides of religion. This important bridging quality of spirituality and of the media deserves further investigation. As Bliss argues, the power of media with younger generations is particularly important, enabling classroom pedagogies that encourage dialogue – an important function, in particular, of social media. In another aspect of this, Lionel Wee discusses the two-way use of media by activists and news organizations to generate a common ethical understanding of the treatment of animals, showing how this occurs through media on three levels by first creating the sense of commonality and community among publics and activists. Once that occurs, the media can generate a sense of obligation on all parties to commit to acts of social change by convincing individuals of the importance of the subject as requiring ‘careful and urgent deliberation’. More research is necessary to understand exactly why it is that spirituality has been stubbornly resistant to definition, rather than decrying it for being so. The opportunities that lie within porosity may have useful applications in negotiations among situations and groups that are keenly aware of the differences in their defining boundaries. 4. Media power. While there has been a great deal of celebration about the agential aspects of media, we can’t forget the very real constraints on social actors from participation with and in media, the political economy of media, and the role of media in the constructions of social reality and culture. As Linda Billings points out, a single subject in visual imagery, in her case photographs taken of planet earth from space, can be manipulated to signify various aspects of identity because of the unique power wielded by those holding the means of access and technology to space. The space photos are used alternately to signify earth as holistic entity, home to all types of species and cultures, earth as under environmental attack and earth as the pristine basis of the extension of America’s Manifest Destiny into outer space. Economic standing and technological prowess have advantages when it comes to media and the generation of messages, and in the case of space photography, this is taken to a grand level. As Billings shows, the ideology of the space race depends in great part on the shaping of communications about the planet. Janice Peck asks in her exploration of the ideological power of cause marketing, charity TV and celebrity philanthropy that we consider the

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ideological effects of media on the way in which individuals understand the contents of a democratic social policy. To what extent, she wonders, is the appearance of concern and charity substituting for genuine social transformation? Other authors point to the responsibilities of media in civil society, to encourage debate and dialogue instead of indulging in ‘sensationalism’. How and where are media outlets applying tactics to cohere and for what purpose? In what ways do these practices seem spiritualized and under what conditions do these surface? 5. Media responsibility and ethics. Tied to number four above, the exploration of how and where spirituality is engaged in socially transformative processes raises new questions about the responsibility media practitioners have to the advance of democracy. In her chapter, Samantha Lawrie speaks about a media form not often considered in media studies texts: graphic design. She calls graphic designers, the powerful new shamans of a mediated world and as such, says they must carefully negotiate their expertise and their occupation’s centrality in business and culture with the impacts of their work in the shaping of public culture. As Curtis Coats points out market-based practices are too often seen as essentially profane, but he provides a nuanced view of this using an example of spiritual tourism marketing. While it is certainly true that charges of co-optation and commodification in relation to the spiritual beliefs of ‘the other’ are apt in many instances of ‘spirituality’, things can also be seen differently. Spiritual tourism, for example, can also provide opportunities for these same ‘Others’ to engage in shared social experiences and thus create platforms upon which they build a common sense of belonging and community. Attention to and respect for traditions of ritual and faith are thus a new responsibility of all media organizations. Representations can either polarize or cohere populations. The stimulation of civic engagement requires media to provide spaces in which dialogue about representations and constructions – including about the role of the media in making those very interpretations – can occur. These spaces are both intellectual – in the formation of media policy – and structural in terms of technology and finance. Media can bridge the imaginary space of fear of the unknown – even as media can amplify misunderstanding and difference, as Coats points out. They can provide apertures through which we can envision change. New media introduce new responsibilities and new ethical challenges. For

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example, the advent of social media has fostered surveillance of other media practices. While more work needs to be done on social media and their impact on civic engagement and socio-political processes, we do know that forms such as Facebook and Twitter can be used to swiftly bring attention through networks to media activity, offering up counterrepresentations and claims, and becoming thereby new contexts of social change with new ethical mandates and responsibilities. 6. The effect of new spiritualities on religious community. New media have enabled the emergence, maturation and expression of new or alternative spiritualities, as Lee Gilmore argues. Media can help individuals overcome differences and stimulate new understandings of collectivity and of shared goals. But for some traditions, the expansion of mediated expression in matters of faith and belief, the emergence of social media and the penetration of media culture in general are perceived as threats. Solomon Schimmel explores an interesting blend of these problems and opportunities. His study of the ways in which members of orthodox Jewish communities use blogs shows how these participants express concerns, ideas and challenges regarding their communities and use the blogs to draw attention to the needs of others. Yet, their blogging can be unacceptable by traditional religious authorities. The potential of these bloggers to reach others in the community and to dialogue with those who hold different, even disapproving views, is an exciting avenue for research. As Lee Gilmore effectively reminds us, and related to Schimmel’s research, in spite of a preponderance of scholarship that looks at the effects of media on culture, we should not forget that culture is shaping media at the same time.

In Closing This book explored the ways in which individuals, groups and organizations can generate messages that appeal to what is assumed to be a deeper level of human experience, the realm of deep values from which we weave the fabric of our identities, our communities and our ideologies. These ‘spiritualized’ means and messages can be put to use to build bridges of cooperative effort among disputes just as they can to manipulate and extend power. In each case, however, it has appeared that the spirituality in question is a set of materials, practices and beliefs that is assumed to be able to overcome other types of obstacles in the path to communication

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and to point to some type of common human experience that supersedes other differences, other ways of seeing and being. It has become commonplace to think of spirituality as more agential than religion because it is more accommodating of interpretive praxis and, less subject to the determining influences of the institutional religious tradition. Its particular usefulness as a tool with which to engage in socially transformative processes is rooted in spirituality’s real or perceived ability to address deeply ingrained biases that have attached, rightly or wrongly, to ideas about religion. While the amorphous quality might make the concept of spirituality theoretically elusive (some would say useless and even dangerous in its creation of another separation or distinction among human practices), we argue that this quality may be its key usefulness in becoming a sort of lingua franca capable of cohering people despite other differences that seem to aggravate rather than smooth the way forward for collective action and social betterment. The term ‘spirituality’ itself has become prevalent in media – serving to legitimate everything from green consumer goods to human rights campaigns. Perhaps we can think of the media as institutionalizing spirituality as a type of ‘commons’ where all can enter and participate with some basic rules in place. Particularly in what are called the ‘lifestyle’ media, spirituality has been commonly understood as designating some set of universalized ethics based on common needs for survival (see Terry Eagleton 1991, 2003). Spirituality is positioned in these processes of social change as something not ‘distinguishable from political, sexual, dietary or financial life’, as William Kirkwood wrote (1994: 13), and this is a condition it also shares with media. Spirituality’s cache in popular parlance and its fungibility and media’s flexibility, speed of response, and distribution accommodate each other well in the cause of social change. Both have transcended segregation into fixed categories, erasing distinctions that would keep them distinct from the secular or the religious or from each other. This desegregation of lived experience and the sacred has generated a great deal of literature on the advent and evolution of ‘spiritual seeking’ (see Wuthnow 1990, 1998; Roof 1992, 1999). Where spiritual life was once considered a matter of devotion and attention to religious tradition, individuals today legitimately assume responsibility for their own spiritual development. Along with this, media have evolved to position individual audience members and consumers as active and autonomous producers of news, standing against received news sources and authorities. These latter

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are themselves now increasingly suspect for their cultural inertia, resistance to change and imputed biases. Along with this, media have become especially active in the articulation of religion. Media are where we live and their normative positioning in culture means no subject, certainly not anything as integral to everyday life for so many as religion, is off bounds. Media, then, have also become a lingua franca; pervasive, penetrating and prolific, mediation becoming a recognized symbol in itself. Twitter has become the voice of current events; television delivers up cultures to our living rooms; the Internet has become not only an informational resource but also the site of ritual and worship. Thus the media shape a culture of spirituality as spiritualization shapes media products in turn. Freed from the singular controls of the institution – be it religious or corporate – media producers or users can credibly adapt and adopt spiritual expression to their visions of social transformation. As we have seen, this is not a universally available set of tools, because they are interdependent with other factors – including financial means of production, education, local use and content laws, geographical location, gender, physical ability, etc. While some laud the ‘freedom’ of agent-actors to ‘seek’ new expression and identity through new mediated and spiritual voyages, there needs to be serious thought given to the manner in which the normative claims of the broad accessibility of these tools blinds us to their determinative, structurally constraining roles, particularly when we think of serious matters of social transformation. For instance, the immediacy of experience provided by new media and spiritualities may overly emphasize immediate gratification over longer-term involvement in civil society. The ability of media and spiritualities to engage new populations is appealing, but we must be aware of the possibility that ‘spirituality’ can – through the media – become an elite endeavor, limited to those with the financial and cultural capital to participate. What we have seen is that spirituality and media combine into a formidable force for the mobilization of individuals, groups and campaigns and the shaping of messages and opinions. Because, to quote Daniel Mato (2008), ‘social processes in the world today are characterized by the growing importance of relations between actors located in different national spaces’, media can bridge among invested and interested actors and pathways to social action by bringing remote issues to the surface and by allowing remote populations to commit acts of social conscience. In the midst of

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this, however, scholarship needs to retain a sense of perspective on the political economy of media, on technological forms, on ideology, on sociohistorical conditions, as well as on the interpretation or reception of messages. The role of the media in ‘the social production of representations’ has been well documented. What is less known is the way in which spirituality can do the same and how it does so via media. We hope that this book can further these discussions and investigations by raising new questions about the depth and significance of what appears to be a fundamental convergence of media and spirituality with social change in economic, political and cultural arenas. As we have shown here, these are questions that are rooted both in the manifest practices of the production, circulation and consumption of these new forms, and in the broader question of what social and cultural ‘work’ is being done and what it produces. These are not easy questions to answer, but we hope the efforts here will have moved the discourse to a new stage.

Notes

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See Gilmore, 2010. Portions of this essay also appear there. See Gilmore 2010. In my surveys and interviews, 58 percent of respondents described their spiritual perspective as in some way ‘alternative’, while 74 percent said that their lives or perspectives on life had been changed by Burning Man. See http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/ principles.html; accessed May 22, 2009. See http://eplaya.burningman.com; accessed May 22, 2009. See for example Larry Harvey, ‘Burning Man and Cyberspace (9th Annual Be-In, January 1997)’, available from http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/ people/cyber.html; accessed May 22, 2009. Prominent self-professed ‘Burners’ include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, among others. See http://www.beliefnet.com/About-Us/About-Beliefnet.aspx; accessed May 22, 2009. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See David Ian Miller, ‘Mac Geek Mike Lee is a committed atheist living a deeply spiritual life’, available from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/ 2008/12/15/findrelig.DTL; accessed May 22, 2009. See http://groups.myspace.com; accessed May 22, 2009. See http://www.youtube.com; accessed May 22, 2009.

Chapter 4 1

The TEACH Act provides educators with expanded rights in addition to fair use to show or play copyrighted works in the classroom and can be downloaded from the Copyright Clearance Center (http://www.copyright.com/media/pdfs/CRTEACH-Act.pdf). There are also guidelines at most institutions, some of which have dedicated offices for legal guidance of this nature, for example the University of Texas Office of General Counsel (http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/ intellectualproperty/teachact.htm). More information can be found in Section 110 (1) of the Copyright Act. It is always a wise idea to check with your institution

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for its policy statement and guidelines regarding the use of open source media in the classroom (Ohler 2008). As a side note here, because the Internet does not ban obscenity or graphic images (Campbell, Martin and Fabos 2007), I ask students to write a disclaimer in advance of viewings about the content. This is for the comfort level of their classmates who may have different religious or cultural sensibilities. Without that, the purpose of the project is defeated, appearing instead as a rude and insensitive gesture that defies values differences rather than honoring those.

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As Dyzenhaus (2003: 345–346) asks: ‘Is it better for a society composed of groups which have done terrible things to each other in the past to confront as fully as possible past atrocities or to suppress the memory of atrocities and get on with the job of living together? Who gets to pose the question? Negotiate and frame the answers? Upon whose terms will the parameters of dialogue and reconciliation be considered? What might justice look like in a society, which is undergoing transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one? To whom?’ And, what are the appropriate roles for journalists? It also provides the foundation of prejudice, racism, colonialism and empire. ‘Conversation with oneself, while admittedly vulnerable to error, is also crowned as the site of our best proximity to truth’ (Riley 2004: 66). Indeed, ‘It’s in th(e) exploitation of the gap between the inner voice and the outer voice that the lie lies’ (Riley 2004: 68). Media have been used both to create and to exacerbate fear, hatred and anger as precursors to violence and genocide as they can be means of their resolution. The stories of pain and hatred handed down from parents to children, from teacher to student, from government to citizenry can take place for centuries constituting a primary part of a society’s mythical sense of itself. One need look no further for examples than from Nazi Germany (Bytwerk 2001, Giessen 2003), or from Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and former Yugoslavia (Gardner 2001). Indeed these stories contributed greatly to the rationale for the outbreak of war in Kosovo in the 1990s (see Nadle 1999). As recently as July 2005, Serbian media drew upon these conceptions in the ways they depicted the tenth memorial to the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica (Popham and Zimonjic 2005). Adapted from Hochheimer 2005. See, for example, Graff 2005. See Glazer (1999), Hochheimer (2001), Hope and Trammel (1992), hooks (1994), Horwitz (2002), Kazanjian and Laurence (2002), Youth of the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center (1991). Both try, in short, to understand (which means, literally, ‘to stand under’) a higher sense of knowing and of meaning than they, as human beings, can ever fully comprehend. This encounter compels each of us to recognize and, ultimately to accept that we, each and all of us can know only part of the greater

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meaning that is out there, somewhere, but to which we are all connected. The scientific method can only take us so far in our knowledge; the rest we can only grasp within a certain degree of uncertainty or, as the physicist J. Bronowski (1974) urged, a certain degree of tolerance. Whatever we look at is profoundly affected by us just in the act of looking. This implies, of course, that we are connected to the objects of our interests – both human and nonhuman things – in ways that we can never fully know. Such media build upon the multi-media recording, performance and radio projects of the 1950s and1960s and beyond (Hochheimer 2006). It is the subject of conjecture, analysis, introspection and faith that has been written about and practiced within all faith traditions for many centuries. While people have attached different names to this voice, its presence and the similarities of its encounters across cultures, is too vital to be ignored (Kamenetz 1994, James 1902, Turner 2006). http://www.videoletters.net/article-1030.106821-en.html Journalism and communication education have typically been defined as the means to teach students the norms and processes of news work in order to provide them with the skills they need to succeed within the journalism industries. It poses the students as blank slates to be drawn upon; they are seen as people with no previous knowledge into which the teacher will pour relevant facts and skills, which the student is obliged to learn in order to succeed. As Paulo Freire (1999) has pointed out, however, education is either about maintaining the existing order by imposing on people the values and cultural perspectives of the dominant classes, or it is about liberation, i.e., about helping them to find their places in a free and open social order. To take an objectivist position in the face of human struggle is to deny any connection with the people involved in that struggle. The degree to which students (as reporters) are turned into objective observers is the degree to which they are also turned against the very humanity which they are charged to represent. Objectivity is, as Remen (1996) suggests, that which ‘separates us from the life around us and within us . . . In the objective stance no one can draw on their human strengths, no one can cry, or accept comfort, or find meaning, or pray. No one who is untouched by it can really understand the life around them either’ (78). This perspective also turns the news media into vehicles which further distance community members from themselves and from each other; it acts to break down connection between people and their past, between each other as they face their present conditions and between men and women in their abilities to work together in the future. Clearly a function and a result of the Videoletters Project. Examples for how this may work come from all over the world. A few may be found in Hochheimer 2001. Some helpful places to begin, especially in the realms of pedagogy and reconciliation include: Glazer (1999), Henderson and Marek (2001), hooks (1994), Horwitz (2002), Intrator (2002), Kazanjian and Laurence (2002), Kessler (2000), Krishnamurti (1953), Loeb (1999), Montero (1995), Remen (1996), Taylor (1996), Tompkins (1996).

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This chapter stems from numerous conversations between the author and Esra’a Al Shafei, primarily when the author was a faculty member and Esra’a a student at Franklin College Switzerland. Unless otherwise indicated, direct quotes are by Ms. Al Shafei December 14, 2008. ‘Social Media for Social Change’. Bitterlemons-international.org February 26, 2009 Edition 8, Volume 7 http://www.bitterlemons-international.org/inside. php?id=1071. http://www.mideastyouth.com Esra’a and her cohorts who create cartoons, video and extensive coverage online and in traditional media, exemplify Don Tapscott’s eight norms of the net generation: freedom (in their own independence), customization (as evidenced by their wildly popular mashups, with combined YouTube viewers upwards of 100,000), scrutiny (for their comment on national and international leaders), integrity (in their unrelenting commitment to freedom of expression), collaboration (numerous media producers around North Africa and the Middle East work on Mideast Youth content), entertainment (their videos and cartoons are indeed quite funny and appeal to wide audiences), speed and innovation (the latter two are evidenced in their timely creation of campaigns and successful, new uses of social media for social change). http://www.mideastyouth.com/censeo/ For more on bridgebloggers, see Ethan Zuckerman’s ‘Meet the Bridgebloggers: Who’s speaking and who’s listening in the International Blogosphere’. Draft Presented at ‘The Power and Political Science of Blogs’ University of Chicago September 16–17, 2005, revised December 23, 2005. http://ethanzuckerman. com/meetthebridgebloggers/ezuckermanbridgeblog122305.html and Marc Lynch’s Spring 2007, ‘Blogging the new Arab public’ in Arab Media & Society. http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=10 http://www.freekareem.org http://www.bahairights.org/ Esra’a based this on responses to a questionnaire filled out as individuals sign up to become members of Mideast Youth. The media producers and students behind Mideast Youth and CENSEO have created numerous campaigns and projects, most of which can be seen on their website: http://www.mideastyouth.com/projects/. see www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0aylHuBHKQ&feature=channel_page, or http:// www.mideastyouth.com/censeo/. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8sPhlqu13A or http://www.mideastyouth. com/censeo/. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEI8RxFL7Zs or http://www.mideastyouth. com/censeo/. Other Mideast Youth campaigns include: • MigrantRights.org, raising awareness of the plight of over millions of migrant workers in Middle East. • Global Village TV.org, Esra’a says, ‘We thought, “Every time someone says interfaith there are three religions: Muslims, Christians and Jews. Everyone

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else is nonexistent even though they face the most persecution. This site educates people on Hindhus Zoroastora Yazidis, etc.” ’ • AfghanPress, using the Internet to document remote villages in Afghanistan. The idea is to put Afghanistan online. • And most recently, Postcards to Iran which uses postcards as a medium to call for justice in Iran and let political prisoners there know they have support from around the world. 15

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The Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2008 prison census: online and in jail 125 journalists, 45 percent, bloggers, online editors, or Web-based reporters. http:// www.cpj.org/imprisoned/cpjs-2008-census-online-journalists-now-jailed-mor.php http://www.Mideastyouth.com/meycast/faq/ The July 2009 protest following the Iranian election highlights this change and the ways new media are used to support it.

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The top corporate income tax rate fell from 49.2 percent in 1970 to 35 percent in 2002 (U.S. Internal Revenue Service 2002a, 288–289), while the top marginal individual tax rate declined from 91 percent for incomes $400,000 and above in 1960 to a top rate of 38.6 percent for incomes $307,00 and higher in 2002 (U.S. Internal Revenue Service 2002b, 220). From 1984 to 2004 some 30 million full-time workers lost their jobs (Uchitelle 2006, 5). The share of U.S. income earned by the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers has more than doubled since the 1970s, while the share earned by the bottom 90 percent of Americans has fallen (Johnston 2005).

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The Social Gospel refers to a concept that came out of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a movement where Christians believed they should work to improve social conditions for the poor, the sick and the less fortunate. By the early twentieth century, the Social Gospel was tied to other movements of the time like temperance, women’s suffrage and settlement houses. The popularity of this idea within the church has fluctuated over time, but by the 1950s it had a new wave of popularity fueled in part by Dr. King, an advocate of the social gospel as evidenced by his work first for the Civil Rights Movement and later advocating for the poor. The social gospel remained in favor through most of the 1970s, but declined in the wake of the rise of evangelicalism, which believes in a personal relationship with Jesus. The Global Fund is heavily supported by foreign countries. The funds raised by RED are miniscule in comparison to these monies. Environmental marketing reflects the growth of consumer interest in sustainable living. There is now a consumer category for this. LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) marketing, for example, was a $206 billion industry by 2006.

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This boomer-targeted category includes products related to personal health, green building, ecotourism, natural lifestyles, alternative transportation, alternative and renewable power and socially responsible investing. However, intention is not action. While CRM is important, it is not the driving factor behind a purchase decision (only 14% of the time). P&G administers a similar campaign for Pampers. Called ‘One Pack = One Vaccine’, this initiative is in conjunction with UNICEF and Selma Hayek. It aims to provide tetanus vaccines to infants and mothers in developing countries.

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See also Taubes, G. (2007), Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. New York: Alfred Knopf. See also Ratey, J. (2008), Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. New York: Little, Brown. See also Wansink, B. (2007), Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology and Obesity. University of Illinois Press, 2007. I am indebted to the research on Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) by Monica Emerich, co-director with Stewart Hoover of the 2008 Media, Spiritualities and Social Change conference held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where this chapter was first presented as a paper. Wright and Middendorf cite Lyson in their conclusion on p. 279. See Lyson, T. (2004), Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community. Medford, Mass: Tufts University Press.

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See also Watts, Roberts, Tenowich, Zamora (2007). See also Coleman and Crang (2002). To protect the confidentiality of my respondents, I have changed the names and, thus, omitted citations of some of these promotional materials in the analysis below. Estimates of New Age tourism in Sedona vary widely, from 64 percent (Olsen 2003) to 20 percent (Ivakhiv 2001) to only 8 percent of total visitors (Behavior Research Center 2005). My research (Coats 2008) suggests that between 8 and 20 percent of total visitors are most likely. For these articles, see http://www.earthwisdomtours.com/about.htm For a detailed account of these themes, see Coats (2008) and Coats (2007). See Heelas (1998), Albanese (1990), Taylor (2004). The most prominent buzz phrase used during my time in Sedona, ‘set your intention’, comes directly from The Secret. This phrase stems from a conflation of idealist philosophy and a spiritualized version of quantum mechanics, which suggests that changing the way we think alters material reality. Practitioners and

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tourists alike used this phrase on each spiritual tour that I took and in most of the interviews I conducted. This phrase, ‘be Indian’, is an extension of Deloria’s phrase ‘playing Indian’ (1998). Deloria (1998) traced the Euro-American fascination with Native Americans and various attempts to mimic and re-recreate Native culture and practice. In Sedona, pilgrim-tourists wanted to do more than mimic or play at being Indian. Instead they desired to be Indian. There is a sense in which spiritual practitioners in Sedona are objectified as well, though there is more dialogue with them whereas Native Americans are, for the most part in Sedona, represented.

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Publication of Satanic Verses (1988), a fictional work partly based on Prophet Muhammad’s life, caused hostility and outrage in the Muslim world culminating in a death fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeni. Copies of the book were burnt in the streets of Bolton, in Northern England. The controversy regarding the Muslim veil or hijab has been an ongoing debate in France for more than 15 years starting with the struggle around students wearing the veil in public schools. In March 2004, the French government enacted a law that prohibits the display of religious symbols in public schools. On November 2, 2007 Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh was shot in Amsterdam by 26-year-old Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent, Mohammed Bouyeri, who declared Van Gogh an enemy of Islam. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/7343986.stm (last accessed August 31, 2009). http://www.abbeymillsmosque.com, retrieved November 20, 2007 currently not online and the domain is now for sale. http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/index/section.php?page=about_us Public worship of non-Islamic religion is prohibited in Saudi-Arabia although the country currently has 800,000 Catholics mostly due to immigrant workers from the Philippines and India (see this story from Time, Wednesday, March 19, 2008). (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1723715,00.html). http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2009/127310.htm

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Author’s contact information: Solomon Schimmel, Ph.D. Professor of Jewish Education and Psychology, Hebrew College, 160 Herrick Road, Newton Center, MA 02459, Tel: 617 559 8621, E-mail: [email protected]. http://modiya.nyu.edu/handle/1964/265 www.extremegh.blogspot.com is now defunct but has been continued as modernorthoprax.blogspot.com. In response to my query as to what he thinks his influence has been in the orthodox skeptic blogosphere he wrote to me saying ‘I think it does have a big influence, because I have readers from all over the world.

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And I know that a lot of people read but don’t comment, because occasionally I bait certain people at random, and they always respond . . . Also, I spawned a number of other blogs, e.g. littlefoxling, JewishAtheist etc. So in fact you could say I started a movement (though I in turn was influenced by DovBear and Misnagid, two of the original skeptical blogs)’. In an email communication with me several years earlier the author of this response (who prefers anonymity even with respect to his blogging nickname), who had read a paper of mine that was circulated on the Internet and which had a profound impact on him, had written to me: I was raised Orthodox, without access to any of the evidence against TMS [Torah to Moses at Sinai, i.e. the orthodox doctrine of divine authorship and revelation of the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch or Torah to Moses in the 13th century BC]. I was always skeptical, which kept me in unending trouble with my parents and other authority figures. Eventually, I did a reasonably thorough study of MSPM [Multiple Source Post Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, such as the Documentary Hypothesis] and was greatly relieved to find out that it’s not just me. Today, I’m still stuck in the frum [very orthodox] community, but I’m a secret atheist. I have a popular blog where I write about the sorts of issues you raised in your paper.

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Lubab No More, April 25, 2008. Elishajan, April 27, 2008. The Hedyot, April 25, 2008.

Chapter 14 1

I am not making the assumption that The New York Times is representative of all news media. Its influence has been widely noted and as my goal is to provide a qualitative analysis, its approach is representative beyond its own pages.

Chapter 15 1

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Domke and Coe have tracked the near reversal in voting trends of mainline Christians, evangelical Christians and Catholics over the last three decades. Using survey data, these authors report that, in 1972, 50 percent of U.S. evangelicals identified with the Democratic Party, and 35 percent identified with Republican. By 2004, 56 percent of evangelicals identified with Republicans compared with the 35 percent who identified with Democrats (Domke and Coe 2008: 22). The term ‘god-talk’ has been used by theologians and others since the 1960s. It is used here generally to refer to forms of speech, communication or discourse which address one’s relationship to God, the Bible as authority or otherwise Judeo-Christian imperatives or logic for taking action and being in the world. In short, it is religious language. See Blackstone (1966) and Macquarrie (1967) for early explorations of the concept.

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Moyers was White House Press Secretary under President Lyndon B. Johnson. See Wicker (1965) and Beschloss (1998: 208–212) for more on Moyers’s complicated relationship with Johnson. Little information about the foundation is publicly available, apart from what can be found on conservative-leaning muckraking sites. These sites indicate, however, that the foundation has been instrumental in providing millions of dollars in funding to environmental and other organizations. Moyers reportedly left the Foundation Presidency in 2007, when his son briefly took over the position. This speech was reproduced widely on progressive websites, such as the progressive Common Dreams website (Moyers 2005b), and also appeared as a chapter in the book Moyers on Democracy (Moyers 2008). For example, Cizik engaged in an almost identical exchange with CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour in her investigative special report God’s Warriors, which aired initially in 2008 and continues to air periodically as of this writing (Amanpour 2008). This is Sir John Houghton, who led the ‘scales to fall’ from Cizik’s eyes at a 2002 conference on evangelicalism and climate change (Moyers 2006a). See Psaros (2006: 18), and Wardekker et al. (2008: 55) for more on dispensationalism.

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According to an International Social Survey Progamme project conducted in New Zealand in 2008 ‘only about 35% of New Zealanders describe themselves as “religious”; the rest either describe themselves as nonreligious (35%) or neutral (30%’ (Gendall and Healey 2009: 1). The authors note that ‘the proportion of New Zealanders who said they have no religious affiliation increased from 29% among those surveyed in 1991 to 40% in 2008’ (Gendall and Healey 2009: 4). These guidelines for the governance of staff behavior were enforced by a system of ‘notices’, policy messages from management which staff members were required to read, and to indicate compliance with, by signing that they had read them (I/V former Air New Zealand employee 2009). Barry Barclay’s Mana Tuturu (2007) makes an extended case for tribal Maori control over the use of their own cultural and intellectual property, partly on the basis of the strong spiritual connection between such property and Maori conceptions of identity. Philip Andrew, Creative Director, Clemenger BBDO. Interview, May 19, 2008. According to Information from Statistics New Zealand, at the time of the latest census in 2006, one in seven New Zealanders self-identified as Maori.

Chapter 17 1

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Vision for Space Exploration. NP-2004–01-334-HQ, February 2004.

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See http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov, ‘Documents’. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, H.R. 1, 2009. http://frwebgate.access. gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h1enr.pdf See, for example, Turner 1994. See, for example, Fukuyama 1992. Griffin made these remarks at a breakfast sponsored by Women in Aerospace in Washington, DC, on May 3, 2005. The author was present at this event. See, for example, National Commission on Space 1986. Http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/oosa/SpaceLaw/outerspt.html Http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlevi.html Also see Slotkin 1990, 1985. Also see Limerick 1999. Http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/oosa/SpaceLaw/outerspt.html It is interesting to note that while Maher (2004) claims the 1968 ‘Earthrise’ photo ‘helped extend . . . Manifest Destiny into . . . outer space’, McDougall (2007) argues that that very same image is ‘the greatest icon bequeathed by space technology’ to humankind thus far. . . . ‘It has become a cliché to observe how Earthrise inspired environmentalists since it vividly depicted our biosphere as finite and fragile’. See http://astrobiology.nasa.gov. See, for example, McCurdy 1997.

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TVCS Air New Zealand ‘Amazing Journeys’ TVC (2007), (Dunedin version). Produced by Colenso BBDO. Music by Jim Hall. Air New Zealand ‘Amazing Journeys’ TVC (2007), (West Coast version). Produced by Colenso BBDO. Music by Jim Hall. Meridian ‘Water Power’ TVC. (2007), Produced by Clemenger BBDO, New Zealand. Music by Jim Hall.

Focus Groups Secondary teachers, Hamilton, May 16, 2008. Members of Karma Choeling Buddhist Community, Auckland, May 18, 2008. Members of Exile Christian group, Hamilton, May 25, 2008.

Interviews Philip Andrew, Creative Director, Clemenger BBDO. Interview, May 19, 2008. Jim Hall, Composer, Soundtrax, Auckland. Interview, May 21, 2008. Flight Attendant, Air New Zealand Interview, March 23, 2009.

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Index

Abram, D. 135 The Spell of the Sensuous 135 Adler, S. 98 ads (in NewZealand) 187 description of 188–9 advertising and reflexive spirituality 189–91 Air New Zealand ad 187 ‘Amazing Journeys’ campaign 191 ambiguous nature of production environment 191–7 Meridian Energy ad 187 African American Lives 25, 29–31, 33 African American Lives-2 31, 33 Agassi, Andre 90, 92 Albanese, Catherine 226n. 7 Al Jazeera TV 71, 75–6, 81 Amanpour, Christiane 229n. 6 American Broadcasting Company (ABC) 90 American economic policy 86 Keynesian model 86 American exceptionalism 207–8 American Idol Gives Back 102 Anderson, A. 165–6 Anderson, K. 51 Andrew, P. 229n. 4 Angarrack, J. 22 Appadurai, A. 7 astrobiology 206 atheism 43 Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) 112 authentic 213 authenticity 213 Avatar 212

awareness 108 Awareness 119 Badaracco, C. 9, 214 Bal, M. 190, 193, 197–8 Barclay, B. 229n. 3 Mana Tuturu 229n. 3 Bartels, E. 145 BBC 71, 75, 78, 81, 141 Beard, C. 51 Beck, U. 125 Bellah, R. 37 Berkman Center for Internet and Society 72 Beschloss, M. R. 229n. 3 ‘Beyond the Tamar’ 19 Billings, L. 11, 215 biological citizenship 35 biopolitics 35 biosociality 35 Blackstone, W. T. 228n. 2 Bliss, C. 8, 214–15 blogosphere 10, 38, 147 see also web of criticism 147–57 aim and motive 149 elements of a community 149–57 reason behind bloggers’ criticism 148 response of the criticized 149 Blood Diamonds 90 Bonds, J. 176–7 Bono (Paul David Hewson) 89, 95, 102 Borlase, W. 18 Bouyeri, M. 227n. 3 Brand, S. 41, 201 branded wellness see also CAM Atkins diet 113 carbophobia 113

256

Index

branded wellness (Cont’d) The Great American Steak Religion 112 Lipophobia 112 living food 114 Mindful Eating 113–14 Nutrigenomics 110–16 Slow Food movement 107, 115 Slow Medicine movement 107 branding compassion Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) 95, 226n. 4 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) 95 CSR and CRM 97–102 American Express 97–8 marketing issues with 100–2 Procter & Gamble 97, 100–1 product RED caimpaign 95, 97, 101–2 religion and consumerism 96–7 Bregman, L. 5 bridge-building 8 Brin, S. 221n. 6 Bronowski, J. 223n. 9 Brooks, D. 110 Brown, G. 142 Brown, J. 57 Broyard, A. 34 Broyard, B. 34 Bryant, P. 119 Buber, M. 68 Buddhism 43 Burenhult, G. 129 Burning Man 38–40, 42, 45–6 as a mashup 40 Bush, George W. 104, 174, 179, 201, 203, 206 Carey, J. 3 ‘A Cultural Approach to Communication’ 3 Celtic church 18 Celtic language (Kernewek) 16 Celtic Revivalist movement 15–16 Chagall, M. 50 Cheadle, D. 90

Chidester, D. 43 Chopra, D. 113 Christianity 43 Christianity Today 172, 175 Cizik, R. 175–6, 183, 229n. 6 Clapham, C. 87 Clay, E. 8, 213 Clooney, G. 90 Clottes, J. 129 CNN 76, 78, 92, 203 Coats, C. 10, 214, 216, 226n. 6 Coe, K. 174, 228n. 1 CoEvolution Quarterly 201 Coleman, S. 226n. 2 collective intelligence 44 color line thesis (by DuBois) 32 Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) 204 comparative planetology 206 The Compassionate Listening Project (TCLP) 65 Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) or Integrative medicine 107, 114, 116 connection 49 convergence culture 8, 38–9, 44–6 see also media convergence Cooper, A. 92 Cornish Guardian 18 Craig, A. 142, 143 Crang, M. 226n. 2 cyber-democracy 9 Dalai Lama 111 Daley, T. 208 Damasio, A. 110 Davidson, R. 111 De Jong, I. 145 Deloria, P. J. 227n. 9 Diaz, C. 101 DiCaprio, L. 90, 101 Diebel, L. 93 Direct-To-Consumer advertising 107–8, 112 DIY(do-it-yourself) spirituality 37, 45–6 and Burning Man 39–42 Doble, G. H. 16

Index Domke, D. 174, 228n. 1 Drew, S. 18 Drucker, J. 128 DuBois, W. E. B. 32 Duncombe-Jewell, L. C. 16 Duster, T. 36 Dyan, D. 211 Dyzenhaus, D. 222n. 1 Earthrise (photograph) 205, 230n. 13 Easton, D. 23 ecotheology 180 Einstein, M. 9, 214 Eisenstein, H. 86 Ellias, Jamal J. 142 Emerich, M. 226n. 4 Esra’a Al Shafei 71–5, 78–81, 224n. 1, 224n. 4, 224n. 9, 224n. 14 the bridgeblogger 74 Etling, B. 80 evangelical Christianity 180 Facebook 38, 54, 76, 217 Faludi, S. 200 fan cultures 39 Flickr 38 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 113–15 Four Corners Magazine 119 Fox News 203 Freeman, M. 33 Freire, P. 62–3, 67, 125–6, 223n. 13 Frommer’s 119 Fukuyama, F. 230n. 5 Fuller, G. 142 Gardner, C. 115 Gates, B. 90, 92 Gates, H. L. 29, 31 Gates, M. 90, 92 genetic blackness 33 genetic genealogy 28 Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMS) 29 DNA fingerprinting 29 mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) 29

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and the quest for heritage African Ancestry (ancestary testing company) 29 AfricanDNA ( ancestry testing company) 29 and the quest for heritage 28–30 geneticization 32 geneticized blackness 31 narratives of 31–5 Gerson, M. 102 Gildea, R. 17 Gilliat-Ray, S. 142 Gilmore, L. 8, 214, 217, 221n. 1, 221n. 2 Glazer, S. 222n. 8, 223n. 16 Global Fund 225n. 2 God’s Warriors 229n. 6 Gore, A. 161, 163, 166, 169, 183 Graff, E. J. 66, 222n. 7 graphic design(ers) 127 as problem solvers 130 and shaman 127–9, 133 as story-telling 132 Vs. advertising 130 Gray, H. 33 Griffin, M. 201, 230n. 6 Grimes, R. 36 Grinspoon, D. 209 The Guardian 143 Guiliano, M. French Women Don’t Get Fat 112 Habermas, J. 145–6, 212 Hadler, N. 115 Haley, A. 30 Roots: The Saga of an American Family 30 Hall, J. 192 Hall, M. C. 193 Hammonds, E. 36 Hardy, A. 11, 214 Harvey, L. 221n. 5 Hawk, T. 92 Hawken, P. 113 Hayek, S. 226n. 5 ‘Heaven and Earth’ 19 Heber, D. 114 Heelas, P. 120, 189, 226n. 7

258

Index

Helfand, J. 128 Henderson, R. 223n. 16 Hjarvard, S. 27 Hochheimer, J. 8, 214, 222n. 6, 222n. 8, 223n. 15 hooks, b. 222n. 8, 223n. 16 Hoover, S. 26, 36, 226n. 4 Hope, A. 222n. 8 Horwitz, C. 223 Houghton, Sir J. 229n. 7 Howard, A. 131 ‘There Is Such a Thing as Society’ 131 hunger, mediated 108–10 Ibn Rushd 139 The Independent 140–1 International Astronautical Federation (IAF) 202 International Institute of Space Law (IISL) 202 internet see web Intrator, S. M. 223n. 16 Is God Green? 172 ‘Creation Care’ 172 and God-Talk 173–9, 215, 228n. 2 potential problems with 179–83 SEJ speech 173, 179 Islam, Sharif 214 Islam in Europe 139 see also MidEast Youth media coverage of 139 Danish cartoon controversy 139 Dreaming Spires vs. Wailing Minaret 140–5 Grand Mosque in Marseille 143 l’affaire du foulard 139 mega-mosque project in London 141–2, 144 Oxford Mosque Row 141 Salman Rushdie controversy 139, 143 Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) 143 Theo van Gogh murder 139, 146, 227n. 3 Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) 141–3

Jacob, Thomas C. 21 Jenkins, H. 8, 38–9, 44 Jenner, H. 16–17 Johnson, K. 92 Johnson, Lyndon B. 229n. 3 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 143 Journal of Marketing Communication 100 Joyner, T. 34 Kareem Amer 71, 75–6, 80 Katz, E. 211 Kazanjian, V. H., Jr. 222n. 8, 223n. 16 Kellner, D. 212 Kepes, G. 133 Kessler, R. 223n. 16 Keys, A. 90 Khomeni, Ayatollah 227n. 1 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 102 King, U. 7 Kingsolver, B. 116 Animal, Vegetable, Miracle 112 Kirkwood, W. 218 Kittles, R. 29 Kivel, P. 87–8 Klein, N. 87 Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) 92 Koss-Chioino, J. D. 64 Krishnamurti, Jiddu 223n. 16 Lach-Szyrma, K. 18 LachSzyrma, W. S. 16 Lagasse, E. 116 Lappé, F. 112 Diet for a Small Planet 112 Laurence, P. L. 222n. 8, 223n. 16 Lawrie, S. 10, 216 Lee, M. 43, 44, 221n. 11 Lerner, M. 63 Lewis-Williams, D. J. 129 lifestyle media 218 Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) 225n. 3, 226n. 4 Limerick, P. N. 203, 230n. 11 Lincoln, B. 4 Lloyd George, D. 19 Loeb, P. R. 223n. 16

Index Los Angeles Times 119 Luckmann, T. 188, 190 ‘Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion’ 190 Luker, D. 17 Lynch, M. 80, 224n. 6 Lyne, A. B. 18 Lyson, T. 116, 226n. 5 Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community 226n. 5 McDougall, W. A. 205–6, 230n. 13 McKibben, B. 205–6 Macquarrie, J. 228n. 2 McVarish, E. 128 Madonna (pop singer) 90 Maher, N. 205, 230n. 13 Marburger, J. 201 Marek, R. 223n. 16 market capitalism 3 Martin, P. 134 Martin-Barbero, J. 26 Mato, D. 219 Mbeki, T. 93 meaning-making 4–5, 8, 25, 65, 188, 198 media see also new media defined 2 and globalization 4 key characteristics of 3 role of 2 media convergence 38, 44, 110, 212, 220 see also convergence culture media culture 4, 7, 39, 212, 217 media expansion 3 media literacy 3, 44, 58, 211 media representation 7–8, 15, 32, 36, 139, 161–71 social consciousness and stance in 162–70 mediascape 7, 10, 121 media sphere 1, 25–6 media studies 3, 216 culturalist turn in 3 media technology 3 mediated science genetic genealogy documentaries as mediated science texts 30–1

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and meaning 26–7 and public engagements of Science 27–8 mediatization 27 of science 27 and public engagements of Science 27–8 mediazation of culture 3 see also media culture medicated publicsphere 9, 113 worried well 114 Meggs, P. 128 Merton, T. 68, 110 Methodism, Cornish 15–19, 23, 213 contemporary Cornwall, media and spirituality in 19–23 historical context 15–19 Celtic Revival 16 Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak (Celtic-Cornish Society) 16, 18 Gorseth Kernow 16 Protestant force Vs. folk culture 16 Identity, Religious and Cultural 15–24 supremacy, media and cultural 18–19 Middendorf, G. 116, 226 MidEast Youth 9, 71–81, 214, 224n. 9, 224n. 10, 224n. 14 Baha’i Rights campaign 74, 78 viral videos on YouTube 78 CENSEO 72 challenges to 79–81 Free Kareem caimpaign 74, 77 Grown Up Digital 72–5 Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent 72 Milden, K. 20, 22 Miller, David I. 221n. 6 Mizo, G. 66 Montagu, A. 209 Montero, J. A. 223n. 16 Morgan, D. 36 Motherland: A Genetic Journey 25, 30–1, 34–5

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Index

Moyers, B. 172–3, 229n. 3, 229n. 4, 229n. 5 Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times 173 ‘Welcome to Doomsday’ 179–80, 182 MSNBC 203 The Muslim News 142 MySpace 38 Nair, K. S. 67 Nash, C. 28, 33 National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 202 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 199, 202, 204–5, 208, 229n. 1 one way communication of 206–7 National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) 172 nation-branding 187 Nelson, A. 28, 32, 36 Nelson, G. 135 neoliberalism 9, 86, 92 neoliberal restructuring 87 new gilded age (America’s) 87 Nestle, M. 113, 115 New Age 210 new media blogposts 51 chat 51 in the Classroom 52–8 Facebook 51 text messages 51 Twitter 51 Newsweek 102 New Thought movements 9 The New York Times 34, 44, 116, 119, 163, 165, 228n. 1 New York Times Magazine 179 Nisbet, M. 173, 178 Nutrigenomics 110–16 see also under branded wellness Obama, B. 199, 209 Obasogie, Osagie K. 32 Oelschlager, M. 180 Oppenheimer, M. 169 Oprah’s Roots 31

Ornish, Dr. Dean 113 Outer Space Treaty of 1967 203–4, 209 Pacific Area Travel Association (PATA) 117 Page, L. 221n. 6 Palmer, Parker J. 49, 68 participatory culture 44 Participatory Development Communication (PDC) 67 Payton, P. 16 Peck, J. 9, 216 Peck, M. Scott 61 Penley, C. 208 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) 166–7 perception 65 Perry, R. 36 philanthropy 88 political and economic implications of 88 buffer zone 88 Pollan, M. 112, 116 Omnivore’s Dilemma 112 Ponte, S. 93 Poole, E. 143 Poppendieck, J. 93 Product RED campaign 89, 93, 95, 225n. 2 Psaros, M. 175–6, 181, 229n. 8 public-service announcements (PSAs) 57 Pyne, S. 204 Ratey, J. 226n. 2 Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain 226n. 2 Ray, R. 116 Reagan, R. 86 reconciliation 59–62 media of 62–70 Compassionate Listening Project (TCLP) 65 goals 68–70 Vietnam Friendship Village 66 inward and outward 59–62 Rejger, K. 66 Remen, R. N. 223n. 13, 223n. 16

Index Richey, L. 93 Ripinsky-Naxon, M. 129, 133 ritual 3 Roberts, D. 36 Roberts, J. 226n. 1 Rock, C. 34 Roman Catholicism 18 Roof, W. C. 189 Roots: The Next Generation (television miniseries) 30–1 as an international cultural forum 31 Rushing, J. H. 207 Said, E. 121 San Francisco Chronicle 43 Satanic Verses (by Salman Rushdie) 227n. 1 Schimmel, Solomon 10, 217, 227n. 1 Schmidt, M. 129 Schneider, J. 11, 215 Schwarze, S. 177 Schweitzer, A. 49 the Science-Religion (dis) Connection 110–11 ‘A Seaside Parish’ 19 The Secret 89, 119–20, 226n. 8 Sedona Journal of Emergence! 119 self 6 Self, R. 9, 214 Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival (SICAF) 57 shaman see under graphic design(ers) Sheilaism 37 Shinto 43 Shriver, B. 95 Shriver, R. 89 Sikand, Y. 142 Slotkin, R. 230n. 10 Snail Creep 17 social gospel 9, 225n. 1 social media 4, 38 see also Web 2.0’ movement Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) 173 Sociological Images: Seeing is Believing 55 Space Age 209 space exploration (US)

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communication mode of space community 205–7 as a cultural invention 204 media, citizens and 207–8 motive behind 200–2, 206 planetary protection 204–5 various aspects of 202–4 Spears, B. 54–5 spiritualities 6–8,38–9,42, 46, 217, 219 spirituality 1–2, 5–11,15, 19, 37–8, 40, 42–6, 49–50, 72, 88, 96, 119, 121, 125–6, 187–99, 210–20 as condensed version of religion 5 as a glow-word 5 mediascape of 7 as the realm of deeper meanings 7 spiritualmarketing 212 spiritual tourism 10, 117–26, 216 cultural cannibalism 118 myopic ethnocentrism’ 118 New Age tourism in Sedona 118–26, 226n. 4 encountering Others 121–4 encountering Self 120 implications of 124–6 role of mythology 123 spiritual magnetism of Sedona 119, 121 vortexes 119 Orientalism 118 Stanlake, M. 20–1 Stolow, J. 77 Suskind, R. 179 Sutphen, D. 119 syncretism 39 Tadic, Redovan 67 Sarajevo: The Living and the Dead 67 Tapscott, D. 72–3, 78, 81, 224n. 4 Taubes, G. 226n. 1 Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease 226n. 1 Taylor, C. 124, 226n. 7 Taylor, D. 223n. 16

262 Taylor, T. 18 TEACH Act 221n. 1 The Telegraph 140–1 Tenowich, A. 226n. 1 Thatcher, M. 86 Thompson, J. 3 Tillich, P. 124 The Times 143 Tolle, E. 89 Tompkins, J. 223n. 16 Trammel, S. 222n. 8 Tregidga, G. 8, 213 Trivic, M. 66 Turner, B. 212 Turner, F. J. 203, 230n. 4 Turner, F. 41 Twitter 38, 43, 45, 217 UNICEF 226n. 5 Urry, J. 121 USA Today 119 USA Today Life 119 U.S. Protestantism 9 van den Broek, E. 66 Vick, M. 161, 163, 166, 168, 170–1 Viemeister, T. 130 Vietnam Friendship Village 66 Villa-Vicencio, C. 67 Villoldo, A. 123 Wallis, J. 103 God’s Politics 103 Wansink, B. 226n. 3 Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology and Obesity 226n. 3, 226n. 4 Wardekker, A. 229n. 8 Washington Post 76

Index Watts, L. 226n. 1 Web 42, 219, 222n. 2 and spiritualities 42–5 online ‘faith communities’ 42 web 1.0 42 Web 2.0 38, 42, 45 Web 2.0 tools 39, 45 Wee, L. 10, 215 Weil, Dr. A. 113–15 Weisel, E. 90 Wesley, J. 16 White, S. A. 67 Whole Earth (photograph) 205 Whole Earth Catalogues 41 Whole Earth “Lectronic Link” (WELL) 41 Wicker, T. 229n. 3 Wikipedia 38 Williamson, Marianne 89 Wilson, J. 51 Winfrey, O. 9, 85, 89–93, 95 philanthropy of 85–94 Oprah’s Angel Network 85, 93 Oprah’s Big Give 90–3 Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls 85, 90 Woodhead, L. 189 Wright, K. 117 Wright, W. 116, 226n. 5 Wuthnow, R. 189 Yavuz, S. 131 Mediating Messages 131 YouTube 8, 38, 44, 49, 51, 55, 57–8, 213, 224n. 4 Yunus, M. 89 Zamora 226n. 1 Zuckerman, E. 224n. 6