Increasingly, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and indigenous movements all over the world make use of a great variety of modern mass media, both print and electronic. Through religious booklets, radio broadcasts, cassette tapes, television talk-shows, soap operas, and documentary film these movements address multiple publics and offer alternative forms of belonging, often in competition with the postcolonial nation-state. How have new practices of religious mediation transformed the public sphere? How has the adoption of new media impinged on religious experiences and notions of religious authority? Has neo-liberalism engendered a blurring of the boundaries between religion and entertainment? The vivid essays in this interdisciplinary volume combine rich empirical detail with theoretical reflection, offering new perspectives on a variety of media, genres, and religions. Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religion and Society in the Research Centre Religion and Society, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam and Professor of the Anthropology of Religion at the Free University, Amsterdam.Her publications include Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana, Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (edited with Peter Geschiere); and Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (edited with Peter Pels).
Annelies Moors, an anthropologist, holds the ISIM Chair at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, University of Amsterdam. She is author of Women, Property and Islam: Palestinian Experiences 1920-1990 and co-editor of Discourse and Palestine: Power, Text and Context.