2021 | 2

Browsing 2021 | 2 by Author "Bornet, Philippe"

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  • Journal Issue
  • Article
    Media and Religion in (Post)Colonial Societies: Dynamics of Power and Resistance. Editorial
    Bornet, Philippe; Knauss, Stefanie; Ornella, Alexander D. (2021) , S. 7-14
    Media and religion (broadly conceived) are often cooperating as the backdrop, and at the forefront of power struggles, in dominant and subaltern narratives, conflict and protest. Religious practices are visual and material practices that communicate meaning, and media thrive on harnessing the cognitive and affective power of religious symbols or narratives. Many media producers draw on the ability of religions, as communicative systems, to distill human experience and to create particularly powerful structures of affect. The intricate and dynamic relationships between media and religion are part of the cultural efforts of inscribing and embodying meaning on an individual and collective level, and thus to turn chaos into order, to establish and communicate categories and boundaries. Thus in this issue of JRFM, we focus on how religion and media participate in and complicate the power relationships between (western) colonizers and (non-western) colonized during the historical period of colonialism and in “coloniality”, a term introduced by Aníbal Quijano to describe the ways in which colonial dynamics of othering and difference, as well as western epistemologies continue to shape the cultural, economic, political, and religious forces within and between communities.
  • Article
    Unruly Images: Representing India in the Calwer Bilder-Tafeln zur Länder- und Völker-Kunde (1883)
    Bornet, Philippe (2021) , S. 55-86
    The contribution focuses on a volume published by a German Christian press related to a missionary society in 1883 and offering a visual panorama of all the world’s cultures in 1,690 engravings. Most images were reproductions of original documents that had initially appeared in different editorial contexts, ranging from missionary periodicals to secular travel magazines and British colonial literature. This study examines the message that the volume’s editors wanted to convey: a message presenting the extra-European world as devoid of historical agency, non-Christian religions as false, and the presence of western agents – in particular, missionaries – as providential. Retracing the life story of a few images, I show that some of them communicated these notions better than others. For example, engravings manufactured after photographs were often not as polemical as those made after drawings, for the simple reason of the mediatic characteristics of photography. Complicating the critical reading of the images as simply representing missionary propaganda, I argue that a volume like the one examined here is best understood when placed within a transnational (or connected) history of visual practices.