commbox Brazil

"This special issue seeks to explore the common ground shared by practices of filmmaking and religious institutions located within postcolonial settings and increasingly linked in global infrastructures. The articles presented here converge in combining theoretical reflections about the interface of ... film and religion with specific examples or historical and ethnographic cases. Written by authors with backgrounds in film studies, religious studies, and anthropology, the contributions to this multidisciplinary issue are based on two common, more or less explicit, points of departure. One concerns the realization that the actual entanglement of religion and film highlights the limitations of a modernist view proclaiming the retreat of religion from the public sphere as an inevitable consequence of the processes of modernization and secularization. In our perspective, the interface of film and religion can more fruitfully be addressed from a postsecularist perspective, which seeks to overcome the unproductive, teleological, and normative understanding that religion should be confined to the private sphere. As the contributions to this issue show, in contexts as diverse as India, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, and postsocialist Poland, the accessibility of modern mass media in conjunction with the politics of neo-liberalism actually facilitate the proliferation of religion in the public sphere. This implies not only that religions may assume a strong public presence, but also that religion and entertainment are increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other. For example, as Maria José de Abreu shows, the Catholic Charismatic priest, pop-singer, and film actor Marcello Rossi embodies this convergence. Not only has film become a prime medium of religious expression, films also often address a religious audience which in turn is seen to authorize audiovisual representations of the transcendent or divine as truthful and authentic. Ravi Vasudevan argues here how Hindu devotional films represented their own religious spectators as a kind of selfauthenticating redefinition of the social with the divine. Whether this authorization actually occurs, as the articles by Birgit Meyer on Ghanaian pentecostally-oriented video-films and by Matthias Krings on Hausa videos in Northern Nigeria show, is a matter of an intense politics and aesthetics of persuasion that may or may not be successful. While in our era of globalizing media the condition of the possibility for religion to assume a public role appears to depend on the successful accommodation of filmic media, the incorporation of such media also threatens to transform religious practice into a form of mass entertainment. The fear of being made subject to superficial visual regimes, as the articles by Mattijs van de Port and Marleen de Witte highlight, may lead religious practitioners to be highly suspicious about the formats and styles that go along with audiovisual mass media. In addition to this postsecular stance, the articles presented in this special issue also share a commitment to moving beyond the assumption of an ontological difference between religion as a domain of the transcendent, on the one hand, and film as a domain of neutral technology, on the other. In this regard, we prefer the notion of mediation as a more open-ended, non-determinist solution for exploring the multiple relationships between religion and film. For example, once religion is understood as a practice of mediation, media appear not as alien to the realm of religion, but as an inalienable element on which any attempt to access and render present the transcendental ultimately depends. By using “mediation” we hope to shift our emphasis away from religion and film as abstract substantialized essences towards a non-dualist emphasis on the relational and contingent practices in which film and religion overlap and engage each other. Brent Plate, in his contribution to this issue, coins the term “religious cinematics” to stress explicitly this point where religion and film merge through the embodied practices of the human senses." (Guest Editors’ Preface, pages 150-151) more

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Cartooning in Latin America

John A. Lent (ed.)

Cresskill: Hampton Press (2005), ix, 388 pp.

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Jornalismo: Comunicação, literatura e compromisso social

Carlos Alberto Vicchiatti

São Paulo: Paulus (2005), 115 pp.

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A missâo da rádio católica nas comunidades: X assembléia UNDA Brasil, IV assembléia RCR. São Paulo, 11 a 14 de novembro de 2004

Marcelo Lima (ed.)

São Paulo: UNDA Brasil; Rede Católica de Radio (RCR) (2005), 96 pp.

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Comunicação eclesial: Utopia e realidade

José Marques de Melo

São Paulo: Paulinas (2005), 159 pp.

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Rádio: A mídia da emoção

Cyro César

São Paulo: Summus Editorial (2005), 229 pp.

"O autor compartilha com os leitores sua vasta experiência como profissional do rádio, em um livro que se destina a todos os que se interessem pelos diversos aspectos da produção radiofônica. Parte do pressuposto de que, por não trazer imagens explícitas, o rádio age diretamente sobre a imag ... more

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Young People, Soap Operas and Reality TV

Cecilia von Feilitzen (ed.)

Göteborg: UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media; Nordicom (2004), 255 pp.

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Vozes cidadãs: Aspectos teóricos e análises de experiências de comunicação popular e sindical na América Latina

Cicilia M. Krohling Peruzzo (ed.)

São Paulo: Angellara (2004), 372 pp.

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Entertainment-Education and Social Change: History, Research and Practice
Deep Insights

Arvind Singhal, Michael J. Cody, Everett M. Rogers, Miguel Sabido (eds.)

Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2004), xxii, 458 pp.

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The Challenge of Indigenous Education: Practice and Perspectives

Linda King, Sabine Schielmann (eds.)

Paris: UNESCO (2004), 283 pp.

"Traditional indigenous education and its structures should be respected and supported. Our knowledge has not been written down by us – on the contrary: we dance it, we draw it, we narrate it, we sing it, we practise it. There is a need for a deeper understanding of what knowledge and learning are ... more