Page - 58 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

58 | Anna-Katharina Höpflinger www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 57–64 world views.2 from this point of view, media become an important agent of religious change. They support and form so-called “banal religion”. “Banal religion” should be understood in the sense that media form religious knowledge, but not in an elaborate or coherent or institutionalised way, and often not in a way noticed as religious by the people using them. in the following, i will appropriate the term mediatisation and use the example of the exhibition of mortal remains in Central europe to look at pos- sible interrelations between gender and religion. This example is useful for examining mediatisation, because while it is embedded in an institutionalised and traditional sort of religion, similar processes can be spotted as in the so-called “banal religion”. The dead body and its staging become the base of world views, practices and narratives that go beyond official statements of a religious institution. In this process, as I will argue, the body takes over the role of the main medium for communicating world views.3 in the following, i will focus on the forming of ideas of gender through the dead body. The basis of my response is the assumption that gender ideas and norms are often not written down as “laws”, but instead are frequently communicated vi- sually and materially. in my example, it is the body that adopts the role of framing normative notions of the world.4 human interaction is focused on this single medium that takes over the main role of communicating gender. as the main agent, the body condenses the expectations and concepts regarding gender and religion. so, in the following, i understand mediatisation not so much as a shift, but as a compaction process of cultural meaning by one specific medium. These compaction processes are temporary and relate to specific contexts, in this instance the dead body, for only a short time and in a specific spatial setting. To work out the role of the body in condensing world views, i will use a material religion approach.5 The basis of the following observations is field research. Together with the photographer yves Müller, during two years (2013–2015) i visited ossuaries and cemetery chapels in Switzerland and adjoining countries. Following a cultural studies approach, we focused on the contemporary usage of these chapels, the rep- resentation of mortal remains, and the normative regulations that are connected with such staging of the dead.6 Due to space constraints, i will operate in the following on a methodological level with the (heuristic) categories “individual” and “collective” and ask how gender is 2 See Hjarvard/Lövheim 2012. 3 See Coakley 1997, 1–12; Zito 2011, 18–25. 4 see Wegenstein 2014, 127–149. 5 see Morgan 2010, 1–18. 6 These categories relate to the so-called “circuit of culture”, elaborated by Paul du Gay, stuart hall and their colleagues at the Open University in london 1997. The circuit was designed to work out cultural processes and divides the analysis into questions regarding production, consumption, representation, regulation, and identity, see Du Gay/hall 1997.