Page - 79 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

Religion, Belief and Medial Layering of Communication | 79www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 75–88 CUlTUral sTUDies aND reliGiOUs PraCTiCes Cultural studies (in German one would speak of “Kulturwissenschaften”) or cultural analyses – in the late 20th century – has become a field for studies in cultural practices concerning habits in daily life, cult rites, low and high cultures, on artists’ productions, consumer culture and mass media.16 since the term “culture” has itself been identi- fied as a problematic concept promoting an essentialist reading, cultural studies have aimed to prove the imaginary structure of such a concept in which an Other is always constructed, often more implicitly than explicitly, from the point of view of the domi- nant discourse. so the use of the term “cultural practices” takes into account that definable “cultures” are always effects of changing processes in the structure and the “cultural imaginary” of the discourses they rely on.17 When we consider the transcul- tural effects of migrations of people, the circulation of material and news in the con- sumer culture and the internet in a globalised economy and a world of multiple wars, it is even more absurd to speak of cultures as defined entities. from the perspective of cultural studies, the frames and conditions for construct- ing religious communities are no different from those for building communities on the grounds of other imaginary concepts (nations, societies, groups, families, “gender”, class, “race”). The point of departure for modern and contemporary cultural studies or cultural analysis – elaborated in detail by feminist and postcolonial studies – was the acknowledgement that all these categories were never naturally given but had been used as essentialist naturalisations of cultural conventions and constructions. The results of this research matched and inherited ethnological methodological ap- proaches towards religious practices in diverse cultures. Moreover, research in cultural studies has shown that cultural fields such as poli- tics, work, economy, public or private life, religion, leisure and others can be sepa- rated or analysed separately only hypothetically because they continuously overlap in daily life. Practices from these different fields are usually intertwined and interlinked. A practice within a specific field transferred into another will be part of continually ongoing and changing signification processes. The claim of a cultural studies’ perspective would be that religion(s) – religious rites, cult(s) or culture(s) – are subcategories of culture(s). religious practices obvi- ously are part or specifications of other cultural practices. With other cultural prac- tices, they have in common ways of including or excluding members in order to con- stitute communities to which they might want to belong or to be able or allowed to belong or not. and secular cultural practices have in common with religious ones that belief in the benefits of whatever these practices promise is essential for inclusion. Religion(s) is a term comparable to others such as society, art or subjectivity. They all have in common that they are abstract ideas which can be observed and analysed 16 schade/Wenk 2011, 57 –56. 17 schade/Wenk 2011, 58.