Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between

Notes

281 notes introduction: religion, technology, and the things in between Jeremy Stolow 1. See Donald J. Mastronarde, “Actors on High: The Skene Roof, the Crane, and the Gods in Attic Drama,” Classical Antiquity 9, no. 2 (October 1990): 247–94; Rush Rehm, Tragic Greek Theatre (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 69–71. 2. See, for instance, Aristotle, Poetics 1454a–b. 3. Whereas in ancient Greek the term mēchanê still reverberated with the connotations of its root word, mekhos (literally a “means” or an “expedient,” etymologically connected to the proto-Indo-European word magh-, “to be able,” whence also comes the term “magic”), by Roman times the word machina already had expanded its semantic terrain to include “device,” “frame,” “contrivance,” and “trick.” 4. David Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (1757–1779; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, trans. Ralph Manheim (1851; New York: Harper and Row, 1967); Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (1912; New York: Free Press, 1995). 5. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 43; see also Latour, “What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, ed. Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 14–37; Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 266–92. 6. Matthew Engelke, “Religion and the Media Turn: A Review Essay,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 2 (2010): 371–79. 7. A landmark text in the generation of this “media turn” in the study of religion is Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). For overviews of religion and media as a field of research, see David Morgan, ed., Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Jeremy Stolow, 282 Notes to pages 4–5 “Religion and/as Media,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 2 (2005): 119–45; see also the many contributions to the journal Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, which began publishing in 2005. 8. As Hent de Vries argues in his agenda-setting introduction to the volume Religion and Media, “We should no longer reflect exclusively on the meaning, historically and in the present, of religion—of faith and belief and their supposed opposites such as knowledge and technology—but concentrate on the significance of the processes of mediation and mediatization without and outside of which no religion would be able to manifest or reveal itself in the first place”; de Vries, “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,” in Religion and Media, ed. de Vries and Weber, 28. 9. On the (mediated) production of immediacy, see Rosalind Morris, “Modernity’s Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 457–75; Birgit Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium,” Social Anthropology 19, no. 1 (2010): 23–39; and Mattijs van de Port, “(Not) Made by the Human Hand: Media Consciousness and Immediacy in the Cultural Production of the Real,” Social Anthropology 19, no. 1 (2010): 74–89. 10. The “conflict thesis” is usually traced back to John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (New York: Appleton, 1878). For recent critiques, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, eds., Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail, and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). On “scientific wonders” and the culture of public scientific spectacle, see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, eds., Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Fred Nadis, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public...