David Morgan and Sally M. Promey (eds.). The Visual Culture of American Religions. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
In divergence from the work of “philosophers, cultural theorists, and aestheticians” who “tend to ask what images are,” The Visual Culture of American Religions, edited by David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, is a collection of work by historians, folklorists, and ethnographers who feel it is “more fruitful to inquire what images do” (17; emphasis original). Despite this noted heuristic focus, starting their discussion with a gloss of the “is/are” question would have been helpful, since the authors do nothing to define the parameters of “visual culture” for this project. For a 400-page book ostensibly devoted to the subject, the editors, in an introductory chapter that might have attempted to provide a clearer theoretical or methodological grounding for the diverse collection of essays that follow it, do very little to answer the question “What is visual culture, and what visual media will be discussed in this book?” but rather seem to take it for granted that their readership is operating under a common definition of visual culture.
It was with some surprise, then, that I came to grapple the limited scope of the proceedings. For instance, other than Steward M. Hoover’s rather perfunctory contribution, “Visual Religion in Media Culture” (inexplicably placed in the second section of the book, “Religious Visual Culture and the Construction of Meaning” instead of the third section of the book, which deals specifically with modernity), no other author discusses advertising, television, film, or photography with sufficient thoroughness—much less video games, comic books, or the influence of the Internet. Rather, the authors, regrettably, tend to stick to “traditional” artistic media, leaving the reader with the absolutely mistaken feeling that American religious institutions and followers have done nothing to engage with the technological advances and cultural development of the last century or so. Whether this oversight was incidental or intentional, one cannot help but feel the editors are either constructing a vision of American religion with snobbish disdain for the trappings of mass culture or establishing religion as the anachronistic remains of a mythological past that is remarkably out of touch with contemporary movements in society and technology, both of which would be untrue, and both of which would run counter to their efforts at reclaiming the place of religion in public space (see section one, “Religious Visual Culture and Public Identity”).
Another criticism that could be just as easily leveled at the book is its profound bias in favor of Christian visual expression—indeed, the book might have been more accurately titled The Visual Culture of American Protestantism and Catholicism since almost all of the authors focus on sub-traditions and issues specific to these two religions, with only two truly notable exceptions (Harvey Markowitz’s excellent contribution, “From Presentation to Representation in Sioux Sun Dance Painting” and Ellen Smith’s “Greetings from Faith: Early-Twentieth-Century American Jewish New Year Postcards”). This is a fact that perhaps should not be surprising, since the majority of the authors in the volume are known for their contributions to this field; nevertheless, the inclusion of a Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheel on the upper left hand corner of the book’s cover seems quite puzzling and deliberately misleading, for when I finished the book, I could not recall a single mention of this tradition or, truth be told, much talk of American Buddhism at all (the index offers three references each for Buddhism and Buddhists, and four of these refer to a single three-page passage in Pomey’s omnibus chapter that opens the collection). Similarly, with the exception of a passing reference to the controversy surrounding the figural representation of Muhammad on the Supreme Court building in Pomey’s chapter (41), Islam is notably absent in the book, and no contributions to American visual culture by Muslims are treated. This seems especially irresponsible given today's willfully ignorant, Islamophobic political climate.
The editors seem to have anticipated this second criticism, however, for at the end of the introduction (where most scholars seem to place their list of concessions), they note, “virtually nothing on the visual cultures of American manifestations of Islam, Asian religions, Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, indigenous religions such as Haitian vodou, or such noninstitutional religious forms as the occult, spiritualism, or New Age has been included” (23). Thus, it would be fairer to judge the book according to the editors’ own aim, which, adjusted accordingly to reflect the book’s considerable deficiencies, is merely to “demonstrate the importance of further study” while “suggest[ing] some key directions for future investigation” (24), two suitably modest goals that the compendium ably achieves. When read on an essay-by-essay basis, several of the contributions in the book succeed as excellent examples of methodological sophistication and, notably, break out of the editors’ artificial tripartite thematic division by approaching public expression, meaning, and modernity all at once, offering a fine example for emergent sociologists and historians of religion in their own research.
