I consider religion an essential part of life; it is like a hidden or secret gem we save somewhere inside us. But what happens when the rock we believe is in the middle of a war or is taking a different position than mine?
Professor Temoney spoke about the conflicts between religion (me) and society, its laws, and what happens when religion mixes with other fields like economy, politics, or media. Weeks later, professor Wing showed us the five divisions proposed by Appadurai to study and understand the global economy.
The writer William T. Cavanaugh refers and how complicated it is to catalog religion in chapter two, titled The myth of Religious Violence, from the book The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence. The main reason is that several concepts of religion are entirely different from one other, and at the same time, there are some connections between them. Cavanaugh offers “to think” religion in two ways, the substantive and the functionalist, with the conclusion that one is less inclusive and connected to our practices, and the other is more inclusive and linked to our beliefs. “This ability to mobilize violence makes civil religion the most powerful religion in the United States.” (3). Substantives may doubt incorporating nationalist groups in the tag “religion.” Still, functionalists can be more open to recognizing them and groups such as Black Lives Matter.
The writer Arjun Appadurai explores the dimensions of globalization from many perspectives; in chapter two of the book Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of Globalization. This book is focused on the economy but has some examples of what happens when the economy doesn’t have a good relationship with other fields like culture and politics, creating disjunctures that affect everyone. “I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes” (33.)
These imaginary spaces are thinking in real economic situations, and the money world can be considered a religion from the Cavanaugh perspective; also, a concept provided by Cavanaugh is that “religions” (substantivism and functionalism) are created and motivated by power.
Ethnoscapes, how many displaced and mass mobilizations were produced by the consequences of wars like Syria, the drug wars in Colombia, the terrorism in the Peruvian Andean, or the Israel-Palestine conflict?
The groups that are provoking these forced migrations are fanatics that see with honor die for their beliefs. Two examples of religious wars discussed in class were Rwanda and the Jewish holocaust; all possible words have been used to describe those horrible events, and since the functionalist considers Nazis’ ideology as a “religion,” the same way as Confucianism or Nationalistic groups. Other groups, like Peruvian terrorists, followed the Marxist ideology and were very violent. Religion travels with immigrants, conquerors, preachers, and tourists. Conquerors affirmed that natives didn’t have religion and imposed theirs with blood, turning colonial expeditions into holy ones. As a result, thousands of natives could escape to other local cultures or exile.
Mediascapes Media can make dreams happen and screen dreams like illusions projected in the TV or cinema theater. Unfortunately, Mediascape also helps to sell dreams, and governments use it to create fear, to control and divide the population because people that influence the world use religion to manipulate us. As Cavanaugh reflects, “The vaguer “ transcendence ” is made. However, the less is it possible to exclude things like nationalism from the category. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a better candidate for transcendence than the “ imagined community ” of the nation.” (24) The idea that is being sold in creating an imaginary world where perfection and greatness are the goals. Some examples are Venezuela’s government has a TV station where the president has a TV show and talks with people and talks about many subjects, including the United States. Nicolas Maduro is well known for his misspoke on camera, like penises “penes” instead of fish “pieces.” Or when he followed a butterfly in front of the camera, saying that that flying creature was the spirit of former president Hugo Chavez. Other similar cases are Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
Media is the new way to colonize the population; Appadurai said, “What is most important about these mediascapes are that they provide (especially in their television, the film, and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed.” (35) Provides exotic images from remote places that are colonialist and were used by the explorers before conquests. The creation of the Soviet Union is an example of these mediascapes platforms; Russia joined several towns and cultures with different languages into one Soviet Union with black and white movies-propaganda that helped to empower journal workers. The same happened in the United States before the Second World War; the US Army used movies to encourage young people to enlist in the Army. And the ideoscapes of the American situation created the character of Captain America as a symbol of the American Identity fighting against the Nazis. In the imagination, he defeats the most horrible enemy’s plans.
Ideoscapes
Appadurai wrote in his book, “These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy.” (36) those elements of the enlightenment a worldview can be considered as well the elements that make a nationalist group a “religion” or Marxism a “religion” as well, or Diego Maradona or Pele, famous soccer players that are idolized in all the world, also some fans created their churches in Brazil and Argentina.
But all these platforms depend on technology to continue developing faster, smaller, and economic models. Here is when technoscapes create the infrastructure for sending information faster or arriving at our destiny in a shorter time each time. We depend on technology so badly right now. As Cavanaugh describes the functionalist motivations, “Religion becomes the name of any ideology or institution that people take seriously enough to kill for.” (26). Governments use technology to control us with the excuse of protecting us; in cities like London, there are two video cameras per citizen, and the way China and some Asian countries handle the virus; can be considered controlling and invasive. The app used to follow your movements and control the places you go or people you meet also helps to know if you were in contact with someone infected by the virus and avoid spreading it. It is efficient, but where are the government’s and our freedom limits as a society and persons?
Technology has reduced problems like distance and time; meeting with family on the other side of the world is more accessible than a few decades ago. This reduction of time and distance is encouraging us to rethink our public spaces before they disappear and strengthen the identity and culture before they get external influence from stronger cultures converting the Internet network into a neocolonial tool to start new “ethnoscapes” displacing whole populations from their original places to completely places, part of a family can go to the north, the other part to the south or other countries, creating divisions and displaced people’s culture get weak and turn to disappear if they don’t work hard to make a connection with your homeland. “Between socially and spatially separated groups have, until the past few centuries, been bridged at great cost and sustained over time only with great effort.” (Appadurai, 28)
Something interesting about the technoscape platforms is that it is changing the way we image the future of our society; it means that technoscapes are influencing ideoscapes to think in an imaginary world perfect for us, like “heaven.” Another way that technoscapes are helping to spread the message from many radical groups is through social media platforms, getting thousands of followers worldwide. Most of those radical groups are related directly to some religious beliefs and use them as arguments in their speech.
The union of the different “scapes.” that Appadurai proposed to us, especially the technoscapes, benefits financescapes in the good and advantages the black market or black money to move the money in seconds just with some clicks from a cellphone. For example, online transactions between Hong Kong and the United States sometimes have different intermediaries, making it hard to follow where the money comes from or divide it into a Swiss bank deposited in several accounts worldwide. Money has become a religion for many people, and I believe that if we are part of this capitalist system, our religion and God is the “money.” In his book, Cavanaugh refers to religion as a “constructed category” (29.) I want to relate that quote with the ideoscapes thoughts, create a perfect nation or a perfect army.
What means “perfect”? The world where our values are correct. “Whether Confucianism is a religion, it is much more potentially fruitful to examine the history and analyze why Western scholars in the nineteenth century categorized Confucianism as a religion and why Chinese nationalists at the same time emphatically denied that it was (Beyer 2003: 174 – 5). Why do some deny that Marxism is a religion, and others affirm that Marxism is a religion? Still, US nationalism is not?” (Cavanaugh, 26). Powerful people use money to maintain their power. Still, we use the money to create more debts and give a sense to our lives. As functionalism includes as a religion more “groups,” like nationalism and sometimes they can turn into cults.
So, I can consider finance as a religion and money as the thing we adore, which makes many possible things like wars, coup d’états, and displacements; money creates countries and disappears from civilizations. We invest money to generate more money, get sick to get money, and then invest money to cure ourselves. Of course, Banks are the temples and are the owner of our money, and with that, the money they finance, indirectly or directly, horrible events; even they finance nationalist groups, they finance wars for many “good” reasons, banks are present in all online transaction and banks finance our imaginary dreams and can turn into o horrible nightmares. So, why do banks allow all these transactions, and why do the banks finance these things?
Because banks don’t care about race, social status, country, or culture, banks care about making money with your money. Appadurai brings an event unknown to many people and is the invention of Khalistan’s state for a weak Sikh population displaced in many developed countries. “The creation of Khalistan, an invented homeland of the deterritorialized Sikh population of England, Canada, and the United States, is one example of the bloody potential in such mediascapes as they interact with the internal colonialisms of the nation-state” (38). There are many “Khalistans” in the world created for tactical reasons for colonialist interests; the oldest nation, colonialist states, control the modern nation-states.
And here again, comes the imagined worlds that created the concept of nation-states and the financescapes make it possible. “The lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes they see are blurred so that the farther away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds that are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other imagined world”(35). Money has two faces, the one that creates nations and the other face that displaces and eradicates nations like the Palestinians or ex-Yugoslavia. The most amazing of all this is practical: we pay or finance all these religious wars, terrorist wars, drug wars, nationalist wars, etc.
The money and the world economy, our savings in the banks and properties, and everything with value are used in an imaginary world (houses have value, and the value goes up or down depending on global finance) to finance wars. Following the functionalist concepts, banks can be considered a religious group, and fights between two groups can be considered. Two religious groups, banks, are presents in transactions to sell guns to terrorist groups and generate violence. Appadurai commented in his book, “Deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies, art impresarios, and travel agencies, which thrive on the deterritorialized population’s need to contact its homeland. Naturally, these invented homelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups” (38) the only way that I can interpret this is using the example of a vice circle, money finances, money destroys, money came back, money reconstruct. The system always finishes prejudicing the vulnerable ones in our society.
My idea of religion is a spiritual and peaceful philosophical movement with little of everything. Still, I didn’t realize religion can separate society or influence organizations that can start wars and genocides. God has nothing to do here; this is human religion. I want to differentiate religion and war.. Religion is the head, war is the gun, and the economy knows when to push the trigger.
Work papers:
The Myth of Religious Violence Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict,
William T Cavanaugh.
In the book Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of Globalization, Arjun Appadurai
Vera Academic Research 