w w w . m e d i a c i o n e s .

n e t

Mass Media as a Site

of Resacralization
of Contemporary Cultures

Jesús Martín-Barbero

(In: Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture,

S. M. Hoover & K. Lundby (eds.) SAGE Publications,
London, Thousand Oaks an New Delhi, 1997)

« If, indeed, the media and religion are coming together,

then perhaps it is because they are fundamental cultural
mediations of the need felt by the people to transform
them into magic, into mystery and into the seduction of
the world. We would find, then, that something very
curious has happened. Despite all the promise of
modernity to make religion disappear, what has really
happened is that religion has modernized itself. Religion
has shown itself capable of eating modernity alive and
making modernity an important ingredient for its own
purposes. What we are witnessing, then, is not the
conflict of religion and modernity, but the
transformation of modernity into enchantment by linking
new communication technologies to the logic of popular
religiosity. »
 2

In recent years, I have become increasingly aware of the

profound changes in the way people come together socially
and how they relate to each other when they are together. I
think that this constitutes, at the deepest level, the object of
the study of human communication. What does, in fact,
bring people together socially? This is connected, I would
argue, with the study of the media as the locus of the consti-
tution of identities and as a space for configuration of
communities. The media are, above all, a factor in the dif-
ferentiation of various types of communities. This implies,
of course, that the media are not just economic phenomena
or instruments of politics. Nor are the media interesting
simply as one more instance of rapid technological change.
Rather, the media must be analyzed as a process of creating
cultural identities and of bringing individuals into coherent
publics that are “subjects of action.” To conceptualize the
relations of modernity, religiosity, and media, one must see
the media as a central factor in the constitution of social
actors.

The Disenchanted Modernity

I begin this chapter with the affirmation that modernity

has not lived up to many of its promises of social, political,
or cultural liberation. But there is one promise that it has
fulfilled: the disenchantment of the world.

Mass Media as a Site of Resacralization…

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Modernity has drained off the sense of the sacred, in large

part, because it has rationalized the world. The reduction of
values to instrumental efficiency has left the world without
magic and without mystery. Today one finds a whole gen-
eration of young people who are living, in their daily expe-
rience, what Weber (1947, 1958) has called the disenchant-
ment of the world. I think that it is almost impossible for
many people to comprehend what it means for the young to
live the dizzy pace of today or the ecstasy of drugs if one
does not see this in relation to the profound loss of awe and
fearful reverence that pervades contemporary cultures.
Every aspect of our experience reflects this disenchantment,
from our blind faith in empirical science to insensitivity to
environmental pollution, but especially the superficiality of
social relations. In virtually all of us, especially in those
who have drunk in the rationality of formal education, the
disappearance of the holy has changed the way we see the
world.

And yet modernity, for all its power of control over na-
ture, has left its sense of emptiness. Few people have
learned to live without some form of enchantment, mystery
mythic vision, and some ritual moments. Strangely enough,
we continue to seek ways to re-enchant the world, bring
back the magic, and clothe our lives with mystery.

One of the most lucid social analysts of our time, Daniel

Bell (1994), a sociologist ready to declare the end of utopian
thinking, has argued that the real problem with modernity is
a kind of crisis of spiritual vision. The old foundations of
our culture are now buried and the new have turned out to
be illusory. Such an affirmation is interesting because Bell
by no means holds a brief for religious apologetic. And in
Latin America, Beatriz Sarlo (1994) writes in one of her
recent articles that in the last twenty years, where once

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people were inspired by socio-political movements, today

the new religions are advancing.

Closely linked to this pervasive rationalization of the

world are the phenomena of fundamentalist, sectarian, and
integralist movements that are once again implanting them-
selves on our planet precisely when we thought we had
risen above all that. This is in part a reaction against the
forces of modernization and in part filling the void – espe-
cially at the level of popular religiosity – of the sense of
unchanging absolutes. In the midst of rapid cultural chan-
ges, people look for foundations beyond human construc-
tion where they can anchor their personal and social
identities. In some cases, such as the case of former-
Yugoslavia, these fundamentalisms are a mixture of religion
and ethnic nationalism. In other cases, the fundamentalist
anxiety strikes back in the form of violent, racist hatred,
such as the skinheads in Germany who see the immigrant
Turks as so threatening that they feel they have the right to
kill them as “invaders.” In virtually all forms of fundamen-
talism, the media play a central role in this search for
identity and in the attempt to affirm that the religious and
the sacred can be the basis for significant social actors in a
modernizing world.

I would like here to explore the phenomenon of disen-

chantment primarily in the Latin American context. It is
not easy to give an account of the relations of modernity,
religion, and media on this continent because secularization
has such a different connotation here. In cultures that have
experienced an ongoing confrontation between Catholicism
and the liberal Enlightenment, the extreme ideological pola-
rization has coloured the concept of secularization with
layers of misunderstanding. Indeed, one can say that Latin
Americans, caught between poles of integralisms, have lived
the relation between religion and modernity in a quite

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schizophrenic manner. On the one hand, modernity is syn-

onymous with the triumph of reason, equality, democratic
participation, and progress. For persons who think in this
manner, religion is simply a matter of the past: irrational
obscurantism and the remnant of an uneducated peasant
society.

In contrast, those with religious commitment have tended

to identify modernity with atheism. Dating from the con-
demnation of “modernism” by Pius X, modernity has been
associated with a society abandoned to the forces of evolu-
tion and to beliefs in naturalistic determinism that destroy
values of tradition. For those with this perspective, moder-
nity means secular humanism and an individualism that
makes a communitarian commitment impossible. Thus, in
Latin America, our lived perception of secularization is
characterized by this radical split of worldviews and a
Manichean polarization. One is supposed to make a choice
between becoming modern or remaining a believer.
Whereas, in countries such as the United States, modernity
not only is equivalent to being religious or has its founda-
tions in religious belief (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler,
& Tipton, 1985), in Latin America we have faced an irre-
ducible opposition of worldviews.

To understand this radically polarized conception of secu-

larization, one must go back to the explanation of
secularization suggested by Max Weber (1958). First, for
Weber, a secular, modem world is not only a world without
gods, but a world completely rationalized, a world guided
by a scientific reasoning that destroys the foundations of a
magico-mysterious perception of human existence. Second,
Weber understood the secular world to be a world in which
experience is without an ultimate meaning. No longer are
there realities that have meaning in themselves and that can
be a starting point “outside our constructed reality.” What

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guides the world, in this explanation, is a type of instrumen-

tal rationality that Weber called, with a very apt metaphor,
“a cage of iron.” Persons now come to live in a world that is
so entirely constructed by human logic that it becomes for
them an inescapable cage because the reasoning that guides
human destiny is concerned only with instrumental means,
without reference to any ulterior ends.

Finally, the secular means the breaking apart of the old

certainties that have supported the communitarian integra-
tion of the city. Because we can no longer assume the
existence of community, we have to make enormous efforts
to somehow find the kind of sociability that we have associ-
ated with community.

I have found Gellner’s (1989) rephrasing of the position

of Weber a particularly apt one:

What Weber meant by disenchantment is the Faust-like ac-

quisition of cognitive, technological and administrative
power. We have acquired diabolical capacities by trading
off our world full of meaning, a meaning humanly experi-
enced even if risky and threatening, for a world that we can
manipulate. We have abandoned that insecure world for a
world that is predictable and much more manageable, but a
world that is coldly indifferent and insipid.

This is the matrix of the concept of secularization. It is a

world ruled by instrumental rationality – cold, pragmatic,
and functional. To this, one would have to add, from the
tradition of the sociology of religion, two other elements.
First, as Hegel emphasized, a secular world is an entirely
human project, created out of our images and desires, an
objectivation of the consciousness and creativity of humans.
Second, a secular world is an autonomous world, a world in
which the state, society culture, and art have made them-
selves more and more independent of religion and have

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created their own bases of social power. This is a world that

has progressively won its cultural, ideological, and cognitive
freedom and that no longer needs justification from beliefs,
creeds, and religious institutions. Once cultures cut their ties
to religious institutions they become diverse and complex,
no longer following univocal paths of evolution. Conse-
quently, this kind of culture does not provide a substratum
of meaning that can be linked with any form of religion or
any form of church (Rahner, 1969).

How Secularization Has Been Lived and Thought From

the Perspective of Latin America

In a very schematic way, I would like to sketch out two

Latin American conceptions of secularization. The first is
what I would call a historicist perspective, represented, for
example, in the work of the Chilean, Pedro Morande
(1984), a sociologist for whom modernity in Latin America
is characterized by the secular politicization of faith. By
this, Morande means that the history of these peoples,
which was once identified with religious institutions, has
become identified with their nation-states. In Latin Amer-
ica, he would argue, the conception of history through
influences as diverse as textbooks and political rhetoric, has
gradually found its principle of unity in its sociopolitical
project and in the development of the nation-state. What-
ever may have been its origins, the history of the peoples
has become identified with the history of the states. It has
been forgotten that there were once other symbols around
which community was formed, other cultural syntheses and
other mediating institutions through which these peoples
expressed the richness and the tragedy of their own history.
Among these other social contexts, there was, above all, the
church. According to Pedro Morande, the history texts of
Latin America have lost the memory of the profoundly

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important role of the church as a specific space for social

meeting and a place for cultural synthesis. More concretely,
the histories of Latin America have forgotten what was
called barroco. The Latin American baroque, one of the
periods of greatest creativity and cultural synthesis, has
been covered over to make way for a political-economic
unity that allows us to find our identities in the nation-state.

The historicist conception of secularization in Latin

America has also tended to rewrite the religious history in a
way that popular religiosity and the formal rationality of
ecclesiastical institutions conflates as one thing. Fortu-
nately, according to Pedro Morande, this mistaken concep-
tion never gained much importance because popular religi-
osity is still, in Latin America, the strongest link of cultural
continuity in these countries. Popular religiosity, never
absorbed by the institutional church, is precisely what en-
ables Latin American culture to respond so differently to
the abstract universalism of modem functionalist rational-
ity. Popular culture is a form of resistance, and popular
religiosity is one of the major cultural resources that helps
Latin America to resist the instrumental rationality of mod-
ernity.

Another current of thought about secularization in Latin

America is the populist conception. The theologian Díaz-
Alvarez (1978) presents an example of this view quite
clearly when he argues that atheism, as a type of seculariza-
tion that denies any meaning to religion, is something that
has affected only a small minority among the dominant
elites. The great mass of people, especially the popular
classes, constitute the true cultural memory and moral
strength of these countries. Díaz-Alvarez argues that for the
majority of the people, religion has continued to be the
source of meaning in life and a powerful influence for the
preservation of moral integrity.

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At the same time, Díaz-Alvarez recognizes that the popu-

lar religiosity carries strong elements of fatalism, ritualism,
and blind devotion to saintly patrons that dilute the strength
of the humanity and moral intuition inherent in this relig-
ious culture.

Díaz-Alvarez also admits that many important social sec-

tors of Latin America, such as intellectuals and educators,
are being absorbed into a secularized culture. He is con-
cerned about the fact, and I think rightly, that the historical
churches, especially the Catholic Church, have not been
able to develop a discourse that captures the interest of
young people. As young people become increasingly indif-
ferent to religious and moral commitment, we are seeing a
slow but important growth of secularization.

It is quite significant, however, that both the historicist

and populist conceptions of secularization sidestep the ques-
tion of the power of the churches over social and cultural
institutions. For Latin America, secularization has not been
a question of atheistic rationalism, but rather of a desire for
autonomy from the church in the areas of politics, the state,
sexuality and artistic culture. One still finds countries where
the state is strongly tied to the church, where the church
feels it has the right to manage and manipulate the field of
education and blackmail the area of culture. I think that in
questions of autonomy from ecclesiastical imposition, the
Enlightenment project of secularization is still very much
alive. As Alan Touraine (1992) has put it, a modem society
is not indifferent to religion or liberated from religion. Mod-
ern society is one that defends the separation of the
temporal and spiritual spheres, without the disappearance
of the spiritual. With modernity we have found a way to
maintain simultaneously the affirmation of the personal
subject with the various freedoms and rights that this en-

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tails: the freedom of conscience, the freedom of convictions,

and the right to resist the destruction of collective identities.

The Re-Enchantment of the World

How is the world being re-enchanted? I would say that

this leads to still another question: What remains of ritual in
public performance and entertainment? (Baudrillard, 1993).
Or, better put, What remains of ritual in the mass media?

My premise is that the mass media are not just a phe-

nomenon of commercial or ideological manipulation, but
are, rather, a cultural phenomenon to be understood by
anthropology and other cultural sciences. The mass media
are the places where many people – indeed, an increasing
number of people – construct the meaning of their lives.
The media offer the opportunity for people to come together
to understand the central questions of life, from the mean-
ing of art to the meaning of death, of sickness, of youth, of
beauty, of happiness, and of pain. Thus, I am suggesting
that we should look for the processes of re-enchantment in
the continuing experience of ritual in communitarian cele-
bration and in the other ways that the media bring people
together. We must ask what remains of ritual and commu-
nity celebration in the Olympic Games, the political rally,
rock concerts, and the huge television contests. This will
help us understand the phenomenon of the electronic
church.

The electronic church has its roots in the popular religios-

ity of the United States, but it has extended into Latin
America through the Pentecostal churches and the intensive
use of the mass media (Assmann, 1988). The electronic
church has been part of a veritable cultural revolution in
Latin America: the conversion of millions of people to the
Protestant sects and, in particular, the passing of millions of

Mass Media as a Site of Resacralization…

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Catholics to the world of the most fundamentalist churches

such as the Pentecostals.

This phenomenon has occurred both in the world of ru-

ral, indigenous peoples in areas such as Chiapas in Mexico
– I am thinking of the splendid study of Gilberto Jiménez
(1989) describing the presence of the evangelical churches in
Chiapas – and in the more urbanized parts of Latin Amer-
ica, such as Argentina and Brazil, where millions of Ca-
tholics have entered the Protestant churches.

The electronic church has a far more profound meaning

than most people suspect. It is not simply that some
churches have used the media to project their sermons to a
larger audience or have used a variety of media and genres
to reach many new sectors of the public. Rather, in my
opinion, the significance is that some churches have been
able to transform radio and television into a new, funda-
mental “mediation” for the religious experience. That is, the
medium is not simply a physical amplification of the voice,
but rather adds a quite new dimension to religious contact,
religious celebration, and personal religious experience. To
demonstrate this, I quote from an article by an Argentinean,
Pablo Seman (1993), describing a Pentecostal ceremony in
Buenos Aires recently:

Today we are going to create a “holy scandal,” the pastor

proclaims to thirty thousand people in the middle of a
massive revivalist meeting that has lasted eight hours. A
feminine voice is humming in the background, rising
above the deep counterpart of the drums and the sound of
guitars falling away. Now the preacher, his voice swelling
to a crescendo in a commanding tone, drowns out the
woman as he exhorts, “You are the spouses of the Lord.”
While the evangelist prays and preaches, the voice-over of
the television anchorman provides a plaintive counterpart
of “Amen!” “Yes, Lord!” “Come now, Jesus!” in the fore-

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foreground. Now the choir comes in with its part, “Raise

me up, Lord! Break me up, Lord! Lord, consume me with
your love!” Then the huge chorus pleads, “Oh come, Holy
Spirit” with trembling body and voice. Now the sound
dies away, and a kind of silence falls over the crowd. In
this scene, there may be particular actors who stand out,
but the coming of the Holy Spirit in a trance-like experi-
ence is the customary high point that the mass seeks and
feels together as one body.

This is not simply a time of worship, but a media event.

From time to time, gospel rock groups take the stage, lead-
ing the people in an intense dance, some people swirling
by themselves, others twisting and turning in unison. So-
me walk around with home video cameras to catch some
of the action for later showing in their local assemblies.
There are dozen of counsellors circulating among the
masses of people with walkie-talkies. A preacher dances
frenetically before a huge screen that projects the words of
the hymns.

Nothing of this seems to be coordinated. It appears to

emanate from the urban cultural experience which the cul-
tural process of the cult seems to know how to take into
account as if all were planned.

To me, this account shows that the electronic church is

supplying the magic that established religions have intellec-
tualized, made cold and disenchanted. The electronic
church has taken hold of the technologies of the image and
of the sentiments to capture the messianic, apocalyptic
exaltation of the feelings. This gives a face and a voice to
the new tribal cults, the new sects, and the new communes.
For these communities, ritual and moral norms are far more
important than theological doctrine.

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Thus, as the Catholic Church and some historical Protes-

tant churches grow rational and intellectualized, the Pen-
tecostals, charismatics, and other apocalyptic groups are
making ritual and celebration the focal point of religious
experience. And these movements are carrying this experi-
ence out of the churches into homes and circles of friends
through the mass media. Radio – FM, short wave, and,
increasingly, local stations – is by far the most important
medium at present. Television, however, is finding ways
not only to broadcast religious worship but to intensify and
magnify the religious experience itself. Through the use of
media, the fundamentalist churches have learned to trans-
form the media into a mediation that is fundamental to the
new forms of religious experience; and these churches are
now in tune with the popular sectors of Latin America. The
Catholic Church has somehow lost the wave length of the
masses, especially the young people, in part, I think, be-
cause this Protestant tradition has understood that the
media are a way to re-enchant the world. The media are the
way to transform the everyday life of the people into magic.

For intellectuals, there remains little magic in the world.

But for the great majority of people, the media are mysteri-
ous, magic, exciting, and enchanting with the melodrama,
the star system, the ability to create the drama of the Olym-
pic Games, the frenzy of gigantic sports contests (more real
than the actual sports contests), and the spectacle of tele-
vised religious revivals. Somehow the media have elimi-
nated the distance between the sacred and the profane. The
walls around the sacred that the religions have protected so
jealously have been broken down by the media. Television,
especially, has introduced magic into the realm of the pro-
fane and has made secular what once was sacred. Without
doubt, the sacred has undergone a trivialization, but at the
same time, the sacred is penetrating into the recesses of
everyday life. I am thinking, for example, of how advertis-

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ing spots make enchanting even the most humble and rou-
tine tasks of daily life. Even the simple activities of washing,
scrubbing, cleaning, and ironing have been transfigured,
made poetic, and somehow raised to transcen-dence. Just
think of how advertising makes a bottle of Coca-Cola a
magic source of energy beauty and wisdom – the source of
life and youth itself.

Television is the place for the visualization of our com-

mon myths. I refer to myth, not in the sense of R. Barthes
(1974) (a form of ideology), but in the deeper anthropologi-
cal interpretation: myths as the source of cultural unity, the
myths that cause and remove deep anxieties, the myths that
protect us from the terror of chaos, and the myths that save
us. We find our motivating symbols in our myths, from the
myths that give meaning to the life of the poor to the myths
that sustain our poor life. It is television that is articulating
and catalyzing the integrating myths of our societies. What
are the myths of our countries if not our football stars, our
rock groups, our champion boxers? The people live their
deep identification with their idols and their stars in televi-
sion.

As trivial and superficial as these symbols may seem,

television has a deep resonance with the capacity and ne-
cessity of the people to be “someone.” And people feel
themselves to be someone to the degree that they identify
with Someone – someone on whom they can project their
fears, someone capable of assuming and silencing these fear

For those of us who for years now have been studying the
cultural meaning of telenovelas, this discussion of re-enchant-
ment leads to important reflections. Why do drama pro-
grams occupy such a large part of Latin American televi-
sion, and why is drama continuing to be ever more impor-
tant? Is it not because drama is the basic form of ritual? Is it

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not because the people find in television drama a way to

ritualize their fears, their joys, and the tasks of their daily
lives? Despite the limitations of the telenovelas – the bad
acting, the reactionary themes, the poverty of aesthetic
expression – there is, in the dramatization, a poetic mo-
ment, an almost frightening poetic mysteriousness, that
permits people to break out of the monotonous cocoon of
their daily routines and re-enchant their lives.

If, indeed, the media and religion are coming together,

then perhaps it is because they are fundamental cultural
mediations of the need felt by the people to transform them
into magic, into mystery and into the seduction of the
world. We would find, then, that something very curious
has happened. Despite all the promise of modernity to
make religion disappear, what has really happened is that
religion has modernized itself (Gil-Calvo, 1993). Religion
has shown itself capable of eating modernity alive and mak-
ing modernity an important ingredient for its own purposes.
What we are witnessing, then, is not the conflict of religion
and modernity, but the transformation of modernity into
enchantment by linking new communication technologies
to the logic of popular religiosity.

Three Questions About Religion, Media, and Society

The Catholic Church and the religiosity of the Catholic

Church have been central factors in the development of
Latin American culture. Today, there are three contradic-
tory questions that one must confront in understanding the
religious transformations in Latin America. As a form of
conclusion, I would like to address these questions.

1. Is not the religiosity of the less-favored classes –

whether this be the popular religiosity of Catholicism or the

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new forms of Pentecostalism – a factor influencing subordi-

nation to the dominant classes?

It is very difficult to deny that there is, in religious beliefs

and practices, an element of alienation, of conformism, and
of the uncritical acceptance of an unjust order. But it would
be unjust and false to reduce religiosity to this. No one will
deny that on continents such as Latin America, religion has
been associated with power. Indeed, popular religiosity has
often been seduced into being an accomplice of power,
domination, and subjugation and has lost the capacity to
make an independent criticism of power.

Religion and the church have also been a fundamental

element in the historical memory of the people. Religion
enables many to discover the meaning of life, to create a
cultural synthesis, and to develop indigenous cultures. It is
necessary to look at both faces of such a complex and con-
tradictory phenomenon – both the complicity with totalita-
rian religions and inquisitions, and the sense of cultural
identity of the popular classes.

2. Why have the historical churches in Latin America –

especially the Catholic Church – seemingly lost their capac-
ity to challenge and inspire the urban masses, the youth,
and the popular classes?

In fact, the historical churches, particularly the Catholic

Church, have been deeply involved in the liberation strug-
gles of Latin America in the past 40 years. For the Catholic
Church, the Second Vatican Council set in motion a great
deal of self-criticism regarding its complicity with structures
of power. There have been powerful currents of honest
examination of the manipulation of popular credulity (for
example, the devotion to the saints) and the superficiality of
the experience of religious commitment.

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The theology of liberation went far beyond self-criticism

and not only stimulated a questioning of complicity with
dominant classes on the part of the churches but also re-
leased a spiritual energy to nourish revolutionary move-
ments. To see this side of the church, we must examine the
meaning of the movement of the base communities in Bra-
zil and the role of the Catholic Church in Chile in the
darkest days of the people’s struggle with the Pinochet dic-
tatorship. In these and other contexts, the churches have
been a support and a source of energy to sustain the mem-
ory and values of a civil society. The theology of liberation
awakened energies that have shown the possibility of a
religiosity that not only is not alienating and does not numb
revolutionary aspirations, but that instead has been an im-
portant inspiration to transform, diversify and revitalize
societies.

It is my view, however, that the churches still retain too

much social power in Latin America. If the church wishes
to rebuild its links with the popular sectors and with the
young people, it must renounce any pretension of imposing
its cultural power. In some countries, the Catholic Church
still attempts to gain a privileged position over other confes-
sions and to retain its ability to manipulate political proce-
sses. As long as the church attempts to impose a cultural
monopoly and sustain its position by cooperating with the
most reactionary power groups of these countries, church
leaders will not understand what the popular classes are
suffering and will not be able to comprehend the discourse
of the younger generations.

3. What is the sign of the renaissance of shamanism,

spiritualism, and other forms of traditional indigenous relig-
ion in the cities of Latin America?

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The paradoxical rebirth of religious and magical practices

from our rural past in the midst of our great Latin America
cities is an aspect of the “ruralization” of our societies that
can be traced back, in my view, to the political economic
policies of our times.

In a period of little more than 40 years, many Latin

American countries have changed from being largely rural,
with some 75% of the population in agriculture or in small
villages, to being largely urban, with more than 70% in huge
cities. But at the same time, we are witnessing the impover-
ishment of the lower-middle classes and the working classes
due to the neoliberal policies that discourage social invest-
ment and favour high-technology employment. This means
that the majority of the people in the cities are learning to
survive on the basis of a kind of urban subsistence economy
that mixes rural solidarity and traditional practices with the
new skills of the city. This affects all aspects of urban life
among the lower-middle and popular classes. For example,
people are once again learning to get by with a mixture of
indigenous herbal medicine and modem medicines. This
cultural and socioeconomic context is also affecting the
religious practices in that a curious mixture of urban secu-
larization, importation of oriental cults, New Age lifestyles,
and rural magic and spiritualism is taking shape.

This new urban religious culture is such a widespread

phenomenon that forms of it may now be found in all social
classes of the city. Among young people of the professional
classes, for example, one finds the attractions of New Age
and oriental religions linking up with traditional shamanism
and “re-semanticizing” even the traditional religiosity inher-
ited in Catholic families. We are witnessing a kind of new
foundational religious logic growing up in the urban areas.

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The Tribalization of Modern Cultures

In the background of this re-enchantment of modem cities

is a profound change in the way young people construct
their social life. The youth of today are very much like no-
madic tribes.

The new diversity of our cultures is lived by young people

as a source of wealth. Although adults still fear this diversity
and pluralism, young people love to move from one cultural
identity to another. Identification with the cultures of me-
dia, especially the culture of popular music, is strikingly
important in discovering and experimenting with new iden-
tities. For young people, music is not just entertainment, but
a language, a way of expressing their dissatisfactions, their
anger, their confusion, and their search. The diversity of this
music gives birth to a multitude of tribes and communities.
There is not just rock music, but plastic rock, authentic
rock, rock of the 60s, rock of the 90s, and an endless inven-
tion of other musical styles. In all of their searching, young
people take to this diversity with an energy and force that
enables them to rapidly identify, disidentify, and reidentify
with cultures and thus escape the pressure to any one com-
mitment.

Why is this like nomadic tribes? There is no attachment

to one particular place. Identity does not come from any
place, but rather young people give identity to places, at
least for a short, passing moment. Their identities are tem-
porary. This is in striking contrast to older conceptions of
identity for a whole life and attachment to a particular place
that is semi-sacred, not for religious reasons, but because
the place has such affective and symbolic importance (Her-
linghaus & Walter, 1994). Young people do not live in such
a relationship with a defined territory. Rather it is the tribe,
the group that in a given moment decides to convert a dis-

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cotheque, the street corner of a neighbourhood, or a village

square into “our” place. For this moment, the youthful tribe
marks the place with their graffiti; they put up their symbols
there and take possession of it. Nation-states now have far
less power of attracting identification than does the terrain
of the cities. People now live close to the landmarks of their
cities, but from a global, transnational perspective. People
have developed such a global vision, in large part, because
the globe is brought to them by the media. They thus feel at
home in just about any part of the globe or in any world,
real or imagined.

The patch of soil, the native village, the consecrated

church and temple have ceased to have a power of en-
chantment. Instead, the mass media create symbols of the
sacred; and the youthful nomadic tribes, identifying with
these totems, have learned how to make holy and en-
chanted any place they decide to inhabit.

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