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- Convenors:
-
Oren Golan
(University of Haifa)
Michele Martini (Università della Svizzera Italiana)
Ben Kasstan (London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine)
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- Chairs:
-
Oren Golan
(University of Haifa)
Nurit Stadler (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/011
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel spotlights communal participation in online settings and sets to explore how religious communal involvement is realized through digital media to congregate, practice rituals, maintain cohesion or digitise religious activities.
Long Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and catalysed the ways in which religious communities embrace online means to congregate, practice rituals, maintain cohesion and digitise their collective activities amidst the threat of social fragmentation. Nevertheless, scholars have highlighted the ways in which religious devotees adapt online means to congregate, practice rituals and maintain the community, its boundaries and its social representation. In this panel, we spotlight the ways that communal participation is achieved through the myriad affordances of cyberspace. Thus, the panel explores the question: how is communal participation through digital media (re)negotiated? This line of inquiry aims to reveal how communal involvement is realized through digital media including official websites, blogs, social media, films, television series, and web series.
We invite scholars who employ ethnographic and netnographic accounts, and network analysis to shed light on these communities and their digital representations. This panel aims at fostering our understanding of key categories that are at the heart of current debates in anthropology and media studies, such as:
- Negotiation of online/offline religious life.
- Emergent roles of online authority.
- Anthropology of mediatization.
- (Self-)Representations of religious communities in the media.
- The ways the religious third space is constructed and mediated.
- Online religious identity building and/or networking.
- Minorities and diaspora collectives over the net.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The study explores how religious webmasters balance their professional identity as hi-tech experts and advocates of the faith. Employing fieldwork with Jewish and Catholic webmasters, the study unveils profiles that converge a devotional and techno-scientific logic to legitimize digital platforms.
Paper long abstract:
The past decade has witnessed a surge in religious webmasters who design digital environments to propel religious movements, proselytize ideals and redefine devotional practice. While past scholarship focused on the veneration of holy sites and religious materiality (e.g., books, icons, talismans), the religious landscape has witnessed a growth of smart technologies-of-the-self which integrate sacred activities into the webosphere. This includes cultivating various platforms such as live-streaming websites for holy places, religious apps (e.g. prayer, community building) and creating video content.
Studies of web developers have underscored their emergence, prestige and occupational burdens, as well as growing tensions between engineers and self-educated workers. However, questions of webmasters’ occupational identity have been less addressed, particularly as they engage in ideologically charged missions. Accordingly, we inquire: How do devotional webmasters work to construct their professional identity as advocates of the faith? Findings are ethnographically informed and are gleaned from 40 in-depth interviews with app developers and semiotic investigations of 40 Jewish and Catholic apps in Israel and the US. Specifically, the study revealed three primary types of relations between religious webmasters’ professional identity and their religious creed: (1) Conservative, (2) Incremental and (3) Radical. Examining these relations the study elucidates a convergence between religious thought and techno-scientific logic, as well as a sanctification of mobile platforms through symbolic religious aesthetics. Findings shed light on the growth of globalized and standardized religious practice, and on its implications with regard to native forms of communal religious identity.
Paper short abstract:
Using visual methedolgy, this study analyzes the Instagram culture of Iranian clreics and holy shrines. The findings suggest that Instagrammig has contributed the popularization and aestheticization of religious spaces and has fostered the superficiality and spectacular materiality of holy shrines.
Paper long abstract:
Following Iran’s supreme leader’s call on the clergy to embark on an online jihad to rescue youngsters trapped in the “killing ground” of the internet, a vast number of clerics and Islamic organizations have expanded their online activities particularly on Instagram. There is a tension in this context between the religious incentives of the employment of online platforms and the secularizing impact of the internet on religious practice in sacred spaces. To explore the tension, this study concentrates on the online visual culture of state-sponsored religious spaces constructed on Instagram. Employing a qualitative method of visual analysis based on social semiotics, the article investigates two categories of image-spaces: Firstly, images of the holy shrine of Imam Reza in the city of Mashhad shared by official accounts and citizen visitors, and secondly, images shared by pro-state clerics. The data has been collected selectively by searching pertinent Instagram profiles, hashtags, and locations. The findings suggest that the use of Instagram has contributed the popularization and aestheticization of religious spaces and has fostered the superficiality and spectacular materiality of holy shrines. The study offers insights into the mediatization of holy sites in Iran and provides understanding of digital practices promoted by the IRI’s cultural policies aimed at extending influence over the youth online culture in Iran.
Paper short abstract:
This paper expends how Muslim males negotiate, articulate and reaffirm their religious identity during partner selection on Islamically connotated dating apps. Providing a normative framework, these apps become religious authorities that disconnect and homogenise morality from cultural distinctions.
Paper long abstract:
Apps are able to exert influence in many people’s lives as they are ready to use with a touch of a fingertip. Recently, apps have been developed that possess a religious connotation and assist Muslims in their partner selection in a novel way. This paper will describe how such Islamically connotated dating apps shape the religious identity amongst Muslims. It will be revealed how Muslims males negotiate their religious identity by ethnographically examining the male users’ interaction on these smartphone apps. Such apps with their discursive logic draw from Islam’s textual repertoire and discursive traditions leading them to become a type of religious authority as the app’s framework guides users though their normative Islamic selection criteria. However, the apps also steer users into a doctrinal homogeneity that focuses on religious normativity. In the sense, it is argued that heterogenic approaches on how to define the dichotomy between halal and haram are disregarded and homogenised in online spaces.
Paper short abstract:
For African Christians in Australia virtual worship is a complicated entanglement of benefits and barriers, mobility and immobility. Churches have had to be innovative in their responses to congregants’ needs. We thus call for the study of online/offline practices as a single co-constitutive field.
Paper long abstract:
In March 2020, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia slammed its international borders shut, internal state borders hardened and lockdown was implemented. Communities and families were separated both at home and abroad for almost two years. This situation was particularly difficult for African Christians living in so-called ‘fortress Australia.’ Although diverse across all socio-economic indicators, for this cohort of migrants church is the cornerstone of their community. Churches, as social institutions, provide material and spiritual support and facilitate local, translocal and transnational connections. In this paper, we argue that for these Christians the speed and scale of the expansion of virtual worship engagements was characterised by a) a complicated entanglement of benefits and barriers, mobility and immobility; and b) places of worship’ innovative responses to their congregants’ needs. Whilst some flourished in the religious cyberspace, others found this development greatly affected their experience of the Holy Spirit, and complicated their relationship with their (religious) communities both in Australia and their homelands. Here, we follow other digital anthropologists who argue for the study of online/offline practices as a single co-constitutive field. We show that these practices are complementary; they work in tandem, one reinforcing the other. Certainly, new and interactive media technologies do not necessarily erase but add to the previous use that religions had made of other technologies to spread the word and make religions tangible, such as images, pamphlets, recordings, books, radio, and TV. This work contributes to discussions concerning the online/offline religious lives of migrants.