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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, -Daria Radchenko (RANEPA)
Paper short abstract:
COVID-19 forced Russian Orthodox believers to celebrate Easter in their homes. This resulted in extended reflections on the legitimacy of the participation in a ritual performed in a different location and construction/externalisation of a hierarchy of spaces and objects related to it.
Paper long abstract:
Epidemics of COVID-19 led to major lockdowns over the world in 2020. This situation severely limited the possibility of a number of social activities, including religious gatherings. In Russia, the peak of epidemics coincided with the central period in Orthodox calendar – the last week of Lent and Easter. As the Patriarch blessed “stay-at-home” politics, churches were officially closed for everybody but clergy and live streams of services in social media organized, believers had to adopt swiftly to a new mode of co-presence (Urry 2002) in church by participating in services online. To do this, they had to make a choice between the places from which live stream was organized, transform the space of their homes to accommodate sacrality of the event, rethink the locality of their own body in being instantly at home and “in church”, manage communication with the priest, fellow parishioners and family members during Easter night. This involved not only formal decoration of homes but also subtle mechanisms of balancing authority within the network of sacred objects, gadgets and people (e.g., home icons were perceived as “more important” than those shown on screen during service; Patriarch’s service could be viewed on a big screen while a co-presence at one’s own parish’s service could be maintained with help of a small smartphone screen, etc). Basing on digital ethnography (including participant observation online) and 40 in-depth interviews the presented paper will investigate how believers constructed and reflected the space of Easter service in their homes and how the vernacular understanding of church as a unity and as a sacred space has changed in isolation.
Malgorzata Rygielska (University of Silesia in Katowice)
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents the ways in which Jesuits and the lay faithful construct and co-create the religious third space. A particular emphasis is placed on the description, analysis, and interpretation of the activity of "mobile" communities (One Ignatian Community, Poglebiarka.pl).
Paper long abstract:
Jesuits have long taken advantage of the cyberspace as a viable platform for the purposes of not only evangelization but also promotion and facilitation of specific religious practices. Consciously and deliberately, they employ "strategic management of religious websites" (cf. Golan &Campbell 2015) to activate the faithful and encourage their participation. The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated the shift in religious practices towards the online realm, modified the existing and facilitated the emergence and promotion of new forms of religious activity. In the case of the Jesuit circles, the intensification of activity conducted via digital media was also related to the celebrations of the Ignatian year (2021-2022).The coincidence of the two factors bore fruit in the form of e.g. the One Ignatian Community - the "Bilingual Prayer Service", as well as the substantial popularization of virtual retreats. Such initiatives bring together a variety of complementary formats: written, audio and audiovisual, including interactive formats. The Online Retreats are created in the form of recordings and visual inspirations with commentaries. At the same time, apart from "global" programs there are also strictly local initiatives (cf. the Polish Pogłębiarka - a mobile community practicing Ignatian meditation https://poglebiarka.pl/ ). The Netnographic Analysis (cf. e.g. Kozinets 2019, Kozinets, Gambetti 2021) allows one to consider many questions regarding/related to the ways of constructing and mediating the third religious space (by Jesuits and lay users as well as co-founders of Ignatian communities operating both online and offline), online religious identity building, and emergent roles of online authority.
Susie Triffitt (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
The Alpha course is an evangelistic course introducing the basics of Christianity. During the pandemic, Alpha went online causing its attendance to triple. This ethnographic study explains how this growth was caused by the “belief-curious” being able to participate with the sacred in private.
Paper long abstract:
COVID-19 dramatically changed how religious communities could congregate and practice their faith together. This paper will show how religion moving online facilitated increased engagement by the “belief-curious”, a term I use (following the language of identity politics) to describe those who are not “out” as religious but are exploring their faith identity. It does so by taking Alpha as its ethnographic focus. Alpha is a successful evangelistic course and has been undertaken by over 24 million people in over 160 countries. Alpha reluctantly went online in 2019 and its attendance tripled. During the 2021 lockdown, I undertook fieldwork to understand this pandemic growth. Speaking to interlocutors across Britain, it became clear that Alpha’s ‘move online’ facilitated religious engagement for those who for practical and social reasons had been unable to engage before. Instead of pandemic suffering pushing people towards or away from faith, the technologies which the pandemic forced upon religion brought the “belief-curious” out of the woodwork. Those unable to go to church previously due to disability, care responsibilities, or the ineptitude of local establishments, were now able to negotiate religious exploration from home, often with a community miles away. Most interestingly, those who felt uncomfortable exploring faith due to social pressures were able to engage with Alpha privately. By drawing on new literature on secularism, conversion and the digital space within the Anthropology of Religion, this paper argues that the privacy of online Alpha created digital communities where participants could renovate their plausibility structures and change their beliefs.
Anand Ranjan (The University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
The study is a part of my PhD project which aims to explore a) In what ways the use of digital space promotes diverse voices and facilitates the inclusion of previously silenced voices in Hinduism, and b) How digital platforms are contributing to the growth of new fundamentalist Hindutva narratives.
Paper long abstract:
The mandated physical distancing to curtail the transmission of COVID-19 led to an increase of innovative ways of religious engagement like e-Satsang, e-prayer, online ceremonies, email prayer, etc. Contemporary life is becoming a hybrid experience encompassing both offline and digital worlds synchronously (Campbell, 2012). In digital space, both online and offline religious spheres are constantly interpenetrating and becoming a site to explore how religion evolves with the new technology. Through a detailed exploration of offline and online Hindu beliefs and practices, this study asks what it means to be religious or 'do religion' outside traditional physical and institutional contexts?
Over the last few decades, a significant shift can be seen in the ways Hinduism is practiced in India. The fluidity and flexibility of digital space encourage diverse voices in Hinduism, which were once excluded (Balaji, 2017). It facilitates the access to religious services such as online 'ritual'(worship, pilgrimage) for transgender and marginalized Hindus. The communicative structure of new digital media and the Internet during the 1990s empowered the religious symbols to disrupt the social and cultural barrier in established hierarchical social structure (Babb & Wadley,1995). The emergence of new digital media in the last three decades has further enhanced religious symbols' spatial and social mobility (Babb & Wadley,1995). Thus, it challenges us to explore the emerging pattern of Hindu religiosity and how the mediation of technology enriches and modifies individual's everyday religious experiences.