Digital Religious Identities As a Subject of Study: New Methods, New Challenges

In the field of anthropology and sociology, observation has been for a long time the best technique deployed by researchers to study the religious phenomenon. However, the digital revolution resulted in a shift of paradigm amid the anthropology and sociology of religion on many levels. During the last three decades, we have been witnessing a real change in the ways of expressing religiosity as well as in the methods employed by the researchers to approach it. Instead of limiting observation to the physical field, we talk nowadays about observing and trucking digital traces and immersing ourselves in the religious and irreligious electronic communities in a specific way that allows us to observe semi-virtual entities. Thus, this paper aims to shed light on these new ways of studying digital religious expressions through a reflexive study of our personal experience in the fieldwork. The conclusions displayed in it draw on the results of many qualitative researches that we have been conducting for more than a decade in Moroccan digital spaces regarding specific aspects of digital religious identities such as religious plurality, extremism, religious reform, and gender. The paper will elucidate some procedures to be used in netnography to study digital Religious expressions through online observation, and to exploit Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis to interpret digital religious content. Furthermore, the paper intends also to outline the challenges that the researcher could face while using these methods and the alternative procedures that he could resort to in order to handle them appropriately.