Digital Objects of Devotion: Online Relationality in a Shi’a Ecology
When a Shi’a practitioner caresses an image of an ‘alam on an iPhone screen, what is being brought into proximity? What is being touched and touching back? how is this mediated?
The proliferation of digital technology throws materiality in religion into new relief. My ethnographic work with Shi’a communities in the Netherlands revolves around questions of digital materiality. Focusing on a Pakistani-Dutch Twelver Shi’a community and women’s WhatsApp group, I explore everyday digital objects that are embedded in Shi’a ecology. Using case studies of e-cards, majlis invitations, and WhatsApp stickers, I locate how certain digital objects are produced and circulated within Shi’a ritual spheres.
I conceptualize Shi’a ecology as an interconnected, dynamic, living system of relationships that includes understandings of the kaināt (cosmos), qudrat (nature), ghayb (unseen), the Ahl-al-bayt (house of Muhammad) and materiality. Ecology here relates to plural environments, including digital atmospheres, as well as processes and relationships that constitute it. I draw attention to these evolving and fluid relationships, as well as gatherings/nodes in the form of digital objects. Therefore, I imagine Shi’a ecology as a zone of entanglement encompassing human, beyond-human, organic, electric, spiritual, animate matters.
Digital objects are ontologically ambiguous, making them valuable subjects of research to explore how meaning-making, relationships, and communication pulses through religious communities. Specific material properties of digital objects allow them to elicit sensations in particular ways: visually, sonically, haptically. However, the messages they carry and meaning they convey are still rendered sensible through the ecologies they are embedded within. Digital objects function as communicative, political, historical, mnemonic and interactive agents, facilitating access to the Ahl-al-bayt and co-creating the bricolage of a ritual. I explore how sensation, memory, and experience are conveyed through digital matter within religious ecologies