Abstracts (in order of presentation)
Panel One: Authority and authenticity online
Samuel Lengen (Max Plank Institute for the Study of Religious Diversity)
Artistic Media Production, Religion and Mediations of ‘The Human’ in Contemporary Beijing
Li Hua, an art student in Beijing, made a short art film about a Buddhist monk’s meditative practice. The film was the result of an ongoing process, wherein Li Hua related his personal experience to notions of religion and non-religion. He had been introduced to Christianity by his grandmother and considered himself a Christian. Despite this background, according to Li Hua, what really had changed him was Buddhism. He stated that Buddhism was not his religion, but an intellectual and ethical practice. Li Hua’s engagement with Buddhism and Christianity took shape in reference to state power and notions of ‘the human,’ which characterize the evolving secularist project of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Accordingly, I conceptualize his media production as an ethical practice engaging official discourse.
Discourse on religion in the PRC, I argue, can be understood within the conceptual binary of historicity and functionality. The notion of historicity can be used to support ‘good tradition’ or criticize ‘feudal superstition’ as remnants of the past. Alternatively, expectations of functionality shape demands of how ‘good religion’ ought to be lived for the sake of future stability and harmony or, alternatively, warnings of how ‘bad’ religious practice endangers society. As governmental techniques, these ways of addressing people and their practices either in terms of their history and tradition or in terms of their function as modern individuals create two opposing conceptions of ‘the human,’ the historically constituted subject and the autonomous individual (cf. Povinelli 2011). Official discourse, then, does not simply encourage a specific image of humanity, but incorporates different notions as governmental techniques with the aim to transform practices and legitimize its management of religious matters.
Li Hua’s digital film on youku is a product of this environment and this paper discusses the conditions for its production. His engagement with Buddhism and Christianity was neither reducible to dominant discourse nor in any way outside of power relations. Official discourse, accordingly, had a formative effect on Li Hua’s engagement with religion. His filmic and digital mediation of Buddhism, however, appears as the creative product of his particular situatedness. Li Hua appropriated the binary conceptions of ‘the human’ present in discourse on religion by giving a historicist account of his Christian religiosity as a family tradition and personal habit, while presenting his study of Buddhism as the secular engagement of an autonomous individual. This apparently straightforward mediation, however, contains an ambiguity, which characterized his practice at moments when his distinction between the religious and the secular became blurred. Yet, the medium of the artistic film, the artistic quality of his work, its presentation in an online medium deemed ‘modern’ as well as his use of notions of historicity and functionality made it possible for Li Hua to explore Buddhism both online and offline in an acceptable manner, while also permitting him to retain Christianity as a ‘personal’ religious belief. Youku offered a way for him to share this engagement with an audience.
Pauline Hope Cheong (Arizona State University)
High-tech High-touch authority: Strategic Arbitration and Presentification for environmental justice among humanistic Buddhists
My research on religious communities in Asia in the last decade has highlighted how religious leaders of various faiths have appropriated newer media amidst tensions and challenges in increasingly information rich and competitive environments. This paper discusses the communicative constitution of transnational religious authority and community. In particular, this paper examines how these relations, in the case of one of the largest Chinese Buddhist organizations in the world, are enacted to address the growing social, political and moral problem of environmental justice.
In contrast with classical formulations of authority into ideal types justified by various forms of legitimation, religious authority is approached in more relational and emergent terms; co-created and maintained in everyday interactions between leaders and followers who acknowledge the asymmetric and consequential nature of their exchanges. This shifts our analytic focus to the process of authoring, which enables religious organizational purpose, theology and identity to be composed.
Given digital media’s affordances to amplify capabilities to author new texts, prior research highlights how religious authority is constructed via “strategic arbitration” whereby Asian pastors co-create expertise where laity cooperation is elicited by retaining discretionary power among the leadership to shape informational and interpersonal outcomes, and enter into agreements characterized not solely by dogmatic pronouncements but also by clergy’s competencies to connect interactively, and across media. Buddhist religious authority is similarly proposed to be performed in temple rituals, and on digital sites perceived to be sacred, to augment congregational ties and organizational loyalty. Everyday interactions on online and offline locales can make religious leaders present and mobilize their sayings to influence the unfolding of spiritual practices.
Hence, as new forms of “high-tech, high-touch authority” are emerging, how can religious authority contribute to the alleviation of human suffering and conflict, where a mix of virtual and physical interactions facilitate how spiritual influence is negotiated and accomplished on local and global scales? In what ways can religious leaders reconstruct authority relations whereby members are organized into humanitarian practices for social change?
This paper presents an informed response to these questions by drawing on data collected in a multi-method granted project on the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation; well-suited for studying spirituality in a globalizing context, for it is “simultaneously an intrinsically Taiwanese phenomenon and a cultural deterritorialization”. Since 1990, Tzu Chi’s missions have included environmental protection; understood as “an urgent imperative that must be translated into action for the continued survival of humanity.”
Findings will highlight processes of strategic arbitration and presentification, including how Master Cheng Yen and her texts are made present across multiple media platforms and in social media interactions,with remarkable implications for Asian “tiger economies” driven by high production, high consumption and widespread pollution. Tzu Chi practices are highly significant given their work across socio-political boundaries and conflict zones. Findings also provide insights into “smart” transmedia practices to create religious capital, in which the digital plays a cardinal role.
Angela Zito (NYU)
Getting your parents online: remediating filiality in China
ON July 1, 2013, amendments to the General Law for Care of the Elderly fell squarely on the family itself, deeming it now a crime to “ignore and cold-shoulder” parents. Of course, in preparation for these new rules, the government undertook a propaganda campaign and put out a revised set of the original 24 Filial Paragons, updated for 2012. Much discussion was devoted to Number 9: Teaching your parents to go online. The old cosmic virtue of filiality is suffering a comeback, and it is not welcome in all quarters.
Filality or xiao, was a virtue of social, cosmic and historical significance in imperial China. From its founding era in the Han dynasty, it emphasized an embodied, ceremonial practice of service and obligation. Rooted metaphorically in the bond between fathers and sons, it expanded in practice to all of the “Five Bonds” including ruler/subject, husband/wife, elder/younger and friend/friend. Filiality’s social utility lay in linking person, kin networks, and the imperial state in a performative web of imitation and mutual responsibility. The reach of human agency was stretched by connecting the social world of filiality to the cosmos through an invisible realm of gods and ancestors. Because of its centrality in organizing ethical and spiritual life, I would place filialtiy at the heart of everyday religion of life cycle ritual, including community ritual or personal ancestral veneration.
This paper will place the New 24 Filial Paragons in context with the original, traditional versions that date to the medieval period and a previous socialist period update. I am curious to understand how the intensely corporeal demands of the parent-child bond have been reshaped in modernity and tilted toward communicative bonds that culminate in digital connections.
Panel Two: Aesthetic starting points for ethical projects
Boreth Ly (UCSC)
Heterotopias Interrupted: Buddhist Embodiment in the Age of Digital Media and Global Capital
This paper considers how the practice of walking meditation and the structuring of time in daily routines in Theravada Buddhist tradition clash with global notions of time and speed in the age of digital media. It looks, moreover, at how the mindfulness and breath control central to Buddhist walking meditation slow down and thus interrupt “still speed” embedded in the digital event and media. Digital speed and time is experienced through the stillness of the body while motions and actions take place on the digital screen. The visual text relevant to my analysis is The Walker (2012), a film created by Malaysian-born, Taiwanese filmmaker, Tsai Ming-Liang. I argue that the measured steps taken the body of the monk amidst the busy and consumer driven streets and shopping malls of Hong Kong in Tsai’s film is an arresting look at and social critique of global capital and speed in the age of digital media. Some of the questions this paper raises are: Could Buddhist walking meditation serves as a mindful intervention on this overlooked experience of “still speed”? How might mindfulness help us reclaim our bodies in an age of digital disembodiment and global capital?
Francesca Tarocco (NYU)
An exemplary digital life: Venerable Daoxin (μ # ) in cyberspace
The young Buddhist monk Daoxin is a proficient user of Sina Weibo, a China-based microblogging service. Weibo encompasses elements of Facebook and Twitter, both of which (along with YouTube) are banned in China. With over 400 million users, Sina Weibo has been a very popular platform for some time even if it is closely monitored by the government. Daoxin’s daily posts seem to resonate with the interests of educated urban Sinophone youths in search of a Buddhist-inspired lifestyle; by June 2012, the monk had more than 189,000 followers. This paper examines Daoxin’s ‘religion work’ and his aesthetic construction of a Buddhist cyberscape. It also looks at his re-fashioning of the Buddhist monastic distinction vis-à-vis the practices of earlier champions of popular culture, including the eminent monks Taixu and Hongyi.
Natasja Sheriff (Center for Religion and Media, NYU)
Reporting Religion in Malaysia: News Making, Art Making, and Advertising after Yasmin Ahmad
Religion and politics are deeply intertwined in Malaysia, yet discussions of either topic are often avoided for fear of inciting conflict or arrest on charges of sedition; news media is censored and much of the mainstream media is heavily controlled by the State. In response, a handful of independent news organizations have emerged during the last decade. While they frequently challenge the status quo they are often stifled by censorship. Since 2008, Malaysiakini, an online source of independent news in Malaysia, has trained groups of non-journalists throughout the country to create videos and blogs on local news stories that transcend the urban bias of the dominant news narrative.
Censorship constrains newsmakers and filmmakers alike when they attempt to address the racial tensions that dominate Malaysian politics and society, and the films of the late Yasmin Ahmad (1958-2009) are no exception. Ahmad’s work creates an idealist vision of ‘1Malaysia’, a united Malaysia that the country’s ruling party longs to create but fails to achieve. Ahmad died in 2009 leaving a legacy that continues to influence a new generation of filmmakers who form part of the New Malaysian Cinema movement. Throughout her filmmaking career, Ahmad continued to work for the Leo Burnett advertising agency, producing commercials for clients including the oil and gas company Petronas.
This paper will ask, to what extent has Yasmin Ahmad, and the generation of filmmakers that has followed her, influenced news making in Malaysia, in particular the rise of independent news media and citizen journalist. Have Ahmad’s vision for Malaysia and her cinematic storytelling and aesthetic influenced the narrative around religion in a country where religion and ethnicity remain highly sensitive? And how did her work in advertising extend the reach of her message and influence the aesthetic of a new generation of filmmakers, despite the limits of censorship? Through dialogues with Malaysian filmmakers, journalists and cultural critics, this paper will assess the extent to which art making has influenced news making in Malaysia, and whether media censorship has encouraged a new generation of filmmakers and journalists to explore the sensitive issues of race and religion using the storytelling and cinematic techniques employed by Yasmin Ahmad.
Panel Three: Violence in digital circulation
Patricia Spyer (Leiden University)
Reel Accidents: Screening the Umma under Siege in Wartime Maluku
This paper focuses on the Muslim-produced Video Compact Disks (VCDs) that circulated in Ambon and more widely across Indonesia during the religiously inflected war that wracked this city in the early 2000s. Characterized by an aesthetics of seriality and repetition, scenes of warfare waged in urban streets and rampant destruction serve as the backdrop for recurrent close-ups and zoom-ins of the vulnerable, wounded Muslim body ruptured and rent asunder by Christian aggression. Such videos were screened to stunning effect among Muslims during the war–often many times–as they inscribed frame after frame, blow by blow, the moment of Muslim loss and death. Unfolding serially in the form of repeated rupture across the VCDs’ distinct frames, such films issue in an image of the umma as a body in parts rather than one cohering as a single unity stretching without interruption from Morocco to China. The power of these VCDs lies nonetheless precisely in their obsessive return to the wound and the affective qualities of intensity, indeterminacy, and potentiality that they unleash and make available for a variety of ends. Here the logic is one of successive coups in the sense both of blows and of something that violently interrupts any possible narrative framing or larger claims. By way of comparison the paper considers several Muslim power murals featuring galleries of heroes. While seemingly conveying a contrasting image of wholeness, these galleries reinforce, in their insistence on incompletion and seriality, some of the sense of possibility as the VCDs. The paper concludes with a broader reflection on the relation between digital media and forms of interpellation that situates the VCDs and murals in relation to a third media form–social media in Indonesia where in contrast to the resistance to narrative recuperation characteristic of the VCDs, I argue that it is possible to speak of a post-narrative appeal and efficacy.
Sahana Udupa (Max Plank Institute for the Study of Religious Diversity)
Internet Hindus: ‘Right-wingers’ as new India’s Ideological Warriors
This paper explores the production of strangeness of the ‘religious other’ through digitally mediated agency as a form of violence in urban India. I discuss how social media, especially microblogging platforms such as Twitter, has expanded in India in recent years to provide means of expression and tools of ideological coercion for a growing number of e-savvy Hindu ‘right-wingers’. These right-wingers, also called by the self-christened term ‘tweeple’ (people who tweet), use shared twitter handles like ‘Internet Hindu’, and similar handles and hashtags such as ‘The Proud Nationalist’, ‘The Saffron Knight’ and ‘Ex-Muslim’, to engage in Hindutva politics as a discursive practice. Among other things, this new breed of e-savvy right-wingers have sharpened the discourse to associate Muslims with violence and threat, which is coeval with their strategy to deepen suspicion about organized English media in India, dubbed as pseudo-secular, hypocritical and even blatantly anti-national.
Building on ethnographic fieldwork among social media users in Mumbai, a city with the largest number of social media users in India as well as a history of violent communal clashes, this paper shows how social media shapes Hindutva politics which is at once urban, affluent and unabashedly confident. Internet Hindus imagine themselves as heroic warriors fighting the ideological battle on their own terms, and upon their own will. The romance of secret networks and underground rebels during the liberation movement translates digital anonymity into imagined heroic politics of individual net warriors. This self-presentation unfolds in a network environment where anonymity is itself contingent upon being inconsequential, since online anonymity can be disrupted with some effort to extract the details, if found important and necessary.
I trace the practices of Internet Hindus along two significant registers: ‘net busyness’ as a distinct aspect of digital sociality, and ‘archiving’ as a form of building up ‘evidence’ for ideological wars in the online space. The paper argues that ‘Internet Hindus’ represent new forms of dispersed agencies, which are inspired by, if not formally associated with the Rashtreeya Swayam Sevaka Sangha (RSS), the parent right-wing Hindutva organization in India. The term ‘Internet Hindus’ then does not suggest any closely bound physical association, but net users who cohere around common themes and issues in ideologically efficacious ways. These themes are often anchored by a set of ‘twitter heroes’. The paper sheds light on what could be defined as ‘net iconophilia’ as the new emergent authority in the politics of religious difference in India. These internet icons are those who tweet most frequently, and in terse, caustic, and provocative verse. Ironically, the sense of net heroism as individual ideological warriors obscures the very structures of authority Internet Hindus submit to and reinforce.
In tracing the practices of ‘Internet Hindus’, the paper unravels a significant strand of new media’s role in religious politics in India, and more broadly, the place of social media – as sources of information, spaces of sociality and technological contexts of mediation – in defining the politics of religious difference. The paper concludes with reflections on how the practices of Internet Hindus could be considered as a form of violence in urban India.
Panel Four: Doing ritual work digitally: Cyberspace and (the) ‘beyond’
Christopher Helland (Dalhousie University)
Co-Locating the Sacred in Cyberspace: Examining the Developing Role of Online Ritual within the Tibetan Diaspora
In this paper I will discuss the developing online presence and social networking activity of religious authorities of the Tibetan diaspora community. Despite “geographical” Tibet being subsumed under the Chinese State, the Tibetan government in exile, official religious organizations, and politically and religiously motivated individuals have actively engage the Internet to promote Tibetan sovereignty and maintain their religious and cultural identity. My paper will utilize a “multi-site networked approach” to explore the complexity of this developing network. This is a multi-site network because it happens in 5 different “spheres” of Internet influence that are connected explicitly and implicitly throughout the World Wide Web. The website groupings are the Tibetan Government in Exile (www.tibet.net); Tibetan News Websites (broadcast in English, Tibetan, and Mandarin around the globe—including “over” the Great Firewall of China); Cyber-sanghas and comprehensive community-based websites; social networking sites and blogs; and Monastic and Religious Websites. In an increasingly online world that has given rise to “networked individualism”, this paper will explore the effect these multiple networks have on maintaining community identity, loyalty, common goals and beliefs, and leadership structures. My research is charting the development of a hybridized community that connects deeply rooted traditional structures of power and authority with new social networks. My presentation will also provide an examination of the modifications and transformations that occur in religious activities as they are “digitized” and engaged through Internet networks. This paper will present my developing theoretical framework examining the impact of new media on ritual liminal space, the concepts of co-presence and co-location in ritual, and community perceptions of the sacred.
Gregory Grieve (University of North Carolina Greensboro)
Fashioning an Asian Subject: Second Life “Zen” as Cybernetic Product of and Response to Global Neoliberalism
In early February 2010, soon after logging onto the virtual world of Second Life, I came across free versions of kesas, Zen Buddhist monk robes which were designed as “Asian.” Using the robes as a touch stone, this paper asks: What ideological labor does “Asianess” perform in digital media? What is the semiotic construction of “religion” that is being produced by these groups? Finally, what is the role of “Asia” regarding aesthetic qualities that motivate ethical/religious expressions in Second Life and other digital media?
Obviously, these digital robes fashion a virtual “Asia,” which indicates not just a geographic location, but also a symbol of a larger ideology by which the Occident is pictured as rational and modern. In comparison, the Orient is pictured as spiritual and traditional. One can take it for granted that such Orientalism is a persistent and subtle Eurocentric prejudice derived from romanticized images of Asia that has legitimized Western domination. Furthermore, Orientalism is not merely an academic problem. Long fascinated with “Eastern Spirituality,” popular culture circulates images of saffron-robed monks, gurus, bhikkhus, sages, sifus, healers, and masters from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions.? In The Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggests that in the Postmodern West, “Eastern Religion” clothes neoliberalism with a patina of spirituality. “Buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tensions of capitalist dynamics allowing us to uncouple from this frenetic and frenzied rhythm and retain inner peace and enlightenment.”
Undoubtedly, this is true. However, I maintain that Second Life Zen is not merely a flawed representation of classic Asian religious traditions; it is a contemporary practice with a family resemblance, and a genealogical relation to classic traditions. If this is so, what does it do, and how is it different? Furthermore, what role does “Asianess” play in creating subjects? Why does neoliberalismik employ “Asia” ideologically? What type of human subject does it imagine? I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher. Instead, using the digital robes as an interpretive lens, I make a claim from the position of sociologist, historian of religion, scholar of digital media and ethnographer. I argue (1) that popular Zen conceives of humans as part of a larger cybernetic system that includes machines and other nonhuman elements, (2) that the cybernetic worldview is both a product and a response to global capital, and (3) that “Zen” is used to dress cybernetic thought in “Eastern spirituality.”
Janet Hoskins (USC)
Simulating or Summoning the Supernatural? Digitally Enhanced Spirit Medium Videos in Vietnamese Communities
This paper explores how digital media are used in ritual contexts for followers of Đạo Mẫu (“the way of the Mother Goddess”), a Vietnamese spirit possession practice. Đạo Mẫu is an increasingly popular trance dance tradition, incarnating the spirits of the imperial past to ask for blessings in the future. I have attended spirit possesion seances in Vietnam (in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi) and also at a number of diasporic temples in California.
Spirits communicate through human mediums, who receive a physical presence, a set of gestures, a state of mind and distribute gifts (food, drinks, cigarettes, trinkets) blessed by the spirits to the audience. Each spirit medium will incarnate from ten to twenty different spirits in a ceremony, in a specified order that starts with the mother goddesses and goes on to include mandarins and generals, ladies of the court, playful princes, highland maidens and impish children.
Spirit seances are often video-taped in Vietnam (and in California diasporic communities). A special service offered to wealthy mediums is “digital enhancement” of the video of their possession experience. This consists in adding cut-aways which mirror the visions, sensations and mental journeys that human mediums are supposed to experience. They feature beautiful scenery shots of the home temples of various spirits, and visual images of the attributes of the spirit concerned: A great warrior will have cutaways to blinding light, spears and swords. The princess who rows across the sea of suffering is framed by cutaways of water. The highland maiden will be set amidst scenes of mountains, flowers and birds. From the perspective of the participants, the digital complements and completes the spiritual.
Using a series of clips from these digitally enhanced possession sequences, I explore the difference between simulating the supernatural (as in the special effects used in a horror movie) and summoning it (as linked to the belief that the spirit comes down into the medium’s body). The music and songs are supposed to help to summon the spirits, since “they hear the music and they want to come down”. Digital effects are added afterward to “enhance” the viewing experience. While the auditory cues are part of the ritual process of summmoning the spirits, the use of digital effects is designed to enchance the process of remembering the experience. In some ways, it seems to serve to standardize the interpretation of particular spirits, to “canonize” their connections to individual temples, and to repeat a certain repertoire of visual associations with the spirits. This process of standardization and “heritagization” is intensified by the construction of elaborate websites, researched by folklorists and anthropologists, which summarize the attributes of particular spirits and provide photographs of their costumes and mediums performing while possessed by them.
Cyberspace becomes a sacred space for ritualized communications of very specific kinds. I ask a series of questions about the relation of visual and audio media in this context: Does digital enhancement help to intensify memory or the ritual experience itself? Does it tend to suppress idiosyncracies to create a more homogeneous memory of each spirit’s manifestations? Is the market for digital enhancement part of the “commercialization” of spirit possession? Can supernatural experiences themselves be commodified and sold as digital products?
Panel Five: Borders of religious activism: Indonesian new media contexts
Merlyna Lim (Arizona State University)
Holy Bandwidth: Race, Religion, and Local Politics in the Social Media Age — an Indonesia case
Drawing on empirical data of the social media usage in the 2012 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election (Pilkada DKI Jakarta), in this paper I explore the ways in which lay citizens, particularly Chinese Christian Indonesians, who never participated in any political events before, contributed to the dynamics of this local political event. Focusing on social media activism, especially the amateurish production of campaign videos, the paper offers insights on the relationship and the blurring boundaries between: participatory culture and civic engagement, race and religion, and spirituality and activism. It discusses how through social media, the amateur producers define and redefine their relationship with state, politics/politicians, and particular communities of interest (e.g. churches), and how these processes challenge existing ideas about personal and collective agency, a sense of community, and cultural production and consumption.
Laura Coppens (Department of Social Anthropology, University of Zurich)
Fighting “Moral Terrorism”: Mass-mediated Sexual Panics and the Quest for Sexual Citizenship in Indonesia
From angry protests against the local queer film festival, the Q! Film Festival, to the forced cancellation of Irshad Manji’s book launch and the Lady Gaga concert in Jakarta, sexual panics have dominated Indonesian public debates in recent years. With Indonesia’s democratic transitioning (reformasi) starting in 1998, the public awareness of alternative sexualities and genders increased and LGBT rights discourses began circulating widely. At the same time, Islamist groups started promoting a political Islam with strict views on morality, rejecting homosexuality as sinful and deviant. The increased public concern with morality and sexuality has to be understood, among other factors, in relation to the changing mediascape in post-New Order Indonesia with a new gained freedom of press, the growing production and consumption of Muslim media, and the mushrooming of films and books dealing with the topic of sexuality. In this paper I suggest that the heated struggle over meaning and place of sexuality in contemporary Indonesia is part of the ongoing process of finding and defining a new national identity after 32 years of authoritarian New Order rule. Sexual panics and “morality talks” (van Wichelen 2007) surrounding homosexuality, pornography, polygamy and seks bebas (free sex) all exemplify how the nation is reconstructed through sexual politics.
Taking the moral outrage over the Q! Film Festival in Jakarta as an example, I analyze the ongoing struggle for moral and sexual citizenship in Indonesia. Whereas local LGBT organizations increasingly demand sexual rights, Islamist groups, like the Islam Defenders Front (FPI), continue their fight for the nation-wide implementation of strict Sharia Law. I will discuss the media’s role in sexual panics and especially consider how social media has been used by the Q! Film Festival organizers to counter the negative discourse in mainstream media and create an affective space for community building and „happy activism.“
Intan Paramaditha
Sexuality, Religion, and Politics: The Secular Framework in Contemporary Indonesian Cultural Practices
My paper will focus on secular cultural practices that engage with the issues of sexuality by responding to violence conducted in the name of religion. I will be looking at the responses of the Q! Film Festival organizers towards the festival banning by FPI through events, audiovisual materials, and social media. I will also look at two works produced in response to violence after the FPI protest: Madame X (2010), a comedy film on a transgender superhero, and Goyang Penasaran (The Obsessive Twist, 2011-2012), a theater performance based on a horror story that links the Islamic notion of “zina (fornication, adultery) of the eyes,” women’s sexuality, and violence. My research is based on observation and interviews I conducted between 2010-2012 as well as a private discussion forum on “Gender and Religion in Arts and Media” involving activists, journalists, scholars, and producers of Q! Film Festival, Madame X, and Goyang Penasaran. I will examine how the secular responses are reflected in formal strategies, including aesthetics and how the producers deploy social media as a tool for both dissemination and self-censorship. While showing how the themes of sexuality provide an alternative view on religion, politics, and nationhood, I will further analyze the limitations as well as internal contradictions in the reconfiguration of the secular framework in these cultural practices.
The entanglement of sexuality, religion, and politics leads to the question of how to locate the secular views and practices in Indonesia today. How does the Islamic resurgence in politics and public culture challenge and reshape the citizens’ secular framework? My research draws on a body of work that interrogates the assumptions on the separation of religion from secularism and the public sphere (Casanova 1994; Asad 2007; Mahmood 2005; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008). Former president cum Muslim intellectual Abdurrahman Wahid (2001) deploys the term “mild secularism” to define Indonesia’s secular state in which religion is separated from the political arena but remains as “a social and moral force.” The rise of conservativism, with its promotion of sharia law, has posed a challenge to such formulation. This has drawn scholarly interests to study conflicting views of Muslim groups that constitute Indonesia’s democratization processes (Brenner 2011; Rinaldo 2011), Islam in Indonesian media and popular culture (Fealy and White 2008), or the relationship between Islamicization and the secular law (Salim 2008). The place of secularism in citizens’ cultural production, however, has not been much explored. I ask what it means to be secular in Indonesia now, when the presumed detachment of religion from cultural practices is confronted by the inescapable encounters with political Islam in laws and the public sphere.
Sahana Udupa (Max Plank Institute for the Study of Religious Diversity)
Internet Hindus: ‘Right-wingers’ as new India’s Ideological Warriors
This paper explores the production of strangeness of the ‘religious other’ through digitally mediated agency as a form of violence in urban India. I discuss how social media, especially microblogging platforms such as Twitter, has expanded in India in recent years to provide means of expression and tools of ideological coercion for a growing number of e-savvy Hindu ‘right-wingers’. Building on ethnographic fieldwork among social media users in Mumbai, a city with the largest number of social media users in India as well as a history of violent communal clashes, this paper shows how social media shapes Hindutva politics which is at once urban, affluent and unabashedly confident. Internet Hindus imagine themselves as heroic warriors fighting the ideological battle on their own terms, and upon their own will. The romance of secret networks and underground rebels during the liberation movement translates digital anonymity into imagined heroic politics of individual net warriors. This self-presentation unfolds in a network environment where anonymity is itself contingent upon being inconsequential, since online anonymity can be disrupted with some effort to extract the details, if found important and necessary.
I trace the practices of Internet Hindus along two significant registers: ‘net busyness’ as a distinct aspect of digital sociality, and ‘archiving’ as a form of building up ‘evidence’ for ideological wars in the online space. The paper argues that ‘Internet Hindus’ represent new forms of dispersed agencies, which are inspired by, if not formally associated with the Rashtreeya Swayam Sevaka Sangha (RSS), the parent right-wing Hindutva organization in India. The term ‘Internet Hindus’ then does not suggest any closely bound physical association, but net users who cohere around common themes and issues in ideologically efficacious ways. These themes are often anchored by a set of ‘twitter heroes’. The paper sheds light on what could be defined as ‘net iconophilia’ as the new emergent authority in the politics of religious difference in India. These internet icons are those who tweet most frequently, and in terse, caustic, and provocative verse. Ironically, the sense of net heroism as individual ideological warriors obscures the very structures of authority Internet Hindus submit to and reinforce.
In tracing the practices of ‘Internet Hindus’, the paper unravels a significant strand of new media’s role in religious politics in India, and more broadly, the place of social media – as sources of information, spaces of sociality and technological contexts of mediation – in defining the politics of religious difference. The paper concludes with reflections on how the practices of Internet Hindus could be considered as a form of violence in urban India.