Materiality, Authority, and Digital Religion: The Case of a Neo-Pagan Forum

Abstract

The study of material culture increasingly pays attention to digital religion, but there are certain aspects, such as religious authority, that remain under-researched. Some questions are still open for inquiry: What can a material approach contribute to the understanding of religious authority in digital venues? How can authority be materially displayed on the Internet? This article shows how religious authority is affected by material practices connected with digital media use through the qualitative analysis of a Neo-Pagan forum, The Celtic Connection. Neo-Pagans tend to hold a non-traditional notion of authority, accord great importance to material practices, and extensively use the Internet. The analysis of the forum suggests that Neo-Pagans use digital venues to look for informal sources of authority and strategies to embed materiality in online narratives. The article claims that it is important to develop new frameworks to analyze non-traditional authority figures and new definitions of media that include both physical objects and communication technologies.

Pushing Intersectionality, Hybridity, and (Inter)Disciplinary Research on Digitality to Its Limits

“…To continue on Ladan's note on Bhabha's postcolonial perspective and its interdisciplinary applications in the field of digital religion, Bhabha's idea of hybridity has been very useful for a study I recently conducted on Neo-Pagan online rituals (Evolvi, 2020). Neo-Paganism is a new religious movement based on pre-Christian beliefs, and it pays particular attention to the feminine and feminist issues.…”

Religion and the internet: digital religion, (hyper)mediated spaces, and materiality

“…Douglas Cowan ( 2005 ) discusses Neo-Pagan online rituals as creating a placeness experience, and emphasizes that an Internet-mediated experience cannot replicate the sensorial practices that people are supposed to activate in a physical location. However, in my previous work (Evolvi 2020 ) I argued that Neo-Pagan online engagement, while indubitably different than an offline ritual, is also characterized by material expressions.…”

Mapping Digital Religion: Exploring the Need for New Typologies

“…They no longer rely on authorities although the sources they access may be authoritative. Researchers point out that in today's Western societies, the authority of the great religious traditions and church institutions has eroded (for discussion on this topic, see, e.g., Cloete 2016;Evolvi 2020;Giorgi 2019;Hutchings 2011Hutchings , 2017Kołodziejska 2018;Kołodziejska and Neumaier 2017;Porcu 2014;Solahudin and Fakhruroji 2020;Staehle 2020). On the other hand, some emphasize that the reverse process is taking place.…”