This edited volume deploys digital ethnography in varied contexts to explore the cultural roles of mobile apps that focus on religious practice and communities, as well as those used for religious purposes (whether or not they were originally developed for that purpose). Combining analyses of local contexts with insights and methods from the global subfield of digital anthropology, the contributors here recognize the complex ways that in-app and on-ground worlds interact in a wide range of communities and traditions. While some of the case studies emphasize the cultural significance of use in local contexts and relationships to pre-existing knowledge networks and/or non-digital relationships of power, others explore the globalizing and democratizing influences of mobile apps as communication technologies. From Catholic confession apps to Jewish Kaddish assistance apps and Muslim halal food apps, readers will see how religious-themed mobile apps create complex sites for potential new forms of religious expression, worship, discussion, and practices.
Table of Content
Chapter 1: Piety in the Pocket: An Introduction.- Part I: Community, Contexts, and Practice.- Chapter 2: Sufi Remembrance Practices in the Meditation Marketplace of a Mobile App.- Chapter 3: An Ambivalent Jewishness: Half Shabbos, the Shabbos App, and Modern Orthodoxy.- Chapter 4: From Self-Learning Pathshala to Pilgrimage App: Studying the Expanding World of Jain Religious Apps.- Chapter 5: Latinx Muslims ‘Like’ One Another: An Ethnographic Exploration of Social Media and the Formation of Latinx Muslim Community.- Part II: Authority, Subjectivity, and Networks of Knowledge.- Chapter 6: ‘Siri is Alligator Halal?’: Mobile Apps, Food Practices and Religious Authority in American Muslim Communities.- Chapter 7: i Prayer: catholic Payer Apps and Twenty-first Centry Catholic Subjectivities.- Chapter 8: Mobile Apps and Religious Processes among Pentecostal Charismatic Christians in Zimbabwe.- Part III: Space, Mobility, and Immateriality.- Chapter 9: Medieval ‘Miracle of Equilibrium’ or Contemporary Shrine of ‘Rock-Hard Faith’?: The Role of Digital media in Guiding Visitors’ Experiences of Rocamadour, France.- Chapter 10: Bringing Creation to a Museum near You.- Chapter 11: The JW Library App, Jehovah’s Witness Technological Change, and Ethical Object-Formation.
About the author
Jacqueline H. Fewkes is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University, USA. Dr. Fewkes is also the author of the books Locating Maldivian Women’s Mosques in Global Discourses (2019), and Trade and Contemporary Society along the Silk Road: An Ethno-history of Ladakh (2008).More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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