5 - Digital Traces of Religious Identities: On Belongingness and Anxiety

Summary

Abstract This chapter documents how poor children in the slums of India used digital technologies as proxy sites for enacting their religious identities. Enactments on digital platforms seldom translated into children performing their digitally mediated religious ideas/practices in physical spaces. Using digital technologies as proxy sites to enact their religious identities was influenced by children's desire to experience a sense of belongingness with their community. Children chose to demonise the religious other in closed/covert online spaces. They continued collaborating and co-existing with the religious other in material sites for economic and social benefits. Children practised jugaad as they simultaneously reinforced and challenged/circumvented the religious norms dominant in their communities for personal desires, financial motivations, and other social benefits.

Keywords: proxy sites, Hindu, Muslim, social media, collective aggression, community building

Children's religious identities influence the meanings and functions they ascribe to digital technologies. This chapter traces the continuities and disjunctures in children's enactments of their religious identities both in online spaces and material contexts. Hindu and Muslim children in Azad Nagar, Munnekollal, and Seemapuri enacted their religious identities online and in physical and material sites. My goal was threefold: a) exploring the connections between children's religious enactments and the public discourses on religion and politics in their communities, b) understanding how children reflected on the similarities and differences in their enactments of religious identities on/offline, and c) documenting how children deliberately used digital technologies as proxy sites to enact the facets of their religious identities they could not perform in physical sites and offline interactions with other people from their neighbourhoods.

I relied on critical ethnography to centre my analysis on the worldviews of the children and their communities, the local epistemologies related to religious identities and the process of community-building, and the realities relevant to the class locations the participants inhabited. Borrowing from the literature on critical ethnographic commitment (Banks & Gingrich, 2006; Boromisza-Habashi, 2013; Hervik, 2019), I present children's experiences of using digital technologies to enact their religious identities. This approach requires that I appreciate the nuances and complexities inherent in human experiences without endorsing or dismissing children's views and emotions. According to the traditions of critical ethnography, my analysis moves between different levels of influence. It reiterates the need to use inductive reasoning and comparison (van der Veer, 2016) to study the macro structures of power and the micro realities of lived experiences.