Digital Mourning

In Digital Mourning, the Shi'a practice of majlis sermons and ritualized grief are taken as a point of orientation to explore digital and otherwise dimensions of ritual, authority, community, and sensory experience. The majlis ritual is explored as a sensational form, digitally and otherwise. Grounded in the religious and community experiences of Dutch-Shi'a people of mostly Pakistani descent, this thesis is an ethnographic exploration that spans digital and offline experiences before, during, and after the Covid19 pandemic. It enriches anthropological insight into the evolving relationship between religion and digital technology, showing that this relationship is characterized by a dynamism reflecting reluctance, rejection, adaptation, enthusiasm and co-created enmeshment. Throughout this work, the idea of a taken-for-granted binary opposition between online and offline dimensions of Shi'a experience, sensation, and religious orientations is challenged. This thesis takes a multifaceted approach to the phenomenon of online and offline Shi'a majalis, and therefore each section elaborates a different aspect of experience. A key contribution is towards arguing for a multi-layered and bottom-up understanding of authority in Shi'a Islam. The course of authenticity-making in ritual practices is traced using the concept of authentication, arguing that this is a critical process in the legitimization of religious authority. Authentication in majlis sermons is relational, performative, embodied, and generative. This is further explored through the interconnected dimensions of embodiment, memory, and the performance of sermon discourse. A focus on listening is developed, framing listening as a sensory, embodied, oral/aural and technologically mediated practice that is carefully employed by both authority figures and audiences within Shi'a rituals to co-cultivate powerful and affective experiences. The sonic landscape of Shi'a ritual is animated with ethnographic descriptions of online/offline sermons, nauha laments, dialogues, and the case study of a digital scholar, orator and influencer. This reflects the plural dimensions of the change and impact of sound in Shi'a practices, particularly towards authentication and co-constructing authority. The final strand of this inquiry engages a material perspective to digital objects, troubling the idea of a digital materials lacking tangibility, tactility or sensory engagement. The ideas in this work culminate to present the concept of Shi'a ecology, through which to understand and frame digital materiality and experience. Shi'a ecology is an argument for ontological plurality, and is used as a framework referring to the dynamic interplay of material and ineffable (ghayb), cosmological, digital, sensory, and relational dimensions of a religious lifeworld. Digital image-objects within Shi'a ecology - such as screenshots, digital invitation cards and Instagram stories - are explored through their enmeshment in communal relationships, ritual practices, and aesthetic religious orientation. Foregrounding the tactile, sensory, and relational dimensions of digital religious artifacts highlights how digital objects are co-constitutive of religious authority, memory, and presence; in turn, this shows how Shi'a ecology is enmeshed with digitality. Shi'a ecology challenges binaries of online/offline and material/immaterial by emphasizing the embodied, affective, and relational dimensions of religious experience and digital mourning.