Event overview
Goldsmiths Media Ethnography Group Seminar Series
Abstract: This paper explores the interface between digital and ritual forms, broadly considered. Worldwide, indigenous cultures, both localized and diasporic, have adopted new information and communications technologies, particularly social media and Skype. Taking polymedia approach (Madianou and Miller, 2013) lets us map an emergent series of sites where now-global indigenous communities explore their own traditions and rituals. Here, digital technologies enable innovations and extensions, conservation and nostalgia that reinvent traditions - familial, communal, and other - that define ethnic, sexual, regional/urban and other kinds of identities. This kind of global mediation and mediatization has political and social implications for the category of 'tradition' itself.
My research here investigates how the revelatory aspects of new social media platforms transform norms for personal intimacy, status and ritual – and thus social practices themselves (see Slater and Miller, 2000) – through a case study of a diasporic Filipino community. Examining a number of rituals documented by photographs, comments and ‘likes’ on Facebook, I trace the reinvention/renegotiation of tradition made explicit in the production, circulation and commentary people attach to these images. Some rituals – naming ceremonies, weddings, wakes – remain in a realm of more or less ‘documentary’ practices while others – birthdays, vehicle blessings – are taking on new, digitally self-conscious forms. It in these new forms that people find their performances of tradition through new media shift the meanings they attach to these rituals and their own subjectivities and intimate ties within their community.
Dr. Deirdre McKay is Senior Lecturer in Social Geography at Keele.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Jun 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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