"Itching to See the Goddess"
contributed by Natalie Lang, 27 May 2020
Anthropological Questions on Religious Practice during a Pandemic
Every week since January 2020, Mageshwari reminded me of the special prayer that she was going to sponsor at a Hindu temple in Singapore in March 2020. Mageshwari is a lady in her fifties who came to the temple at least once a week and helped as a volunteer on a regular basis. For weeks, she was busy planning this special prayer, asking me repeatedly whether I would come, and urging people in the temple to contribute.
One week before the event, I felt a silence in our otherwise regular WhatsApp conversation. On the day itself, the ritual had to comply with the government set rules in relation to COVID-19. Only ten people could attend—the main sponsors. Mageshwari had to unspokenly disinvite me. Our WhatsApp conversation included several sad emoticons.
The current restrictions on social gatherings greatly impact religious life. To Mageshwari and other practitioners, communal worship and the social aspects of sponsoring a temple ritual are central. Although not being able to conduct a long anticipated ritual is something that Hindus also have to deal with under non-coronavirus conditions, for instance when they are ritually impure after a death in the family, the current situation affects all practitioners simultaneously and comes along with particular emotional responses of shock, fear, and uncertainty. At a time of crisis, when praying seems more important than ever before, practitioners need to shift their ways of praying into the home and the online world.
Possibilities of Prayer
In late March, prayer was still allowed inside temples for groups of less than ten, as well as from outside of some temples under safety measurements as in the picture below. Lines on the ground ensured that devotees would keep social distance while queuing before reaching over a gate to place the offerings they would like to make. Flowers, milk, or rose water were placed onto an offering plate on a table, which the priest then would offer to the gods. Due to the circuit breaker measures implemented in April, even such worship without entering the temples became impossible, as the temple gates were closed.
Singapore, March 2020
Live streamed worship has become an important means through which priests and temples can stay in touch with devotees. As announced in the digital flyer below, circulated by the Hindu Endowments Board on media channels including Facebook and WhatsApp, devotees can purchase a milk pot by phone that would be offered to the goddess by temple staff during the full moon ceremonies.
In addition to such initiatives by temples, one can also observe numerous creative responses online by individuals or smaller groups of Hindus worldwide, such as calls for prayers of solidarity. These can be watched as online groups while sharing responses through words and emoticons.
Hindu Endowments Board Facebook page, 6 May 2020, https://www.facebook.com/hinduendowmentsboard/photos/a.276363485889883/1957042761155272/?type=3&theater
Ethnographic Challenges
While acknowledging the importance of online worship and online religious negotiations, I still believe in the importance of deep offline hanging out, of embedding online religious and social interactions in the offline lives of people. While I can follow larger ritual broadcasts via social media channels, I could not follow Mageshwari’s more privately sponsored event, which was not filmed or live-streamed, let alone the social interactions she had in the temple on that day.
Participant observation in people’s homes is also impossible at the moment. Enjoying the cosiness of sitting together with people to talk about their religious media usages, for instance in the form of scroll-through interviews, will have to wait until we can meet again physically – standing in stark contrast to the speed of online interactions.
Religious Mediation
In addition to such ethnographic challenges, the current situation is coupled with conceptual questions and possibilities. If religions go digital, how can online ethnography contribute to the material and sensory turn in the study of religion, which taught us to overcome the previous focus on textual religion by bringing the sensory aspects of religion to the centre of attention?
Looking at how online watch parties interact through the use of emoticons, and how practitioners experience religion through the materials of their phones are only tiny steps into this direction. The current situation will encourage us to think beyond assumed contradictions between sensory and online religion. It renders existing approaches on the intrinsic relation between religion and media even more obvious, and it invites us to examine diverse forms of mediation of religion and crisis.
At the same time, several of my Hindu interlocutors in Singapore are rather reluctant about watching ceremonies online or making a phone call to purchase a milk pot to be offered on their behalf. Instead, they pray in their homes, lighting a lamp in front of their shrines, and hoping that this situation will be over soon.
Despite the possibility of watching live streamed worship, Priya, a woman in her thirties who went to several Hindu temples almost every week before the circuit breaker measures were installed, writes to me on WhatsApp: ‘Itching to see the goddess’.
Priya was not as socially involved in the temple as Mageshwari and others for whom the temple is also a place to spend social time together. But praying to the goddess in the temple, which for Priya included walking around the sanctum, standing and kneeling in front of the goddess, seeing and being seen by the divinity, was an important experience that she now misses. Her statement ‘Itching to see the goddess’ seems to suggest that she does not perceive seeing the goddess on the screen of her phone as seeing the goddess, as a persuasive mediation between her and the goddess.
Dr Lang is an anthropologist working with both the Asian Urbanisms Cluster and the Religion and Globalisation Cluster. Her research interests include religion, urbanity, migration, and diaspora in La Réunion, South Asia, Singapore, and Paris. Natalie Lang conducted her doctoral research at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, on Hindus in the French overseas department La Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Before joining ARI, Natalie Lang was a Junior Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. She holds an MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a BA in South Asian Studies from the University of Heidelberg.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the blog editorial team or the Asia Research Institute.
South Asia | Southeast Asia | East Asia | Other Places | Hinduism | Buddhism | Islam | Christianity | Other Religions