Online Mediations of Religious Politics: Dignity and the Anthropology of the Good

Sahana Udupa & Max Kramer

Abstract

In India and its diaspora in the UK, online activities of various sorts—tweeting, blogging, vlogging, instagramming, trolling, and tagging—have become central to tensions and aspirations surrounding religious politics. Three clusters of practices undergird these digital transformations: piety, surveillance, and fun. Building on ethnographic fieldwork among right-wing Hindu nationalists and Indian Muslim political actors in India, the paper develops “digital dignity” as a conceptual resource to excavate these practices and analyze the ways they have intensified the stakes of religious identity in political life. In so doing, the paper critically engages with the tension between an “anthropology of the good” and an “anthropology of suffering”.

Bio

Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at LMU Munich, Germany where she leads the ERC starting grant project on digital politics ONLINERPOL, and the ERC proof of concept project on AI assisted model to tackle online extreme speech.

Max Kramer is Postdoctoral Researcher at Project ONLINERPOL, LMU Munich.