Consumption and Authenticity in Developing Media and Technology

The Shi‘i Islamic tradition of Nazri—votive food offered during religious ceremonies, particularly in Muharram—has long been an expression of devotion to the martyred Imams, commemorated through communal meals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions on gatherings led many Shi‘i organizations to shift their Nazri practices online. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, this paper examines the emergence of the digital votive in pandemic-era Shi‘i Iran, where meaning-making, meal consumption, and prayer intertwined with virtual space.

This study explores how digital platforms, particularly social media and interactive apps, both constrained and redefined communal sacred eating, fostering an ephemeral online religious community of mourning. It also examines supplemental eating, where one devotee symbolically eats on behalf of another, replicating votive consumption across digital and physical realms. Ultimately, this paper argues that while digital votive practices lack physical immediacy, they extend and reimagine the votive meal, shaping new forms of participation in religious remembrance.

In the contemporary digital landscape, Muslim artists are increasingly utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to reclaim narratives, challenge Islamophobia, and reshape religious healing discourses. This paper examines how digital art functions as a form of spiritual and collective healing in response to structural violence, algorithmic bias, and the socio-political trauma experienced by Muslim communities. Through a case study of Muslim artists using AI software such as MidJourney, I explore how digital art not only shifts public perceptions of Islam but also integrates lived religious identities into digital spaces. Drawing on Gary Bunt’s (2024) concept of Islamic algorithms and Heidi Campbell’s (2012) framework of lived religion, this study investigates how AI-driven Islamic artistic expressions create digital sanctuaries that reinforce resilience, belonging, and new modes of religious engagement.

This paper examines the online content of Isabella Ma, known as Steakandbuttergal on TikTok. This paper brings analysis of far-right wellness rhetoric into conversation with Catherine Albanese’s concept of the “enlightened body-self,” the tradition within American metaphysical religion that values “the physical as a route to the transcendent.” Like the Liver King, Raw Egg Nationalist, and other carnivores examined by Marek, Rooney, and Cerja in “Long Live the Liver King,” Ma invokes a mythologized, primal, past where men and women lived true to their nature. And like the women in Catherine Tebaldi’s “Granola Nazis and the Great Reset,” Ma’s embodiment of normative feminine beauty is her source of authority on healing and salvation. But Ma also reveals the contested nature of far-right gender traditionalism, placing her feminine beauty in juxtaposition to her masculine-coded meals, contesting traditional gender expectations, and laying her own claim to the head of the table.

The War on Drugs has recently been overshadowed in the headlines by the “psychedelic renaissance,” a renewed interest in psychedelics as therapeutic medicines and spiritual tools. Despite the growing popularity of psychedelics, harsh penalties for drug possession have continued to threaten psychedelic users around the world. The rise of internet forums in the 1990s gave psychonauts a newfound freedom to share information, experiences, and recipes with likeminded individuals. Along with this freedom came the implicit requirement of anonymity, embodied by the acronym SWIM (“someone who isn’t me”), which is commonly used on forums. This paper analyzes the role of trip reports and drug forums in online psychonautic communities. I argue that online psychedelic forums developed in tandem with the rise of the public forum as a source of informational authority for the general population, representing a shift in spiritual authority from traditional religious institutions to the anonymous psychonautic collective.

This paper introduces the concept of meme rituals—digitized religious practices that utilize online platforms to reproduce and disseminate in a memetic fashion, often manifesting as emojis, images, or interactive applications. Focusing on the Chinese cyberspace, the study employs a multidisciplinary approach integrating material culture studies and historiography to critically analyze the affordances of meme rituals within the unique historical and social context of contemporary China. I argue that the reinvention of rituals in Chinese cyberspace not only changes the format and medium of religious practices but also fundamentally transforms how individuals engage with deeply meaningful cultural and social experiences. By building the framework of meme rituals and analyzing its broader implication, this paper seeks to contribute to the late-blooming field of religion in Chinese cyberspace and the general understanding of technologization of everyday religious rituals.

Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, are a form of internet based interactive storytelling that blurs the lines between fiction and reality. ARGs present their narrative as true through what is called an “aesthetic of authenticity,” sometimes creating confusion over what is an ARG or genuine. Given that some ARGs present themselves as internet based religions, this can make it difficult for scholars to tell whether what they are observing is “real.” I will illustrate this difficulty with the case of the TSUKI Project, whose followers were split over whether they were following a real religion or playing an ARG. In bringing together the digitality of new religions and invented religions, I argue that whether the TSUKI Project originated as an ARG does not determine its authenticity as a religion. Rather, if its followers believe it to be real, what we are observing is authentic religious practice.