2024/05/27 by John W. Borchert · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Media, Religion, Digital Communication #Digital Games and Media #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
paper · doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfae044
openalex publication_date 2024/05/27 · openalex created_date 2024/05/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Jeffrey G. Snodgrass’s The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Videogames combines fieldwork from Rajasthan, India, and the online game World of Warcraft (WoW) to illustrate how secondary identities can locate therapeutic processes for psychosocial well-being. Using ethnographic data and a theoretical apparatus assembled from psychological anthropology, The Avatar Faculty bridges gaps between religious and gaming senses of the term avatar to understand how taking on alternative identities (whether through spirit possession or an in-game character) can navigate unhealthy social conditions. The book successfully charts definitional choppy waters to its own use of the term avatar as a “symbolic second self” (15) and upholds this key term as exemplary of the kind of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary work that is possible when we prioritize our subjects of interest over disciplinary conventions. Drawing on one case of spirit possession among the Bhat (a low-status Indian community practicing folk Hinduism) in the late 1990s and one field site among a guild of American WoW players in the late 2000s, The Avatar Faculty explores how these secondary social identities achieved through what Snodgrass labels the “avatar therapeutic process” (194) negotiated cultural identities. Snodgrass argues that possession by a spirit and taking on a digital identity within a videogame have parallels as “vehicles” (198) through which individuals navigate their psychosocial well-being within the fluid metrics of what is healthy and unhealthy. In the case of Bedami Bhat, a young woman possessed by the deity Chavanda Mata (a clan goddess), this negotiation leads to a complex web of social, gender, and economic norms transgressed and fortified throughout the ordeal. Within the WoW communities, players use avatars as identities to intensify or deescalate individual and social stresses.