Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Eylul Bombaci
This paper aims to discuss the exchange economy of spiritual guidance within digital spheres from TikTok tarot and astrology videos to algorithm-based astrology apps. By that, I aim to understand how the digitalization of spiritual guidance affects the links of monetization in ways of believing. I delve into the value-making of digital spiritual guidance by creating a conversation between Godelier’s work on salt bar exchange in New Guinea (1977) and Alfred Gell’s Technology of Enchantment (1994), while investigating what makes the exchange of spiritual guidance valuable in a guidance seeker's eyes in digital and non-digital aspects.
Participant observation and in-depth interviews are among the social anthropological techniques used in this study, with a focus on digital ethnographic techniques (Boellstorff et al. 2012; Geismar and Knox 2021). My research is "on and off" the internet by nature because it is digital, following the habits of my subjects. My informants are limited to individuals residing in London, with an interest in spirituality and astrology.
Furthermore, I equip my arguments with Gell’s “Technology of Enchantment” (1994) to discuss how “unmodern” spiritual guidance practices are revived by the so-called “modern” tools such as internet and smartphones, as per Bruno Latour’s book “We Have Never Been Modern” (1993).
In sum, this research explores the commodification of fortune-telling relationships, which once could have been described as intimately “humane” bonding mediations of human connection. I discuss how we might conceptualise intimacy through the internet and how belief becomes commodified within the Internet’s assets of exchange.
Eylul Bombaci is an MSc Digital Anthropology graduate from UCL and currently working on an ERC-funded research project, Music and Artificial Intelligence.
In her dissertation, she conducted an ethnography on internet spiritualities. Eylul, with her psychology and sociology background from Istanbul Bilgi University, is interested in digital culture and spirituality.