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Antropologi Indonesia

Abstract

Following the proliferation of digital media usage, the world has seen an increasing amount of digitally-mediated lives in everyday contexts. While anthropological scholarship has started to address this ever-growing subject, anthropologists are mainly preoccupied with human engagements in virtual worlds that have their own tangible and embodied sense of spatiality (e.g., online role-playing and gaming communities). In so doing, anthropologists have yet to comprehensively delve into online practices in more disembodied and intangible networked environments like Facebook. In this article, I examine methodological challenges faced by anthropologists who study online communities in such disembodied worlds. I draw on my ongoing online ethnographic research on a community of Indonesian Muslims with same-sex attraction who believe their sexuality is a divine test from God and actively build an online community on Facebook and other social media platforms (e.g., OORTH, WhatsApp, and Zoom) to reform themselves into heterosexuals. Unable to fully submerge in the world of their interlocutors through sensorial approaches and embodying practices as conventional ethnographers do, anthropologists who study online communities on social media platforms like Facebook may encounter an impasse in their ethnographic observations. Reflecting on this impasse, I argue that anthropological inquiries have to be reoriented and go beyond the framework of sensorial observation and embodying practices. Even though such methodological reorientation might require anthropological knowledge to be partial and incomplete, this is necessary to fully capture what it means to be human in the disembodied and intangible virtual worlds.

References

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