For a 'beautiful' religion without 'buzz': Hinduism, Facebook, gender, and status in La Reunion

ABSTRACT

The ways in which some Hindu women use Facebook in the French overseas department of La Reunion suggest an intrinsic relationship between religion and media, not only in the sense of religious mediation, but also as mediation between their aspirations and achievements in terms of religious knowledge, gender roles, and social status. While their Facebook interactions need to be considered in continuation with their offline aspirations, the young women reported in this article use Facebook to create an alternative space to claim positions of authority. In contrast to the temple context and its strictly gendered access and tasks, they can, to a certain extent, bypass notions of ritual (im)purity and male domination on Facebook and take important roles in the selected dissemination and display of religious knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• social media
• Hinduism
• gender
• Facebook
• Tamil diaspora
• La Reunion
• France
• India

Acknowledgements

The first version of this article received the European Association for South Asian Studies Research Student Award in 2016. I am grateful to the audience at the European Conference on South Asian Studies in Warsaw for their questions. I thank Patrick Eisenlohr, Rupa Viswanath, Srirupa Roy, Zaid al Baset, Alva Bonaker, Malini Ghose, Jadumani Mahanand, Loreley Franchina, Hanne de Bruin, Antonie Walther, and Isabel van Manen for their excellent comments in the revision process. I thank Caroline Starkey, Emma Tomalin, and Anna Halafoff for including my paper in their panel at the International Sociological Association Forum of Sociology in Vienna 2016 and in this special issue section. I am also indebted to the anonymous referees of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for their very helpful suggestions and to Elisabeth Arweck for her support in the publication process. The research on which this article is based was funded by a Dorothea Schlozer PhD Scholarship and travel grants by the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Gottingen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All the names in this article are pseudonyms which conform to the persons’ gender and the origin of their actual names (Christian/European or Hindu/Indian). I have also changed other details to protect my interlocutors.

2 All the interview extracts in this article are translated from French.

3 Puja denotes offering worship to deities. Darshan denotes the mutual auspicious seeing between devotee and divinity in Hindu worship, although the frequent scholarly prioritising of the visual dimensions should not neglect other sensual experiences of darshan (Lazar 2020, 236).

4 In the absence of a religious census in France, my interlocutors usually estimated the number of Hindous/Malbar/Tamoul at around 30% of the more than 850,000 inhabitants of the island. This estimation may entail an affirmative self-assessment and is problematic because the local terms Malbar and Tamoul denote Indian origins and/or Hindu religious affiliation, depending on context, and neither Hindu religion nor Indian origins are given categories in Reunionese society, given people’s diverse religious orientations and mixed ethnic origins (metissage).

5 Brahminising or Sanskritising tendencies refer to the adoption of religious practices associated with higher castes in India, often linked to attempts at social mobility. While caste is practically non-existent in La Reunion, such changes of religious practices can reflect aspirations in terms of social class.

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Notes on contributors

Natalie Lang

Natalie Lang is Associated Junior Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt. She is the author of Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Reunion (2021). CORRESPONDENCE: Max-Weber-Kolleg fur kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, Universitat Erfurt, Postfach 90 02 21, 99105 Erfurt, Germany.