[Air-L] Religious Dimension of Sustainable Development

[dtoews at uwindsor.ca]

I've been re-reading Baym's essay on "The Emergence of On-line Community" 
(1998) and she helpfully breaks down, in a methdologically useful way, 
some of the key factors that allow online communities to be stable (and 
therefore significant).  I would propose that questions of online 
community owe and important debt to the sociologists and anthropologists 
of the classical era.  I think the classical question of the relationship 
between religion and society is absolutely apropos of internet research 
that is approached from the point of view of communication and sociology. 
In "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life" (1912) Durkheim held that 
"it is unquestionable that a society has all that is necessary to arouse 
the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power it has over 
them".  He further argued that "collective sentiments can just as well 
become incarnate in persons or formulae: some formulae are flags, while 
there are persons, either real or mythical, who are symbols."  The study 
of societies is the study of that which people attribute a 'sacred' 
quality to and how they do this and why they do it in certain 
circumstances rather than other 'profane' or ordinary circumstances.  A 
key research question (for me at least) would then be, what rituals, 
practices, emblems, and symbols, in each case of online activity, form a 
set of 'sacred' conditions that acts as a centre which they then imagine 
as the basic feature of their community? (BTW, just in case anyone takes 
me for a conservative, I would add that the sacred is always the most 
important and essential opening for the contestation of a society, and 
indeed, without the sense of social seriousness it brings there would be 
little reason to contest or resist anything.) 
______________________________
Dr. David Toews, PhD
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Windsor, Canada

If you do not keep the multiplicity of 
language-games in view you will 
perhaps be inclined to ask 
questions like: "What is a question?"
- Wittgenstein