Animating Relations: Digitally Mediated Intimacies between the Living and the Dead

Abstract

Recent theorizations of animation offer intriguing possibilities for recognizing and attending to the sociality of a range of entities, including the dead. Today, diverse digital media are being used to maintain and even deepen intimate relationships with deceased loved ones. These media bring the dead to presence through forms of animation, understood not only in the narrow technical sense as a media genre but more broadly as a mode of mediation that vivifies in particular ways. This mode of mediation is iterative, bringing forth the multiplicity of the dead. Their materializations are partial and fragmentary, cohering around a database of elements rather than a cohesive, narrative identity. They are sparsely outlined, evoked rather than depicted. When the dead are animated by digital media, they invite their loved ones to fill them, expanding into many versions to which shifting attachments can form. Those who answer their call extend their ambivalent hospitality, maintaining mutually constitutive relationships through which both the living and the dead are carried forth.

Introduction: Towards an anthropology of data

“…On the border between Kyrgyzstan and Russia, an ethnographer studying seasonal migrant labour finds herself concerned by data gathered into the ‘black list’, a tool used by Russian immigration services to make migrants deportable (Reeves 2016). In the United States, a grieving daughter describes how a personal database of memories appears to bring her mother back to life (Hales 2019). From conflicting data about voter turnout in the 2019 Indian elections, apparitions of ‘ghost voters’ emerge ( India Today 2019).…”

Virtual embodiment in physical realities

“…This perceived authenticity is gathered through the conduct of manifesting one's virtual corporeality in the Twitter cyberplace: a realization of both ways of relating towards others and markers of physicality such as names and photos of one's own bodies. As such, the act of realizing virtual corporeality is not just an act of animating one's relations with others (Hales 2019), that is turning one and others into lively virtual characters-or personas-but also a conjuration (Csordas 2000). In this case, the bodies of Twitter denizens are not "shades" of dead bodies as Csordas discussed.…”

Monumental Names

“…Such regulations might be known to funerary experts alone. They might be improvised and, increasingly technologised, digitised, and animated (Hales 2019). Nevertheless, notions of 'tradition', 'culture', and 'proper' ways of dealing with the dead continue to preoccupy the living who ask how someone died, how the remains should be treated, how graves are tended, and who visits them.…”