Wangye practices online: From burning effigy vessels to digital networks

Abstract

This article explores the performance of a transnational network of Wangye practices, spirits, technologies, vessels, and Sinophone communities. The Wangye belief, a Fujianese popular religion performed in mainland China, Southeast Asia and Taiwan, remains widely performed. The article begins with an account of watching a YouTube recording of the live stream video of the Donggang Ying Wang religious festival in 2018. Culminating in the deity's sending off at the seaside and the burning of the NT$7 million Wangye's Boat, the video of the burning vessel remains archived online. Similarly in Malaysia, Yong Chuan Tian Temple performed the 'Wangkang Ceremony' in 2020, which also featured an elaborate construction of a vessel and its eventual burning. Streamed and recorded online, viewers can now witness the revelation of spirits through the conversion of material vessels into ash,smoke, and digital video. These digital enactments of religious vessels articulate a new religious re-composition that includes religious and non-religious social actors, machines, and gods, bringing old frontiers of nation and diaspora into contact.

Beyond migration? Alternative articulations of transnational religious networks

“…The relationship among technologies, migrants and faiths is further complicated in Lim's (2023) paper. Through the exploration of the digital voyages of ritual processions culminating in the burning of King of Pestilence boats among Sinophone communities that spread across borders and islands from China to Southeast Asia, he offers fascinating insights into the assemblage of technologies, devotees, spirits, vessels and other (non)human agents in/through online religious networks.…”

“…Online network formations have been shown as not merely fluid and evolving but also subjected to existing geopolitical forces that determine how religious networks are mobilized and sustained. He argues that ‘social media platforms act as nodes that extend the networking between temples even as they create new connections and exclude former nodes’ (Lim, 2023, p. 13).…”