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This presentation discusses a selection of examples of what I term ‘rhetorical holiness’ created using Second Life (SL), a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) on the internet. Second Life is a three dimensional persistent space made up of thousands of islands (called sims). In SL a person is represented by an avatar, a body which they manipulate in the environment. The avatar can travel around the huge space of SL in real time visiting themed sites, buying and selling virtual commodities and participating in social and cultural events with others. The shared online three dimensional spaces of SL include religiously themed sites where the holy is one of the main defining criteria of interaction. The sites in SL that I have examined are the Buddhist island of “Bodhi Sim: Land of Buddhadharma - a Second Life fansite” and two mosques built in SL; the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and the Cordoba Mosque. Finally the Koinonia Congregational Church of Second Life is a Christian church which operates entirely in SL. For the purposes of this presentation, these sites are examined for the use of symbols from three established religious contexts that have been re-deployed in the virtual environment. The purpose of such an exercise is to identify a system of rhetoric within a larger literacy for such three dimensional virtual environments.
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Religion in New Places:Rhetoric of the Holy In the Online Virtual
World of Second Life
Jim BarrettHUMlab/Language StudiesUmeå University
Three Dimensional Virtual Worlds(What is relevant)
• Online• Social
• Language Dependant• Architectural
• Persistent• Multimedial• Spatial• Immediate (Real Time)
Rhetoric in Second Life
It is the sharing of symbols, in this case through their acknowledgment as holy, which leads me to the concept of rhetorical holiness in three dimensional virtual spaces.The shared interpretive and interactive values of this rhetoric, as holy, exchangeable and meaningful, I argue should be considered as examples of the literacies needed to participate in the (religious) cultures of SL. In SL rhetoric operates in a discursive sense.
Koinonia Church is a functioning place of worship with appointed clergy and services.
Manifest via Second Life.
The focus for the Koinonia structure is a multi-channel communication portal within the frame of the rhetorically holy. Signified by the architecture and relatively few interactive objects present.
People meet there.
The signifiers of rhetorical holiness on Bodhi Sim include the lotus, stupa, prayer flag, the action of prostration by avatar, mani stones, thankas, statues (Thai and Tibetan) and a Dung Chen (Tibetan ritual horn), with six sound samples.
In Tibetan Buddhism the act of a three part prostration at a shrine or temple has great
symbolic value.
In a simulative sense the operator of the avatar is enacting a practice that is firmly contextualized in established religious and
social cultures.
Sultan Ahmed Mosque (completed 1616), and the Great Mosque of Cordoba
(completed 987) are recreated in Second Life
Each of the SL mosques offer a head scarf or hijab (Arabic: Cover) for female avatars, before entering the mosque.
The hijab plays a role in the particular identity for the avatar (and its operator) by relating them to the wider communities from which the practice of wearing the hijab comes.
Rhetorical holiness is deployed in the examples from the Second Life virtual environment through both simulative and representative features. Both of these features are largely enacted through the symbolic, either as individual symbols, such as the cross in Koinonia, or as systems.
Rhetorical holiness is used in conjunction with the symbolic to frame communication via such virtualenvironments. Koinonia, with it sparse use of interactive objects in comparison to the BodhiSim, represents a portal for community and communication
Such literacy is new in the contexts of the inscriptive technologies of the west and their role in religion, where books and the written word have dominated since the
Protestant Reformation.
However the participatory enacting of narrative can as well be found in pilgrimage.
It bears consideration that many of the practices and meanings that are present in so-called new
media have strong parallels in older media forms.
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