O Mundo Espírita Virtual: navegando pelas malhas da ciência, da tecnologia e da religião

Abstract

One of the most visible products of the digital age, the Internet has raised the interest of the Brazilian population. From a technological innovation to a place where the whole culture will transit in the coming years, this new space of sociability increasingly intrudes into our daily lives, serving as a prime arena for a range of events that have given shape and life in cyberspace. In this regard, calls attention to the growing presence of religious groups spread across these World Wide Web. Among these, the spiritists were at the forefront. The occupation that the spiritists have taken at the cyberspace have been conducting itself as a good case for thinking about the Brazilian Spiritism, particularly on the relationship between science and religion as well as the forms of appropriation of these categories by the spiritists. The socio-anthropological literature on Spiritism is unanimous in pointing out these two categories as essential to understanding the spiritists' practice, and in regard of the spiritists participants in the virtual world these same categories appear as references in both the discourse and in everyday life. Starting from the movement of a group of adepts for the spiritist virtual world, this paper aims to analyze the practices and relationships built by the spiritists in cyberspace and to discuss the ways in which those groups are constituting themselves less as an area of dialogue than as a field of tensions, which signals the existence of different truth regimes in circulation within the spiritist virtual world. To discuss the implications arising therefrom is one of the goals of this research.