Virtual Religion

Abstract This chapter considers “virtuality” as potential, a concept historically articulated by Dun Scotus, Henri Bergson, and particularly Gilles Deleuze. It does so to ask: What are the analytic advantages of thinking of religious events not as determinate action or prefigured possibilities but as open-ended “problems” constituted by the intersections of differing intensities of forces that, through their interplay, open up the way for different resolutions as multiple possible thresholds are reached? This investigation is accomplished through a review of ethnographic and anthropological writings that have explicitly relied upon “virtuality” in the sense that the term is understood here, and also through a rereading of other anthropological and ethnographic projects through the lens of virtuality. Ultimately, viewing religion through the lens of the virtual allows for a greater comparative reach, a way to think variation and individuation while still acknowledging patterns, a new way to frame ritual, and finally, a sense of what it is that makes religion so protean.