Cérémonies de mariage dans World of Warcraft : Transfert rituel ou institution collective?

Abstract

Wedding Ceremonies in World of Warcraft: Ritual transfer or collective institution? My research over the past three years has been focused particularly on online religion in the virtual universe of the videogame World of Warcraft (WoW) as it is played in French. A first moment will give a brief outline of the different perspectives in current research on the study of religion on the Internet, cyber-rituality and WoW. This preliminary part will thus serve as part of the framework of the investigation. Secondly, we will focus our discussion on a significant question about this religious transformation, the case of cyber marriage in WoW. Using a corpus of 100 ceremonies we will analyse wedding rituals, celebrations via avatars (digital representations of individuals), in which guilds (player’s communities) develop a politico-religious function analogically. Finally, we will consider the socio-anthropological changes that this case reveals, and realted theoretical questions.

Keywords

• cyber-weddings
• World of Warcraft
• ritual
• online religion
• ethnography