An ethnography of the virtual spiritist world: some methodological approaches

Abstract

One of the most visible products of the digital age, internet is in the core of most Brazilians interests. This “new space of sociability”, the cyberspace, is nowadays an attractive arena where events take place and happen. In this context, we must pay attention to the emergence of virtual communities. With the broad participation of Brazilian Internet users these communities are attracting the interest of social scientists who found a new space for the study of contemporary sociability so that for many of them the research on the internet is linked to the those communities. The emergence of these new "locus" (virtual?) for the accomplishment of a socio-anthropological research suggests a movement of dislocation regarding some categories commonly used in the analyses of these "virtual worlds”. Based on my current research about the spiritists in the internet I want to discuss in this article some methodological aspects of doing an anthropological research in / about the cyberspace.