The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Videogames, By Jeffrey G. Snodgrass

Jeffrey G. Snodgrass’s The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Videogames combines fieldwork from Rajasthan, India, and the online game World of Warcraft (WoW) to illustrate how secondary identities can locate therapeutic processes for psychosocial well-being. Using ethnographic data and a theoretical apparatus assembled from psychological anthropology, The Avatar Faculty bridges gaps between religious and gaming senses of the term avatar to understand how taking on alternative identities (whether through spirit possession or an in-game character) can navigate unhealthy social conditions. The book successfully charts definitional choppy waters to its own use of the term avatar as a “symbolic second self” (15) and upholds this key term as exemplary of the kind of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary work that is possible when we prioritize our subjects of interest over disciplinary conventions.

Drawing on one case of spirit possession among the Bhat (a low-status Indian community practicing folk Hinduism) in the late 1990s and one field site among a guild of American WoW players in the late 2000s, The Avatar Faculty explores how these secondary social identities achieved through what Snodgrass labels the “avatar therapeutic process” (194) negotiated cultural identities. Snodgrass argues that possession by a spirit and taking on a digital identity within a videogame have parallels as “vehicles” (198) through which individuals navigate their psychosocial well-being within the fluid metrics of what is healthy and unhealthy. In the case of Bedami Bhat, a young woman possessed by the deity Chavanda Mata (a clan goddess), this negotiation leads to a complex web of social, gender, and economic norms transgressed and fortified throughout the ordeal. Within the WoW communities, players use avatars as identities to intensify or deescalate individual and social stresses.

The Avatar Faculty foregrounds an audience in anthropology, religious studies, and game studies (xv), and Snodgrass mentions students in particular as a focus in his discussion of research methods (xvi). However, there is a broader audience who could find this book useful: The Avatar Faculty is for any student or scholar interested in mapping the socio-cultural conditions of measuring healthy and unhealthy behaviors, whether around explicitly religious behavior or digital cultures. The methodological and theoretical synthesis demonstrates a flexibility of utility exemplary of Snodgrass’s mastery of the material.

This theory and method are rooted in psychological anthropology, which concerns the relationship between culture and the mind. Snodgrass engages ethnographic accounts and survey data in this interdisciplinary pursuit of understanding the therapeutic utility of avatars. In addition to these anthropological accounts, Snodgrass draws on the work of Willian Dressler, Edward Higgins, and Michael Marmot to develop a theory of socio-psychological health, arguing that behaviors deemed healthy or unhealthy are the product not of essential traits but of enaction within social contexts (xiv). Dressler, Higgins, and Marmot descend from anthropological, social psychological, and epidemiological disciplinary backgrounds, respectively. Still, Snodgrass handles this breadth of theological approaches with ease, indicative of his experience and previous publications in these fields. The book’s approach to mental health through avatar identification focuses more on the “cultural frames of meaning” and therefore leans more towards the social-scientific than diagnostic in its approach to public health, though Snodgrass does not exclude the possibility of introducing biological data into further pursuits.

Snodgrass organizes The Avatar Faculty around four body chapters that internally oscillate between his two field sites plus an introduction and conclusion that frame the more extensive theoretical and methodological interventions. He includes a set of key terms, a glossary, and three appendices that collect his survey methods and results. All of this makes the book approachable and teachable at the undergraduate level, and—apart from one section of the fourth chapter that is a bit unwieldly in its handing of some ethnographic experience in a seemingly unrelated Indian gaming zone outside either of his major field sites—The Avatar Faculty balances its theoretical and methodological investments with lightness and ease.

Chapter 3 exemplifies this ability. Entitled “The Psychosocial Dynamics of Avatar Therapeutics: Enhanced Self-Image and Elevated Social Standing,” it deals with both Bedami Bhat’s possession as turning a private struggle into a public one and the dynamic psychosocial relationship between in- and out-of-game identities in WoW. At the onset of her possession, Bedami Bhat found herself divided between loyalties to her husband Ramu and the broader Bhat community who saw Ramu as both stingy with his money and lacking in his support of the broader Bhat way of life. Bedami would have little recourse to comment on this social conflict without access to her secondary identity as the deity Chavanda Mata. Bedami’s “dissociation” (87) (a term Snodgrass uses to significant effect) into her avatar identity allowed her a kind of authority and remove to speak to these complex dynamics directly. Similarly, digital avatars like those available in WoW enable individuals to expand themselves into a self-image that better fits the social needs of their group. Snodgrass profiles the Knights of Good guild, a group of gamers dedicated to playing in a way that prioritizes balance between in-game and out-of-game activity and achievement in contrast to emphasizing in-game successes over out-of-game needs. In both cases, Snodgrass finds that what is experienced as healthy or unhealthy gameplay correlates to whether the player feels their needs are being met by the guild. Through this chapter’s cases, Snodgrass demonstrates that these avatar therapeutics position both Bedami and the Knights of Good not as individuals but as “plural subjects” within a group, as “we” thinkers, acting out how they “ought” to behave, marking avatars as “psychological-anthropological” rather than individualistic subjects (153).

The Avatar Faculty’s primary goal is to “draw out and explore . . . sacred/secular avatar parallels, to clarify the foundational processes underlying human psychosocial functioning and wellbeing” (15). The book successfully draws together seemingly disparate fields of online gaming and spirit possession by developing a “psychosocial dynamics of avatar therapeutics” (126) to illuminate how the cultural conditions surrounding these events shape the therapeutic or detrimental fallout from such avatar personalities. This review gives little room for the descriptive “portraits” (203) that the manuscript paints of its subjects, but its comparative case study approach goes far in bridging a gap between Hindu spirit possession and WoW, a gap that some might find hard to fathom when picking up the text.

The Avatar Faculty could benefit from a deeper excursion into existing scholarship on digital avatars and religious experience. Although it does well to hold its survey and ethnographic data lightly without bogging it down with unnecessarily dense theoretical interventions, there are times where some bibliographic context would have been helpful. The third chapter, for example, offers a quick but effective summary of parallel scholarship on the gendered and economic politics of possession in other Asian contexts but does little to find other such parallels in scholarship on digital experience. Although the text is not focused on digital religious experience but rather the parallels between digital and religious experience, it nonetheless could have benefitted from the wealth of extant work on this subject.

Overall, The Avatar Faculty is a compelling and approachable execution of a remarkably diverse set of theorical and methodological insights that students can digest. Its synthesis of approaches (which Snodgrass himself marks as an ambition for the work) is handled with care and produces sympathetic and thoughtful scholarship that recognizes mental health and well-being not as individualistic and solely biological conditions but ones deeply embedded in larger social and cultural conditions of what is healthy and unhealthy. And for that, The Avatar Faculty is an essential contribution for any student or scholar invested in the psychosocial dynamics of religious or digital experience.