Elsevier

Language & Communication

Volume 75, November 2020, Pages 36-50
Language & Communication

‘Thank you for your blessing’: Constructed mobile chronotopes in a Buddhist online community in Bhutan

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2020.08.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Bhutanese community members use WeChat to connect.

  • Time/space dilemmas are addressed.

  • Concepts of the sacred, family, and social hierarchy communicated digitally.

  • Buddhist ceremonies foster ties among rural communities.

Abstract

This article examines data collected from an online group of extended family members linked to a Buddhist temple in rural Bhutan. Using the concept of the mobile chronotope we examine how they negotiate problems of time, space, co-presence, and participation. These are addressed through the co-construction of other chronotopes: the sacred, family, and social hierarchy. Methodologically, we extend previous work by analysing the multimodalities of the social media app, WeChat, and the visual images and audio/voice files that the app affords. We examine how members construct chronotopes not only through text, but also through the mixing of languages, images, and vocal qualities. Finally, we show how online technologies can shape and extend traditional, sacred practices across temporal and spatial boundaries.

Introduction

Before the growth and widespread adoption of social media and internet connectivity, rural community members' access to news and information about the outside world was often limited by the ‘tyranny of space and distance’ (Malecki, 2003, p. 201). Communication within such communities was primarily local and face-to-face (Allen and Dillman, 1994), and contacts with members who migrated from rural to urban centers, especially in locations that lacked telephones or other communication technologies, were infrequent (Sandel, 2015). Yet recent years have witnessed a dramatic change. Places that formerly were perceived as socially and geographically isolated are no longer islands (Collins and Wellman, 2010). Information communication technologies (ICTs), particularly mobile phones, afford novel ways for people to connect both locally and globally (Sandel, 2014; Schrock, 2015). With the evolution of digital media, the spaces between the ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ have become ‘increasingly fluid’, and forms of communication should be understood as they ‘are realized in and through digital spaces themselves’ (Burger et al., 2017, pp. 26, 27). This has implications for both the kinds of activities afforded by ICTs, and the places and communities where such activities can occur. It also speaks theoretically to online perceptions of time and space, understood via the concept of the chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981).

In reflections on how time is impacted by the ‘network society’, Castells argues that the linear, ‘predictable time’ of the modern period – coordinated by the clock – ‘is being shattered’ (2010, p. 463). To illustrate, he describes global capital markets, and the emergence of ‘just-in-time labor’, whereby labor does not operate under the regularity of the clock, but upon the global demands of the space- and time-compressed market. These illustrate the accelerated speed of the networked society, abiding by the principles of ‘timeless time’, meaning that the relationship between ‘actual working time and schedules is undetermined’ (p. 473). How does this play out in Bhutan, a nation that has only recently joined the modern period?

In this article we examine how a group of people who participate in the activities of a Buddhist temple in rural Bhutan use the social media platform, WeChat, to construct mobile chronotopes, via messages that acknowledge, negotiate, and transcend spatiotemporal problems. In particular, we are interested in how mobile chronotopes afford spatial realignments (Lyons and Tagg, 2019; Lyons et al., in press), as those who follow religious activities via their mobile phones, and are acknowledged as being in some distant space out ‘there’, can be transposed to become participants who are ‘here’. In the disembodied space of the mobile phone, group members must work to ‘discursively contextualise their utterances’ (Lyons et al., in press, p. 5) by referencing the physical contexts, activities, and personal referents that can be used to construct socially shared meanings.

We are also interested in how the mobile phone affords users the ability to communicate chronotopic identities (Dick, 2010; Karimzad and Catedral, 2017). Members of this online group share personal and familial connections that in the face-to-face context would be evident in displays of respect according to such social categories as age, gender, and position (i.e. lay member or lama). But in the online environment, these social and personal identities must be communicated through the medium of the phone, and according to sociolinguistic scales that are mediated via the mobile chronotope (Blommaert, 2015). Members communicate identities semiotically not only via text, as has been studied previously (Lyons and Tagg, 2019; Lyons et al., in press), but also by using WeChat's affordances of voice messages and stickers (images with text). These multimodalities can afford chronotopic shifts that index a range of individual and group identities that may mimic, or even differ from those in offline interactions.

Our study draws on a lager ethnographic study conducted across Bhutan. We are interested in how the availability of mobile phones and social media applications afford new forms of communication among online groups, both large and small. This analysis is based upon the messages shared among members of a small, WeChat group, who support the activities of a temple in Bhutan's remote, northeast, and are related to each other as members of one extended family. While this study focuses on the mobile communication of a small group, findings have implications for a wider range of online groups across many different landscapes.

Section snippets

The mobile chronotope

The concept that guides this study is that of the ‘mobile chronotope’, defined as ‘socially conditioned configurations of time and space largely within text-based virtual exchanges … through apps such as WhatsApp, SMS, WeChat’ (Lyons and Tagg, 2019, p. 659). Building upon work by Agha (2007, p. 325), who draws attention to the ways that signs can be ‘mass mediated’, Lyons and Tagg explain that the mobile phone affords ‘inherently dynamic’ chronotopes, as mobile phone users may ‘re-enter

Background to the context: Bhutan

Located in the Himalayas and bordered by India and China, with a population of a little more than 700,000 (2017 Population & Housing Census), Bhutan is a nation that until recent decades was cut off from the rest of the world (Phuntsho, 2013, 2015). People lived in small communities in valleys cut deep by the rivers that flow south from the Tibetan plateau. While in the past some Bhutanese visited Tibet to the north, or India to the south, the majority spent their lives living and working close

Lhüntse district, Bhutan

Data for this study come from a WeChat ‘Group Chat’ of 28 members, all with a personal connection to the Lhüntse district of Bhutan. Located in northeastern Bhutan, in settlements spread along rivers at an elevation ranging from 1000 to 2500 m above sea level, the district is comprised of approximately 15,000 persons (Hyslop, 2017). The local language is known as Kurtöp, although most speak other languages, including the national language of Dzongkha, and English – the language of education,

Data and methods

Our initial contact with this WeChat group began in 2017. The second author, a native of Bhutan, through a personal friend became aware of Dungkar Naktshang Tshogchung; he then asked for permission to join this group for research purposes. After a period of negotiation – assurance that he would protect participants' identities, a demonstration of a kinship tie via shared descent from his great-grandfather, and more importantly, the fact that his family worshiped the same deity as members of

Analysis

We now discuss these messages in turn, focusing on a series of 17 messages posted by the Lama and nine different members of the WeChat group, spread over a period of three days. (The Lama was the only group member present at the temple and Dungkar.) Our analysis shows how members constructed their messages and used WeChat to negotiate time/space challenges during an interactive Buddhist ceremony. These are interpreted through three emergent chronotopes: the sacred, family, and social hierarchy.

Conclusions and implications

In this study we analyse messages posted to WeChat in response to a Bhutanese Buddhist ceremony. We show how the medium affords members the ability to bridge space and distance, through mobile chronotopes, and construct messages that create a sense of social presence. This is important in the context of Bhutan where a traditional way of life centers on face-to-face interactions, cemented through community-supported religious practices. Yet in recent decades rural-to-urban migration has led to a

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    We wish to thank the University of Macau for supporting this project, grant ID: MYRG2017-00059-FSS.

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