Abstract

To date, older adults have received little attention in the newly emerging technological narratives of transnational religion. This is surprising, given the strong association of later life with spiritual and religious engagement, but it likely reflects the ongoing assumption that older adults are technophobic or technologically incompetent. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with older Sinhalese Buddhist migrants from Sri Lanka, living in Melbourne, this paper explores the digital articulations of transnational religion that arise from older migrants’ uses of digital media. We focus on how engagements with digital media enable older Sinhalese to respond to an urgent need to accumulate merit in later life, facilitating their temporal strategies for ageing as migrants. We argue that these digital articulations transform both the religious imaginary and the religious practices that validate and legitimize a life well-lived.

RAS ID

56475

Document Type

Journal Article

Date of Publication

7-1-2023

Volume

23

Issue

3

School

School of Arts and Humanities

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Publisher

Wiley

Comments

Gamage, S., Wilding, R., & Baldassar, L. (2023). Digital media, ageing and faith: Older Sri Lankan migrants in Australia and their digital articulations of transnational religion. Global Networks, 23(3), 646-658. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12414

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.1111/glob.12414