Cyberbodies: The New Age and the Internet

In addition to its metaphorical and practical influences, the internet has informed New Agers’ cosmologies and corresponding bodily practices by requiring a rethinking of the physical universe in the face of virtual ubiquity. It has allowed them to imagine new ways of making space in their ontological realities for metaphysical, energetic substances. We can see, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, that the digital has made the spiritual ever more material and situated in the flesh for New Agers searching for the true nature of existence. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork from 2016 to 2018 and ongoing research with energy healers in the San Francisco Bay Area, this “anthropology of virtual matter”—understanding how the virtual has caused a paradigm shift in how we think about the material world—gives us fresh eyes with which to see the New Age. It even forces us to reconsider spiritualities as material ontologies, the conception of materiality that shapes how believers understand and interact with the world around them through their bodies, sensoria, and metaphysical appendages.