Birgitt Röttger-Rössler: I’m speaking with social anthropologist Dr. Max Kramer, who in his current research focuses on religious minorities, specifically Muslim minorities in India, and their media practices. Max, if I understood correctly, you are particularly interested in the tactical use of digital platforms by religious minorities. That is, you deliberately focus on how experiences that activists have in their analog life worlds are represented online. Is that correct?

Max Kramer: Well, it’s not exactly like that. First, because these activists don’t really have analog life worlds anymore; their lives are deeply mediated. This means that in their everyday practices, there’s essentially no meaningful online-offline separation. Instead, it’s more about a tactical use of various affordances that offer certain possibilities but also come with specific risks. I understand tactics as something that arises from long-term learning. This learning is not only about representation. I’m mainly concerned with what could be called ethical questions – for example, how to emotionally adjust to a Twitter practice, how sometimes it’s better to write a poem than a political tweet with news value, how one might leave the platform for months to follow political opponents and learn about the racist ecosystem that exists in India and has been built by Hindu nationalists over the past 15 years, how one works on oneself to post the right content at the right time with the right emotions on the right platform. These are tactical refinements acquired through sometimes quite brutal learning processes. Because if you don’t, you might get „framed“ or become part of a moral outrage spectacle staged by political opponents. So, my interlocutors are constantly thinking about what they can do to prevent such things from happening.

Birgitt Röttger-Rössler: If I may interject briefly – that’s very interesting, what you’re saying, because you’ve convincingly shown that the separation between online and offline, virtual or digital and analog worlds, is actually no longer sustainable. The fact that all these media and digitized practices shape our everyday lives makes this distinction somewhat artificial. This, of course, also challenges socio-anthropological research – we have to deal with it. So, how do you manage that? For example, you told me in our preliminary discussions that you initially followed influential political activists – those with large Twitter handles, or X handles as they’re now called – online, tracking what they were doing, how they represented themselves, who they interacted with, who they responded to, and so on. Then you tried to get in touch with these individuals through your extensive network of contacts. So, how did you document and store your online research? And how do you document this intertwining of analog and digital worlds that you just mentioned?

Max Kramer: It’s more of a circular process. I already had networks in Delhi and Bombay from previous research, and because of these actors, I had to read and retweet. These were mostly people with relatively large handles – by that, I mean more than 50,000 followers, often up to 150,000 followers – what you might call Twitter micro-celebrities. So, I followed all of them initially. There aren’t many people across India with that level of following. I then tried to meet these people in person as quickly as possible. So, my main data consist of conversations about their practices. What interests me is what matters to them in their practice, what problems they face when navigating social networks, how they learn to deal with these problems, how they avoid them, and how they develop new tactical approaches.

Before meeting activists for the first time, I usually reviewed their tweets from the past few months and occasionally took screenshots if I thought a tweet had been widely shared, was highly controversial, or perhaps even led to legal proceedings against the activists. These were the tweets I screenshotted and brought to the first meeting. However, I soon realized that the screenshots I had taken beforehand were not necessarily significant tweets for the activists. For their own memory of their Twitter history, these tweets were rather trivial, while entirely different tweets held much greater importance.

So, I then engaged with those tweets, took screenshots, organized them into folders, and encrypted those folders, storing them securely on an encrypted hard drive. That’s how I handle all the data I collect.

Birgitt Röttger-Rössler: I’m speaking with social anthropologist Dr. Jürgen Schaflechner, who leads the Volkswagen Foundation-funded research project “The Populism of the Precarious,” which explores how discriminated religious communities in India and Pakistan position themselves as political actors through social media. Jürgen Schaflechner is virtually with me today as he’s currently conducting fieldwork in Pakistan.

Jürgen, thank you for taking the time for our conversation despite your busy schedule. Could you briefly outline your research topic for us?

Jürgen Schaflechner: Yes, thank you very much for this opportunity to speak. The project “The Populism of the Precarious” deals with the question of what has changed for minorities – particularly religious minorities in South Asia – with the rise of social media over the past ten years. Part of the project focuses on Muslim minorities in India, while another part, in which I’m more involved, focuses on non-Muslim groups in Pakistan, such as Hindus, Christians, Jews, and others.

Over the years, a key question has emerged: what happens when the intermediary – or institution – that used to mediate between religious minorities in Pakistan or India “on the ground” is no longer present? What happens when people find themselves in a space where they can represent themselves?

What we’ve found interesting is how quickly this has led to an entirely new system of visibility, where actors cleverly stage themselves. They do this in ways that often play to Western perspectives or those from the Global North, attempting to represent a certain image – one that conveys victimhood or persecution – so that it’s easily understood by audiences in the West. This is exactly what we’re trying to examine more closely, both through traditional ethnographic methods and digital ethnography. We want to understand what happens in this process of translation.

Birgitt Röttger-Rössler: Yes, thank you. I’m particularly interested in your methodological approach. Could you elaborate on that? I find two aspects especially intriguing: first, how you capture the interconnection between analog and digital spheres, which seems central to your research; and second, whether you collect, document, and analyze media content on a larger scale – whether you employ computational methods or if those are not part of your approach.

Jürgen Schaflechner: Yes, at the beginning of the project, we indeed tried to analyze a lot of social media data. This was partly because, during the first year, we couldn’t go into the field due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation led to an interesting shift in perspective because we spent about a year – or six months – focusing solely on analyzing these data.

When we were finally able to enter the field, the data from social media presented themselves quite differently. We could, so to speak, look behind the avatars. We could see how activists and the so-called victims represented themselves online.

I believe this interconnection between analog and digital spheres is the most fascinating aspect. It’s about closely examining, on one hand, how individuals want to present themselves digitally, who their intended audience might be, and how these representations come to be online. That’s, I think, the central question and the most interesting part of this research project.