Three people facing an altar and an open laptop, with hands clasped in prayer. A fourth person stands in the corner filming the people in prayer.

This project is an ethnographic examination of virtual ancestor worship in urban Viet Nam, with the broad goal of exploring how social relations with others—both human and divine—are formed and maintained through new forms of electronic media. Using new media technologies as a conceptual framework for understanding contemporary ancestor worship, the project explores how urban Vietnamese use online media to contact and propitiate the ancestors, and what these practices reveal about how they understand the nature of communication between the human world and the world of the spirits and ancestors. The proposed project raises questions about the relationship between technology and tradition, visibility and invisibility, and materiality and mediation.