Making the Mundane Sacred Through Technology: Mediating Identity, Ecology and Commodity Fetishism

This article explores the sanctifying power of technology and digital imagery, and its use for local political action. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in northeastern Thailand, the author examines how a photograph of a tree and its presentation on a laptop computer were used to save the tree from being cut down. He shows how a unique combination of rhetorical strategy and commodity fetishism, when coupled with the digital image, rendered the tree sacred and therefore untouchable; this was possible due to the cultural identity of rural villagers, who imagine themselves simultaneously as both rural and national.