Making the Sacred: Craft, Ritual, and Computational Imaginaries in Postcolonial HCI

Paper Title

Making the Sacred: Craft, Ritual, and Computational Imaginaries in Postcolonial HCI

Publication Info

• Topic area: Intersection of devotional craft, materiality, and HCI in a postcolonial context.
• Keywords: HCI, postcolonial computing, devotional craft, materiality, Durga Puja, Kumartuli, sacred making, ethnography, craft and technology, religious materiality.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing HCI research on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality (FRS) focuses on belief, ritual performance, and digital mediation but neglects the materiality and embodied practices central to religious life. Similarly, HCI craft scholarship remains largely secular, overlooking devotional and sacred dimensions of making.
• Significance: Understanding devotional craft practices can challenge and expand HCI’s secular and instrumental assumptions about materiality, creativity, and technology, offering more culturally grounded design approaches.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI has explored secular craft, making, and unmaking, as well as FRS in technology adoption and ritual practices. However, these domains rarely intersect, leaving a gap in understanding how sacred material practices shape human–divine interactions and sociotechnical systems. This paper addresses this gap through an ethnographic study of Kumartuli, Kolkata’s historic idol-making community.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Ethnographic study of Kumartuli’s idol-makers to explore how sacred craft practices intersect with devotion, materiality, and urban political economy.
• Novelty:
  1. Detailed ethnographic account of devotional craftwork, highlighting material, embodied, and relational dimensions absent in HCI’s FRS and craft research.
  2. Theoretical expansion of HCI’s understanding of making by integrating ritual obligations, gendered hierarchies, and capitalist pressures.
  3. Contribution to postcolonial HCI by revealing how secular design assumptions marginalize devotional knowledge and sacred temporalities.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Four-month ethnographic study in Kumartuli (May–August 2025).
  • Data collection: 26 semi-structured interviews, 2 focus group discussions, spatial mapping of 9 workshops, analysis of digital and material archives, and participant observation.
  • Thematic analysis of qualitative data using inductive coding.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Devotional craft in Kumartuli unfolds through three phases: learning (spiritual and technical apprenticeship), sculpting (material transformation into divine forms), and trading (balancing sacred labor with market pressures).
  • Artisans’ practices integrate embodied mastery, sacred proportions, and spiritual attunement, challenging secular notions of craft.
  • Economic pressures have led to adaptations such as themed idols, fiber idols for export, and digital marketing, though these often conflict with traditional devotional values.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Highlights the centrality of sacred materiality and relationality, which are overlooked in secular HCI frameworks.
  • Provides a nuanced understanding of how devotional craft resists and adapts to capitalist and technological pressures.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Ethnographic methods included interviews, focus groups, spatial mapping, and digital content analysis.
  • Data sources: 300+ pages of fieldnotes, 800+ photographs, 50+ hours of audio recordings, and archival materials.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Findings are specific to Kumartuli and not generalizable to other contexts.
  • Limited exploration of caste dynamics and broader urban-infrastructural influences.
  • Future research could examine caste-based marginalizations, urban dynamics, and seasonal variations in craft practices.

Summary

This paper examines the devotional craft practices of Kumartuli’s idol-makers, revealing how sacred making integrates materiality, relationality, and cosmological meaning. Through ethnographic methods, it highlights the tensions between traditional practices and market-driven adaptations, offering insights into how HCI can better engage with non-secular, culturally specific forms of making. The study contributes to postcolonial HCI by challenging secular assumptions and advocating for design approaches that honor devotional values and sacred temporalities.