Like-able Me, Like-able There
by James Bielo
How might the practice of self-posing for images and circulating those images through Instagram advance the study of religious tourism? Two interrelated phenomena prompt me to ask this strangely specific question: how visitors engage with complex sites; and, the entanglement of visitors’ media acts with the institutional work of religious publicity. The former resonates with a long tradition in tourism-pilgrimage studies, eager to understand how travelers create attachments to place. The latter resonates with burgeoning scholarship seeking to understand how social worlds become “infused” with religion’s ideologies, ambitions, and materialities. This question and these interests organized my analysis of 500 Instagram self-poses at D.C.’s Museum of the Bible (MOTB).
Opened in November 2017, MOTB received nearly a million visitors its first year. Located two blocks south of the Washington Mall, the project cost roughly $1 billion dollars and boasts 430,000 square feet spread across seven public floors. Museum industry reviews have been laudatory; individual exhibits have won design awards and The Washington Post’s art and architecture critic mused that “it could change the museum business.” MOTB has also courted controversies: from illegally importing antiquities to displaying modern forgeries and questionable acts of artifact acquisition and provenance tracing.
Biblical studies scholars are voicing critiques about MOTB’s antiquities practices and its ties to conservative evangelicalism. As an ongoing anthropological project, I am raising additional questions. Drawing on interviews with design firm personnel, I am exploring how MOTB’s exhibits reflect the strategies and imperatives of late modernity’s experience economy. Drawing on interviews, questionnaires, and Instagram posts, I want to learn about the practices and perceptions of everyday visitors.
Conducting a qualitative, multi-modal Instagram analysis entails multiple methodological choices. Upfront, I honed in on a specific image genre: self-posing onsite. This genre of photograph includes individual and group selfies as well as pictures taken by someone outside the frame (perhaps a fellow traveler, perhaps a stranger). They may be spontaneous or planned, candid or staged, but they are defined by the act of placing bodies in selected space. Focusing on self-posing ensues from Instagram’s media ideologies and practices, such as the documentation of everyday life, the demand for like-able content, and the curation of a like-d life. In the visual economy of Instagram, a self-posed image is a particular communicative act: ‘I was here, I want my presence here known, this image performs a self I desire to circulate publicly, and I think it might secure desired likes.’ Instagram is Goffman’s impression management, maximally caffeinated.
This decision meant that a range of images were excluded, such as those featuring only museum content. Other exclusions were tied to onsite locations. I focused on MOTB’s permanent exhibits because my interviewing focused on design personnel who created these exhibits and I want to ask how visitor practices interact with the choreography of design. As a result, self-poses at special events and in temporary exhibits were excluded.
Another sampling decision concerned searching images. MOTB’s Instagram account was minimally useful because it primarily posts promotional images and only periodically reposts self-poses. Hashtag searching seemed promising, but an unwieldy range of hashtags are used for MOTB onsite posts and several common tags (e.g., #museumofthebible) are also used for offsite images. The most productive approach was to use the MOTB geotag, reflecting a distinctive media practice: Instagram posts are 31 times more likely than Tweets to include geotag data.
Finally, there was the question of when to stop. How many images would I include? Rather than choose a fixed number, I followed the saturation principle: I stopped when distinct patterns emerged and further data only confirmed those patterns, ceasing to produce new insights. The results at 350 continued at 400 and 500. I began when I was – September 21, 2019 – and worked backward to July 7, 2019, documenting every self-posed image with the MOTB geo-tag. Ultimately, I analyzed 500 images from 263 accounts.
If we imagine MOTB as a collection of photo-ops, visitors can select from hundreds of potential stages. The data reveal roughly 70 different spots. But, is 70 that diverse given the immensity of 430,000 square feet? Consider that 250 images (50%) came from just ten spots. The most popular spot is the entrance (83/500). On reflection, this seems overdetermined. It says ‘I/we are here,’ but it is also a place for groups to gather before dispersing and a bottleneck where people regularly queue and wait.
Reframing from individual spots to exhibit areas, a clear pattern emerged. One quarter of all self-poses (123/500) were taken within the World of Jesus of Nazareth, part of Floor Three’s Stories of the Bible section. (The next most popular area had only 62.) Nazareth is a 7,000-square foot space, themed as a first century replica. A dozen or so artifacts are housed in glass cases, but most of the space (and, every self-posed stage) consists of fabricated nature (e.g., olive trees), technology (e.g., olive press), re-created spaces (e.g., mikveh), and wall murals of landscapes and everyday activities.
The popularity of Nazareth resonates with a broader promise MOTB makes to visitors, which is to offer a surrogate experience for Holy Land pilgrimage. In the Lobby area visitors can take a nine-minute “Holy Land tour,” a Virtual Reality headset film with footage collected on a 360-degree camera; Jerusalem stone encases Lobby pillars; a touchable Western Wall stone opens a Floor Five exhibit (a spot for 9/500 self-poses); and, botanicals indigenous to Israel-Palestine adorn the Floor Six biblical garden (a spot for 19/500).
The most popular self-posing spot within Nazareth was in front of a wall mural of the Sea of Galilee/Lake Tiberias (16/500). Rather than being a walk-through space that requires no doubling back, Nazareth ends in a cul-de-sac facing this mural. The vantage point is elevated, facing east at sunrise with seven biblical sites identified but no human presence. In other areas, overhead sounds match the activity represented (e.g., a sound of dripping water plays inside the mikveh replica), but the soundscape in front of the mural shifts to instrumental devotional music. This choreographed spot replicates evangelical Holy Land tours that prioritize the Galilee, mobilizing an ideology of timeless nature in order to ‘step back in time’ to the lifeworld of Jesus. Some captions echoed this way of engaging the space, such as one user who announced to their Instagram public: “My inner geek came out in full form today… #biblehistory #israel #happyplace.”
Relative absences in the data are also striking. Many seemingly pose-worthy spots received little or no attention. For example, a de-commissioned jeep used to tour the Holy Land and featured in a short film sits outside the theatre’s entry. Only 1/500 used it as a stage. Archaeological artifacts – a source of MOTB’s controversy and for some the museum’s bread-and-butter – were featured in only 3/500 poses. With the Galilee mural, visitors are drawn to a spot choreographed by designers. Not so for other such spots. When I observed a tour of Floor Two’s Impact of the Bible installation led by the design team’s project manager, he described a wall display with every name used in the Bible written out as an “Instagrammable moment.” Yet, only 5/263 posters followed the designers’ cue by posing next to their name.
In the mixed-method effort to understand how people engage sites of religious tourism, Instagram self-posing is a generative data source. This media act also suggests a provocative dynamic in the study of religious publicity: that there is a dialectical motion between representations of self and place, between personal and ideological brandings. The like-able me and the like-able there stimulate each other, mutually circulating through media networks.
James S. Bielo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University (Oxford, OH). He is the author of four books, most recently Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU, 2018). He is the creator of Materializing the Bible, a digital scholarship project that curates Bible-based attractions throughout the world to consider how written words are used to create experiential, material environments.