A Symbolic Reconstruction from the Ritual to the Belief: Virtual Alevi Communities

This article aims to deal with the symbolic reconstruction of the communities in the modern era in the case of virtual Alevi communities. It claims that modernity is symbolically restructuring in the context of an abstraction process that moves from ritual to faith rather than destroying communities, and that virtual communities are cognitive structures of this symbolic construction process. In addition, it is believed that the symbolic construction processes of the communities continue without slowing down. The emergence of more flexible and individualistic new types of virtual communities is seen as an indicator of this situation. It considers this symbolic construction of the community as a result of reflexivity which can reflect on the modern structure’s own structure and organization, and to correct and renew itself. It intends to put forward its claim that communities have undergone a symbolic reconstruction that has led to an increasingly flexible and individualistic structure in the case of online Alevi communities. For this purpose, two separate researches were carried out at different times for the same sample consisting of the ABF (Alevi Bektashi Federation), AABF (Federation of Alevi Unions of Germany), Gen？ Aleviler Forum and the Alevi Forum. The first research was carried out in September 2012- April 2013 by cyber ethnography. The second one was conducted in April 2019 with indirect observation technique. The data of both studies were compared and interpreted in order to understand how a transformation has occurred in the structure of virtual communities and in what direction the symbolic building process is proceeding