An avatar is an agent who serves as a vehicle or vessel for another’s consciousness and will. In spirit possession in India and elsewhere, possessed spirit mediums transform into avatars of divine will. In online roleplaying games like World of Warcraft, digital avatars do players’ bidding. Relevant to psychosocial well-being in these two contexts is how avatar experiences can enhance feelings of moral agency. The spiritually possessed, infused with divine energy and newly respected in the community, bolster their felt capacity to achieve personally and socially meaningful goals. Likewise, video game players can enact in virtual worlds more ideal selves in ways that enhance their feelings of self-efficacy.

The Avatar Faculty brings together in one place decades of thinking on how spiritual and digital avatar identities can help promote human flourishing. The book’s main contribution is to develop avatar as an analytical category that highlights how a general human capacity to cultivate alternative representations of the self (avatars) can help religiously minded persons and gamers alike to enact the good life. Using that abstraction across religious and secular contexts is a distinct feature of my book, and is an idea not found elsewhere in anthropological analyses of spirit possession. This analytical use of avatar also shows how non-western categories of thought can serve theoretical ends outside of their original ethnographic and historical contexts.