Between ancestors and algorithms: ritual responsibility as a culturally sensitive framework for responsible innovation in DeathTech

This article examines the ethical, cultural, and political implications of DeathTech—digital afterlife technologies such as memorial platforms, chatbots of the deceased, voice clones and AI-generated avatars—arguing that existing frameworks of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) are insufficient when applied to symbolically charged domains such as death and mourning. While current debates often focus on fairness, accountability, privacy and transparency, these procedural tools overlook the ritual, communal and intercultural dimensions through which societies generate meaning around death. Drawing on philosophical analysis, comparative ethics, anthropological literature and empirical fieldwork conducted in Benin, the article introduces the concept of ritual responsibility. This notion captures the ethical obligation to respect and sustain the symbolic boundaries and collective practices that regulate mourning, remembrance and the transition from the status of the deceased to that of an ancestor. Beninese Vodun traditions provide a particularly illuminating case study because they articulate death not as an individual event but as a socially mediated transformation enacted through structured rituals, collective responsibility and the mediation of ritual specialists. These practices reveal the limits of universalised governance models and show how mourning can become ethically and psychosocially fragile when severed from communal frameworks. By bringing these insights into dialogue with current digital afterlife technologies, including griefbots, memorialisation platforms and postmortem avatars, the article proposes a ritual-sensitive reconfiguration of RRI. The article reinterprets anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness through ritual responsibility and translates this reconstruction into practical governance and design recommendations, including grief impact assessments, collective consent, culturally meaningful temporal limits, interpretability for bereaved users, and accountability metrics oriented toward dignity, community cohesion and symbolic non-harm. It argues that digital afterlife technologies must be designed and regulated not only as technical artefacts but as moral infrastructures capable of reshaping values, relations and collective memory.