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What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 73; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/socrel/srs064

1759-8818

Roland M. Harper,

Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology

This collection responds to and expands upon recent scholarship on religion, secularity, and spirituality. Courtney Bender and Ann Taves offer the volume as a revisitation and revision of a now-familiar secular(ized) story: According to this story, a secular age is a reflexive age; religious believers must be aware of themselves as believers—and aware that they need not choose belief. Concomitantly, a secular age forces one to reckon with the historical–cultural constitution of beliefs and values that once one could assume to be transcontextual, intrinsic, and universal. Ambivalence and doubt enter where certainty once prevailed. Secularization does not thereby erase religion, but it mandates either religion's disenchantment or believers' execution of some sort of dodge around historical–cultural consciousness—for example, mystification or misrecognition. While Bender, Taves, and their contributors concede that secularization portends changes in religious ways of being, they challenge prevailing assumptions—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, in different versions of the old story—about the nature, direction, and scope of the change. In her essay on the iterations of spirits in Ghana, Birgit Meyer challenges the notion that secularization equals disenchantment—offering instead an account of a “secular” space in which spirits do not merely survive as premodern holdovers but proliferate in and through the bureaucratic/technocratic sphere. Christopher White's essay on nineteenth-century psychological discourse shows how concepts such as “suggestibility,” often used to debunk religion, were also used to reform and fortify certain manifestations of religion. Should one be tempted to view enchantment as a matter for putatively “religious” bodies in a secular age, Jeffrey Kripal's piece on the Esalen Institute's Sursem group demonstrates and calls for an academic bending away from dogmatic materialism, toward the possibility of the paranormal, in order to embark upon a more robust exploration of human consciousness. Worth mentioning as well is Bender and Taves's own reformulation of spirituality—specifically, their noting of the term's frequent, conspicuous deployment in secular critiques of religion, and their call for increased attention to spirituality as a word—like religious and secular—“with a history” (7).