The Study of Religious Experience; Bettina Schmidt

Edited by

Bettina E. Schmidt [+–]

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Bettina E. Schmidt, PhHabil, PhD, MA in cultural anthropology (Marburg University, Germany), Professor of study of religions at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Director of the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre in Lampeter. Previously she worked at Marburg University, Oxford University and Bangor University. She was also visiting professor at the City University of New York and visiting scholar at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo.
She has published extensively on Caribbean and Latin American religions, identity, cultural theories and migration. Her academic interests include the anthropology of religion, diaspora identity, religious experience, urban studies, medical anthropology and gender issues. Her main fieldworks were conducted in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, New York City, and, more recently, in São Paulo, Brazil, about spirit possession and trance. She is the author of Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City (2008, Ashgate), Einführung in die Religionsethnologie (2008, Reimer Verlag Berlin), and co-editor of Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2010, Continuum), to name just a few recent publications.

The Study of Religious Experience aims to show how a range of disciplines – including anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, theology, biblical studies and history – approach the topic religious experience, how this approach is applied and what contributions they make to the study of religious experience.

Preliminaries

Foreword [+–] vii-viii

Peggy Morgan FREE

Sir Alister Hardy, a renowned scientist, approached the complex field of religious and spiritual experience from a similar disciplined and scientific manner in which he approach natural science. Asking people from the public to send him accounts of first-hand experiences with spiritual or religious powers he established the Religious Experience Research Centre that has been since then at the forefront of the academic study of religious experiences. This book will take his work forward and show how to study religious and spiritual experiences in the 21st century. The aim of the book is to show how a range of disciplines (e.g. anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, theology, biblical studies, history) approach the topic religious experience, what their contributions to the study of religious experience are and how the approach can be applied. Each chapter will present a different approach while the introduction will highlight how the individual chapters contribute to the study of religious experience, where they differ and where they overlap.

Acknowledgements [+–] ix

Bettina E. Schmidt FREE

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

The renowned scientist Sir Alister Hardy approached the complex field of religious and spiritual experience in a similar disciplined and scientific manner in which he approached natural science. Asking people from the public to send him accounts of first-hand experiences with spiritual or religious powers he established the Religious Experience Research Centre that has remained at the forefront of the academic study of religious experiences. This book will take his work forward and show how to study religious and spiritual experiences in the 21st century. The Study of Religious Experience aims to show how a range of disciplines – including anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, theology, biblical studies and history – approach the topic religious experience, how this approach is applied and what contributions they make to the study of religious experience.

Introduction [+–] 1-10

Bettina E. Schmidt FREE

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Section One: Anthropoligical Approaches to the Study of Religion

1. How to Study Religious Experience: Historical and Methodological Reflections on the Study of the Paranormal [+–] 13-32

Fiona Bowie £17.50

University of Oxford

Fiona Bowie is a Research Associate in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford. She studied anthropology at the universities of Durham and Oxford, specialising in the anthropology of religion, with regional interests in Cameroon, and Wales. Fiona has taught at several universities in the UK and overseas, including the University of Wales, Bristol University, and the University of Virginia, in areas related to religion, gender, spirituality, kinship, ethnography and the afterlife. She is widely published, including recent chapters in The Study of Religious Experience (Equinox, 2016), Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from between the Worlds (Daily Grail Publishing 2014) and The Cambridge Companion to Miracles (CUP, 2011).

In this paper I will give a brief account of the role of experience in the study of religion, from E. B. Tylor and Andrew Lang in the Nineteenth Century to so-called ‘ontological turn’ in the Twenty First Century. I propose a form of cognitive, empathetic engagement as an ethnographic method that is well suited to the study of religious experience. In essence this implies openness to the other, critical awareness of one’s own perspective, and reluctance to move too quickly to explanation. It is consistent with aspects of phenomenological, dialogical and ontological ethnographic methods, as well as the anthropology of wonder, which has been used to bridge ethnographic and theological perspectives. I then use the study of the afterlife as an example of the ‘common core’ or ‘experiential hypothesis’ of religion, which brings us back to the key role of experience in the formation of religious ideas and practices.

2. Ethnological and Neurophenomenological Approaches to Religious Experiences [+–] 33-54

Michael Winkelman £17.50

Arizona State University

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A compelling aspect of religious experience is the similarity in the reports across people, time and cultures which suggest their bases in human nature. Cross-cultural research is a key tool for establishing these universals, as well as for determining the social differences in the manifestation of these phenomena (for example, the predominance of possession experiences in politically stratified societies). Biogenetic structural approaches help to identify the foundations for these experiences, placing them in the context of brain functions and the structures of consciousness. Neurophenomenological approaches that establish homologies of the structure and content of these phenomenological experiences with brain functions provide a basis for understanding the significance in relation to human nature. This paper provides: 1) a cross-cultural approach to religious experiences, noting both universals and social complexity differences in the manifestations of classic forms of religious experience; 2) a biogenetic approach to the alteration of consciousness associated with many religious experiences, characterizing them in relation to an integrative mode of consciousness in which the functions of ancient brain systems are elevated and integrated in consciousness; and 3) a neurophenomenological approach to religious experiences that characterizes some of the typical experiences in relationship to the activation and deactivation of specific brain systems. These approaches help to clarify why religious experiences are universal in terms of their relationship to innate aspects of brain function and the basic operations of consciousness.

Section Two: Methodological Challenges for the Study of Religious Experience

3. Fieldwork and Embodied Knowledge: Researching the Experiences of Spirit Mediums in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer [+–] 55-70

Emily Pierini £17.50

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

This chapter addresses the question of researching a particular kind of religious experience that arises from phenomena of spirit mediumship and possession. It discusses the implications of the ethnographic method, tackling particularly the engagement of the researcher’s body in the field as a methodological tool for approaching a practice that is grounded in embodied forms of encounter with the sacred. The mediums’ relationship with the sacred is hereby considered as something lived through on a bodily, sensorial and emotional dimension. The discussion draws upon the author’s fieldwork in the Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer in Brazil.

4. Cultural-Linguistic Constructivism and the Challenge of Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences [+–] 71-87

Gregory Shushan £17.50

Ian Ramsey Centre, Oxford University

Ostensibly documentary accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) are found in a variety of texts around the world: in religious literature, historical documents, and reports of ethnographers, missionaries and explorers. Despite local phenomenological differences, there is an essential thematic and structural continuity to the accounts cross-culturally. Furthermore, NDEs have a cross-culturally stable physical context (i.e., the individual is commonly near death), and basic interpretation (what happens when we die). Because beliefs in souls and life after death are commonly considered ‘religious,’ this has important implications for currently dominating postmodernist-influenced paradigms which state that because all religions are culturally unique and all experience is culturally-linguistically generated, there can be no such thing as a pan-human ‘religious experience’ type.

5. Provincializing Religious Experience; Methodological Challenges to the Study of Religious Experiences in Brazil [+–] 88-104

Bettina E. Schmidt £17.50

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Religious experience is a vague category that is used to describe and categorise experiences of very different types. Quite often people experiencing it do not categorize their experience as religious but prefer terms such as spiritual or even normal. They fear that labelling it as ‘religious’ experience would discriminate their experience as a kind of ‘abnormal’ activity. This was also the case in my research about spirit possession and trance in Brazil. Often spirit possession is even regarded by the community as technique, means of communication between the world of spirits and the world of humans with the person embodying the spirit described as “medium” that enables the communication. Referring to my fieldwork experience in Brazil I will discuss in my paper the challenges of the study of religious experience.

Section Three: Theological and Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Religious Experience

6. Immediate Revelation or the Basest Idolatry? Theology and Religious Experience [+–] 105-124

Robert Pope £17.50

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

In this paper, we will explore theology’s ambivalence towards religious experience as a ‘particular set of distinguishable experiences’. It will consider the fact that ‘experience’ of some sort or another has been crucial in Christian history, but that this has not necessarily been the primary consideration in the formation of systematic theology. Augustine will be considered as an example of this, demonstrating that the reading of Augustine’s experiences has been skewed by William James’s analysis of religious experience and that alternative readings are possible. We will then move to epistemological considerations which might suggest how religious experience can contribute to theological discussion before looking at a particular example from the work of Catherine Barsotti who claimed to have had a formative religious experience while watching a film.

7. An Argument from Religious Experience: Origins and Revelations [+–] 125-134

Tristan Nash £17.50

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

In this paper I will draw a distinction between two different types of religious experience. Firstly, those experiences that it could be said are part of our everyday framework of beliefs, as fundamental as our beliefs in the external world or the existence of other minds. Then there are those religious experiences that are extraordinary; those experiences that are, in part, defined as religious experiences by the manner in which they are distinct from our everyday experiences. It is this second group of religious experiences that will be the focus. The extraordinary nature of these beliefs often, and quite reasonably, lead people to look for the causes of these experiences, often resulting in competing causal explanations of either a divine or biochemical nature. However, by drawing comparisons with other profound experiences in the field of ethics and scientific discovery, I will argue that focusing solely on causal explanations is to fail to grasp much of what is important about these experiences. I will argue that what is truly significant about religious experiences is not what causes them, but what they reveal.

Section Four: Reflections on Types of Religious Experience

8. Text and Experience: Reflections on ‘Seeing’ in the Gospel of John [+–] 135-150

Catrin H. Williams £17.50

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

The paper will consider some of the ways in which the concept of ‘religious experience’ has been used in recent New Testament scholarship. It will also examine the challenges and opportunities posed by attempts to uncover the experiential dimensions of the beliefs and practices of early Christian communities.

9. Music as Spiritual Experience [+–] 151-159

June Boyce-Tillman £17.50

University of Winchester

This chapter will examine the development of the area of spirituality over the twentieth century and especially last twenty years. It will chart the origin of the term in Nietzsche’s assertion of the death of God through the development of a perennial philosophy and common core to spiritual experience. It will interrogate the complexity of the interrelationship between religion and spirituality and how the interface between these and culture challenges the sacred and secular divide. It draws on this history to list the characteristics of the spiritual experience grouping these under headings – Metaphysical, Narrative, Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, InterGaian and Extrapersonal. It sees the qualities as being subjugated within western culture and examines their place in philosophies of the arts (drawing on Dewey, Turner, Beattie and DeBotton). It will interrogate the fluid nature of the metaphysical and the uncoupling of this from the narratives of the great faiths, offering the possibility of a religionless spirituality that is reflected in music. Finally it sees the development of a model that seeks to embraces these and gives a deeper understanding of the relationship between music and spirituality. The chapter will be illustrated by accounts of the spiritual experience that involve music. .

10. Is it Possible to Have a ‘Religious Experience’ in Cyberspace? [+–] 160-168

Gary Bunt £17.50

University of Wales, Lampeter

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Gary R. Bunt: Director of MA Islamic Studies & Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies

The internet, within and between its different elements and forms, holds transformative potential for religions, in terms of representation, adherent networking, and application as a proselytizing tool. As access intensifies and technology becomes cheaper, those well placed in the information marketplace are reaping potential ‘benefits’ of access. Even the most reluctant or techno phobic agents of diverse forms of religious belief and expression in diverse cultures have found a place online. Web content and interaction can, according to some observers, contribute to increases in participation within diverse religiously oriented activities generated and represented online. The extent to which this translates into affiliation and membership, if relevant, is open to question. The spiritual supermarket now has an online checkout, where surfers may shop for the religious concepts and artefacts – and perhaps ‘experiences’ – that appeal to them. As much as being an agent of change, religious expression on the internet may also engender conformity and tradition, especially within specific micro-areas of religious interests, driven by notions of membership. This presentation explores these issues, asking what the implications of forms of ‘religious experience’ in cyberspace are (if any), and how religions are adjusting to digital media?

End Matter

Bibliography [+–] 169-188

Bettina E. Schmidt FREE

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Index [+–] 189-197

Bettina E. Schmidt FREE

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Reviews

A rich and welcome addition to the literature which has something for anyone with a serious interest in this area of investigation.
Professor Peggy Morgan, Mansfield College, University of Oxford

Altogether, this is a most useful publication and a valuable addition to the literature. The book illustrates very well the signal importance of approaching the phenomenon of religious experience from a variety of disciplinary methods and insights. It deserves to be widely read.
De Numine

This book is absolutely ideal for experienced researchers or writers who seek a scholarly interpretation on how the study of religious experience has been incorporated into fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, theology, and religion.
Reading Religion

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