[Nuria Palmerín Singenberger]

Dear all

Last week’s study group was very interesting and I wanted to follow up with some reflections regarding the discussion in our break out room about the idea of “specialness” of religious experiences / experiences deemed religious. I clearly remember having read a paper that briefly mentions an anthropologist’s account of discussing the deads’ need for food in the afterlife with people from non-Western cultures and that they, in spite of giving food offerings to their dead, make a clear distinction between this and the biological need of eating. I couldn’t find the paper itself but I did some research and the excerpt of this text also points to the same notion:

Bering, Jesse. (2002). “Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Agents’ Minds: The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs as Phenomenological Boundary.” Journal of Cognition and Culture. 2. 289-290. 10.1163/15685370260441008.

https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/InstituteofCognitionCulture/FileUploadPage/Filetoupload,90244,en.pdf

I believe that religious experiences can be deemed as special in the sense that even if they become day-to-day occurrences for some people, they remain special within the population. They might be very normal for religious specialists, but I can’t think of a general population in which everyone or a significant number of people is either in a constant state of higher consciousness or in constant contact with spirits. Depending on the culture (or even subculture) these things might be normalised and people might report it more, but they are still special to some degree. I also liked how Taves’ sees these things on a spectrum. I do think that there is a huge difference between, say pareidolia (seeing images in objects, the clouds, your coffee…) and, say, reaching an altered state of consciousness or talking to spirits that respond. I personally know people with both kinds of experiences. In my personal, and non-scholarly articulated view, the people I knew who were very obsessed with finding faces in objects (or, for instance, finding orbs with their old phone camera), were in desperate search of something special, although the orbs on their phone could be explained away rationally quite easily. An experience might become more special, the more it resists rational explanation and the more complex the rational explanation for it would have to become. This should hold true to some degree even for non-Western cultures, because I do believe that we as humans have some rational base assumptions about how the world works that hold true everywhere (like the fact that a corpse does not need food and that a normal corpse will not wake up, neither to be resurrected nor to haunt the living – if a corpse did such a thing it would be extremely special and serve as the basis for countless stories or even religions…). I believe it is important to acknowledge this, because I do feel that portraying non-Western cultures as somehow “more spiritual” is just the other side of the coin that says that they are “primitive” and “irrational”. Furthermore, it favours the view that the “West” only thinks along the lines of Protestantism and atheism in spite of its’ rich cultural history of mysticism and (Western) Esotericism and the fact that regular people don’t necessarily think the way the cultural elite would like them to.

Anyhow, apologies for the long text, I got carried away.😅

[AmaNesciri]

Hi,

I wanted to share a video where Dr. Ann Taves discusses some research on how non-believers make sense of their nonordinary experiences. Some interesting points about survey design as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfe11a-jgXw

[Dr Angela Puca]

I found both Nuria’s and AmaNesciri’s reflections deeply stimulating, particularly in relation to how Taves’ notion of critical naturalism allows us to navigate the space between explanatory reduction and phenomenological attentiveness. One of the strengths of Taves’ framework, as I see it, lies in how it resists the dichotomy between “believers” and “non-believers,” or between “rational” and “irrational,” by foregrounding ascription as an active process through which experiences acquire “specialness.” What is significant, therefore, is not whether an experience is objectively supernatural or not, but how and why it becomes deemed special within a particular interpretive community.

Nuria’s comments on universality and the human base assumptions about reality raise an important tension in Taves’ work: the balance between a cognitive-evolutionary substrate and the radical variability of cultural interpretation. While it may be true that all humans share certain intuitions about life, death, and agency, Taves’ critical naturalism invites us to trace how these intuitions become differently elaborated through systems of meaning. In this sense, experiences of the special emerge at the intersection of universal cognitive tendencies and historically situated modes of valuation.

I also appreciated the caution against exoticising non-Western traditions as inherently more spiritual. This point resonates with Taves’ methodological proposal to approach religious experiences as natural phenomena without collapsing their emic significance into a purely etic explanatory framework. Doing so enables a symmetrical anthropology, where mysticism, mediumship, and visionary states within Western esotericism or vernacular Christianity can be studied with the same epistemological respect afforded to other cultural contexts.

Finally, I find it productive to consider Taves’ spectrum of experiences, from pareidolia to mediumistic communication, as not simply degrees of specialness but as differing configurations of interpretive labour. Some experiences demand more negotiation between the ordinary and the extraordinary, while others are seamlessly integrated into an individual’s ontological repertoire. What counts as resisting rational explanation is, after all, itself historically and socially variable.

[Alessandra Salerno]

Thank you all for your fantastic reflections and suggestions!
What stood out to me most in our first discussion is how Taves’ approach helps us think about spiritual and magical experiences as part of broader, “natural” mechanisms of human existence. In particular, her notion of the magical as something to which people ascribe specialness points to a pan-human, evolutionary cognitive mechanism—one that allows us to ascribe salience to certain things rather than others in order to organize our lives and actions in meaningful ways. I find this really interesting (though I remain unconvinced by Taves’s suggestion that this cognitive mechanism might be rooted specifically in the development of basic mother–infant sociality). Thinking about the magical in terms of how people attribute specialness to things allows us to connect the study of magic with a much wider range of human practices and experiences. This perspective breaks down the boundaries that have often separated the study of magic and religion from other fields and opens the door to combining approaches – including the scientific. Such an interdisciplinary reorientation could not only deepen our understanding of “magic” but also shed light on larger questions concerning the relationship between the dimension of human experience and the (co)constitution of world(view)s.

That said, I was struck by how little the concept of specialness seemed to resonate with practitioners’ own understandings. In this regard, one of Andrew’s points particularly made me think. While Taves’ naturalistic model presupposes that individuals internalize interpretive frameworks (such as the “magical”) —either top-down of bottom-up— and project these onto their experiences Andrew emphasized a dimension that Taves’s account perhaps underplays: the moral and agentive character of human beings as capable of consciously choosing which framework to apply in order to orient their action. This made me wonder whether Taves’ framework presupposes an overly linear understanding of how meaning and experience operate—and whether it might be precisely in that friction that human will and agentive power take place.

[SEAN]

One thing I’ve noticed in the reading, among many, is the tendency to use words like “suggests” and “may” as in “may mean something.” I would conclude this means the things she says are things to think about but not rooted in anything like objective factuality. It is a naturalistic approach that seems frequently etic in perspective. I wonder how it may be limited in the modernist paradigm where thousands of years ago and still, in some places, the sacred was everywhere and in everything and religion was not a concept because it was so integral to life. I suppose there were certain limitations in ancient nation states, like temples that restricted entry only to the few initiated people or divinization spells limited only to a few powerful people, but this was fundamentally political (which would be an interesting way to analyze “the specialness” of things). This could be applied to terms like anomalous, ideal and absolute, as well. One could argue that religious, sacred or special were the norm in very ancient cultures and some current ones and it is the cultural changes since then that have made the religious and sacred “special.”
Some comments really challenged my sensibilities, like the statement on page 16 that ‘the sacred is that which is set apart and forbidden. As such it is purely relational and has no essential content of its own. “The sacred is simply what is deemed sacred by any group.”’
Also, the definition of what has agency and how that was arrived at.
Also, as Dr. Puca discussed in her lecture on if magic can be studied by science, I wonder if many of the hypotheses Taves wishes to test and the methods used would be fraught with the same limitations of interpretation through lenses of psychological, personal and cultural influence that confound the general ontology of any conclusions.
And that is the first 12 pages of chapter 1, so I’ll leave it there. My comments are not meant to be critical, but more investigative.

• Cette réponse a été modifiée Il y a 3 semaines par  SEAN.

[SEAN]

Also, to add to the idea of very ancient religion and its integration into everyday life, one of Taves’ central goals is a critique of the sui generis theory of religious experience, and I would agree with her (although divergently) that religion
is not unique among human behaviors and can be accounted for using the research methods and/or explanatory principles that are applied to human
behavior more generally, because it was once not so unique among human behaviors but has become so. I think this shift in the “uniqueness” of religious experience would be an interesting aspect of her own line of inquiry. Her own path and goals of enlightenment, as it were.

[Alessandra Salerno]

Your reflections have given me a lot to think about, Sean, and I apologize if I take your ideas in other directions. Regarding your point about the integration of religion/magic into the ordinary in the past, it made me wonder if, in fact, Taves’ idea that human cognition naturally functions by applying a qualitative distinction (i.e. specialness) to certain events and dimensions of life does not support the conclusion that the religious/magical is actually a natural part of humanity, whose content may change over time but which will never disappear as a way of relating to the world because it is an integral part of our existential structure. In light of this, theories of secularization, according to which magical and religious thinking will sooner or later be completely replaced by scientific one, would have no basis (as we have already started to see in the current century), but rather we should study what new content, such as perhaps science itself, is being reinterpreted as special in our era and therefore approached with a “special/religious” cognitive structure. Taken to the extreme, we could say that for Taves herself, science is ‘special’ in how she uses it, with the due differences, to develop considerations of ‘non-ordinary’ judgement but of ‘higher value’.

By aligning the ontology of science and magic or religion in this way, who would actually have a claim on each other?

• Cette réponse a été modifiée Il y a 2 semaines, 3 jours par  Alessandra Salerno.

[SEAN]

These are all very interesting questions and no apologies necessary, Alessandra. With a doctorate in physical sciences, I was also deeply fascinated by learning about how the mysterious, “invisible” worlds in chemistry and physics work and it still can be fascinating to consider. I think a possible question regarding a “scientistic-like” culture vs let’s say “animistic-like” culture and ideas of ordinary and special, is if it can be better defined what is meant by ordinary or special. The definition of special in Tave’s book and articles appears to include non-human, invisible beings with agency, “inanimate” objects with agency (trees, mountains, lakes, crystals, etc.), and inanimate objects without agency which can alter ones circumstances just by existing (cross, four-leaf-clover, horse-shoe, etc.). She adds to these non-religious absolutes, like “Beauty” with a capital “B.” However, Taves focuses in on very evocative cases involving unusual physiological symptoms, states of consciousness and waking visions that I would guess would be regarded as special and unique in almost any culture or spiritual disposition. On the other hand, everyday events or sometimes unusual events like non-extreme dreams, storms, earthquakes, talismans, etc., would likely be viewed differently by most people depending on which of these two cultures they were in. For an absolute something like “Beauty”, it is hard for me to say. I think science could fall into the specialness level with most absolutes, although I wonder how one’s belief in ‘the involvement of more powerful agencies at work’ vs ‘transcendent concepts’ affects one’s perspective. You could add to this how absolute their belief is in this absolute, with the same true for belief in religious experiences. However, I think any investigation of something so large in scale as “the mechanism of specialness with regard to cognition and culture” needs to not overcomplicate itself with every nuance or it will never get off the ground. If it is solid enough to provide rigorous scientific results, the nuances can be added bit by bit.
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I would agree with you that secularization will likely never completely replace religious and magical thinking with scientific thinking, in the common way of defining them (to set aside for now any view that magic and religion are sciences). I think it’s also true most people will strongly desire and seek special experiences in their lives and these may change in form. However, although we see many have changed to depend more exclusively on absolute concepts, including scientific thinking, and attribute less events to “special agencies”, many people continue to depend on more powerful agencies at work and “magic” abilities of objects.
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I’ll have to leave the last question about ontology for another time. Lunch hour is over.
Best regards.

[SEAN]

Hello again. Having gotten home and had a nap I’ve formed a response of sorts. I believe surveys show that people are very flexible in terms of the ontology and prefer to accept a mixture of the two ways of thinking, accepting the reality of scientific findings while allowing for the magical and/or religious to be behind and beyond these findings. Some minority of 10-40%, depending on the topic, will reject a magical/religious component and a similar percentage will reject the scientific explanation. Science has had virtually undeniable and unprecedented success in application to many areas of life, while the religious/magical address existential and experiential issues, among other things, for most people. Something else interesting in this is how the “absolutes” Tave’s discusses color one’s perceptions and interpretations of non-human agencies in various ways and, in turn, one’s self, such as what is acceptable, one’s own value or sense of connectedness and how this will affect their personal and sub-personal processing and actions. For instance, the preference of Plato and some of his predecessors for more noble and good divinities and rituals (whether they believed in them or not) vs those prevalently believed in at their times – and modern correlations.
Also, science seems to continue to show that genetics has a stronger influence on beliefs and behaviors than often recognized when factoring in cultural and experiential influences and personal agency. How do researchers correctly determine the correct proportion of these influences on the various levels involved in behaviors and experiential attributions and ascriptions?

[Alessandra Salerno]

Hi everyone,

Looking back at our last session, what’s standing out most to me is how bringing together such a wide range of perspectives is really revealing the limits of the theories and methods we’re studying—especially when we try to apply them to lived experiences coming from so many different standpoints.

For example, Jorge pointed out in relation to the mechanistic framework that experiences don’t always “work” in such a mechanical way, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, even when the same elements are present. Anna highlighted how the role of power dynamics tends to be somewhat obscured, which resonated with Sean’s comment about how we can actually know and account for the weight that cultural, biological, psychological, and personal factors play in experience.

Personally, what I find limiting is how these theories seem to reify a split between the mind—as a kind of computing engine processing and interpreting information—and an external reality that’s stripped of agency, and almost of existence on its own terms. This sense of separation and of the mind’s uniqueness in its operations feels hard to reconcile with emic perspectives that often describe experience in terms of unity and external agency.In a long jump of thoughts, this made me think of Aristotle—perhaps the first critical naturalist we remember in Western culture—who, in his own way, described the building blocks of human experience (through his theories of humors, elements, and cognitive processes via the inner senses…), yet placed them within a worldview where those same “building blocks” also operated in the forces of the cosmos. This allowed for a bilateral and unified understanding of interaction between humans and the world—something that seems closer to the operations behind the kinds of experiences we’re interested in. This made me think that perhaps for me the limiting issue with these theories might not lie so much in the how—the method, like the building-block approach or reverse engineering (as I said, in the end they are not that new in the history of pre-enlightenment natural philosophy)—but rather in their starting point: a worldview that doesn’t align with the one from which these experiences actually arise. It makes me wonder whether it’s not only possible but even desirable to develop theories and methods from outside the perspectives we’re trying to explain.

That said, I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on what you think is missing in the theories we’ve been studying and maybe we can even bring some of these questions up with Taves when we meet her.</div>

• Cette réponse a été modifiée Il y a 1 semaine, 3 jours par  Alessandra Salerno.
• Cette réponse a été modifiée Il y a 1 semaine, 3 jours par  Alessandra Salerno.