Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches

Description

This book explores the entanglements of gender and power in spiritual practices and analyzes strategies used by spiritual practitioners to attain what to social scientists might seem an impossible goal: creating spiritual communities without creating gendered hierarchies. What strategies do people within these networks use to attain gender equality and gendered empowerment? How do they try to protect and develop individual freedom? How do gender and power nevertheless play a role? The chapters in this book together and separately demonstrate that, in order to understand contemporary spirituality, the analytical lenses of gender and power are essential. Furthermore, they show that it is not possible to make a clear distinction between established religions and contemporary spirituality: the two sometimes overlap, and at other times spirituality distances itself from religion while reproducing some of its underlying interpretative frameworks. This book does not take the discourses of spiritual practitioners for granted, yet recognizes the reflexivity of spiritual practitioners and the reciprocal relationship between spirituality and disciplines such as anthropology. The ethnographic descriptions of lived spirituality included in this volume span a wide range of countries, from Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands to Mexico and Israel. Cover Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality 1 Cultivating the Sacred: Gender, Power and Ritualization in Goddess-Oriented Groups 2 Spirituality within Religion: Gendered Responses to a Greek ‘Spiritual Revolution’ 3 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership among Soka Gakkai Buddhists in Spain 4 The Power of Submission? Personal Growth and the Issue of Power among Umbanda Practitioners in Paris 5 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna: Gendered Power Strategies in Alternative Pilgrimages to Marian Shrines 6 From Crisis to Charisma: Redefining Hegemonic Ideas of Science, Freedom and Gender among Mediumistic Healers in Germany 7 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender in a Jewish Spiritual Renewal Community in Israel 8 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 9 Gender and Power: Brahma Kumaris Spirituality and Hinduism in Portugal 10 Obscuring the Role of Power and Gender in Contemporary Spiritualities 11 In Search of Spirituality in Northeastern Mexico: Religious Change and Masculinity among Addicts in Recovery Bibliography Contributors Index