Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality

Ethnographic Approaches

Anna Fedele, Kim Knibbe, Anna Fedele, Kim Knibbe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135114527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Sexualidad y género en la religión

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.

1	Cultivating the Sacred
	Gender, Power and Ritualization in Goddess-Oriented Groups
	Åsa Trulsson

“I hope we are not creating a religion”, Kathy says.¹ “All known religions have been patriarchal”. In Kathy’s perception, a gathering of Goddessinspired individuals would be a preferred model for the growing spiritual community around Glastonbury, her hometown and the locus for her creative vision. Each summer, she co-hosts a large festival called the Glastonbury Goddess Conference, where hundreds of women and men gather to celebrate the Goddess through artwork, discussions, workshops and, above all, ceremony. Moreover, Kathy is the author of several well-read books on the Goddess, a workshop organizer and a healer. She is also a key figure in establishing what might be called a Glastonbury Goddess tradition, which consists of eight consecutive seasonal celebrations and a particular ritual structure to establish sacred space. The Goddess community recently opened a dedicated place of worship and activities are expanding to include a so-called women’s moon lodge, different workshops and regular healing ceremonies. Except for the Goddess Conference, the three-year-long training of priests and priestesses of Avalon is probably the most well-known feature of the Glastonbury Goddess tradition. Kathy is its founder and teacher and further reserves the right to choose intuitively who may best benefit from taking part in the training. According to Kathy, the priestess training is a path of devotion and dedicated practice. At the heart is learning to create ceremony, which Kathy defines as a space for the divine to manifest and interact. Creating such a space, Kathy claims, is not about following prescribed rules or manipulating certain symbols, but a craft that has to be learned in practice—especially if the ceremony involves other people. One has to be trained properly.

The following pages concern interaction in Goddess-oriented groups and highlight negotiations of gender, power and authority through the lens of ritual or, more precisely, ritualized practice. The women participating in these groups regularly adhere to an egalitarian and feminist ethos and they shun the label religion, which they associate with hierarchy, patriarchy and domination. However, with regards to power and authority, only a brief encounter with the fields in question paints a more complex picture. In fact, there are several authorities at work. Kathy, for instance, is known to be an authority of the Goddess; she is the long-term teacher of hundreds of people, and she has even encoded several of the practices that constitute the core of the priestess training, the Goddess Conference and the Goddess Temple. Hence, a more critical examination of the women’s discourse on the distinction between what they regard as patriarchal religion and their own spirituality is called for.

According to sociologist Matthew Wood, such an assessment is exactly what has been lacking in academic studies of contemporary spirituality. As noted by Wood, research about contemporary spirituality, whether termed New Age spirituality, subjective spirituality, paganism, Goddess-worship or anything else, makes limited use of ethnographic material, but instead focuses either on written media or the discourses of the participants. The consequence has been the adoption of different folk-models, among which the concept of self-spirituality as the guiding principle for contemporary spirituality has been particularly authoritative.² The observation corresponds to the central question posed in this volume: could the scholarly thesis on internal authority, the sacralization of self or subjective turn merely be a reproduction of the internal discourses of contemporary spirituality, thus leaving power and authority unexamined? Another consequence is that religious practice, including rituals, is under-communicated and at worst disregarded.³ From a scholarly perspective, ritual action has long been associated with the constitution and negotiation of power and authority.⁴ However, scholars commonly understand ritual as a collective mode of action that is prescribed by an external tradition,⁵ which would perhaps seem contradictory within the guiding theorems of self-spirituality and self-authority. In short, ritual would have a limited role in religion “organized in terms of what is taken to be the authority of the self”.⁶ In the same line of thought, the practices of so-called spiritual seekers might also be regarded as something less than religious—unfocused, undisciplined or a constant search for private peak experiences.⁷

In the subsequent pages, I will take a different approach and regard contemporary spirituality from a practice-oriented perspective. Firstly, I regard practices less in terms of semantic representation, symbolization and display, but rather as belonging to the realm of the body.⁸ Further, drawing on Saba Mahmood’s theories on the strategic use of practice in the formation of the self, as well as Catherine Bell’s perspective of ritualization as a strategic process, I will discuss both the use of practice and the constitution of power in practice.

THE FIELD SITES

In 2000, I made my first visit to the Goddess Conference in Glastonbury. The event was chaotic and intense, featuring large collective ceremonies, art exhibitions and numerous talks, workshops and performances. The conveners were well-known and not-so-well-known contributors to the Goddess movement, the Pagan milieu and so-called earth-centered spiritualities in England and internationally. The different topics were quite diverse, presenting knowledge and practices from assorted fields such as astrology, Goddess archaeology and shamanism, as well exploring subjects such as sexuality, sacred dancing, singing and much more. The focus was certainly on female imagery, the Goddess and women’s experiences, but aside from this, a wide array of beliefs, ideas and discourses were presented. The women then ventured into the streets to enjoy and participate in the bustling religious environment that is contemporary Glastonbury.⁹ While I struggled to achieve coherence, deduce an underlying logic or systematic worldview behind these sprawling features, the inconsistency seemed to disturb the other participants considerably less. They simply shared, explored and evaluated the individual contributions. Also, and perhaps even more intriguing, they followed the different presenters to other contexts or brought new ideas home to already existing groups.

During the following years, my fieldwork followed the rhythm of the participants at the Goddess Conference. It became increasingly multi-sited, as the participants moved between different groups and contexts, often traversing regional and national borders.¹⁰ I participated in several groups of different sizes and organization, ranging from large festivals and publicly advertised workshops to intimate and more regular settings that all featured intense experimentation with different forms of practice. The groups would perhaps seem to have little in common, except for the fact that the same women tended to show up in several of these groups and that there was a common emphasis on female deities and women’s experiences. Otherwise, organization, symbolic content and transmitted meaning seemed diverse and at times incompatible. Moreover, there was a wide variety of beliefs and discourses among the participants, and each woman could also take divergent positions at different times. The women were concerned neither with formulating a clear religious identity, such as Goddess worshipper, Pagan or Wiccan, nor with limiting their participation in different groups with regards to coherence between different beliefs or worldviews.¹¹ Furthermore, correct belief was never a prerequisite for joining any ceremonies, festivals and workshops, but rather women claimed to disband beliefs when participating in a specific ceremony or practice.

Scholars frequently note the fluid character of contemporary spirituality. Yet, while recognizing these features, scholars often promote unity and discrete categorization, most notably by systematizing and extracting a common belief system,¹² or giving primacy to discourses on self-authority and individualism among participants.¹³ As Wood argues, little analytical attention is given to how themes of discourse and authority are played out in actual ethnographic contexts.¹⁴

During my fieldwork, it became increasingly difficult and moreover meaningless to try to categorize the gatherings as New Age, Pagan or even Goddess spirituality, as none of these categorizations seemed adequate. Anna, for instance, organizes workshops with drumming and dancing from the Italian regions of Calabria and Apulia. Her main spiritual inspiration is the Madonna and most of her teachers come from the Catholic south of Italy. Nevertheless, she is also initiated to a Sufi order in New York, performs ceremonies associated with Brazilian Candomblé and makes extensive use of various practices of so-called alternative healing. The issue becomes even more complex when regarding the participants at Anna’s workshop, who are often relatively new to the practices she teaches and also hold quite diverse creeds. Their religious identity is not compromised by either their attendance at the workshop or their participation in the ritual proceedings. Of course, it might be argued that Anna and the participants follow their own inner authority rather than adhering to specific religious traditions, or interpret the different practices to suit their own personal motivations or desires. When pressed with questions on why and how, they might also rationalize their practices in this way. However, more often such questions render vague answers or none at all, with respondents regarding them as intriguing, odd or irrelevant. Moreover, when it came to ritualized practice, people participated fully and claimed to abandon any preconceptions. It would, therefore, be reasonable to suggest that the rationale for eclecticism is located in the realm of practice rather than on a level of belief and reflexive rationalization.

Several scholars emphasize that the realm of a systematized and coherent beliefs system is often a scholarly pursuit rather than a lived, religious experience. Beliefs and intellectual systems have been the subject of research because of a theological or even confessional understanding of religion, where the Protestant emphasis on belief has become normative in establishing essential traits of religious life.¹⁵ Still, local religious life outside theological and scholarly discourse is rarely “a seamless whole but consists of diverse and sometimes discordant strands”.¹⁶ Instead, these scholars argue that religious life should be located in specific contexts of interaction, which may or may not harmonize on a logical level, but where meaning and power are continuously negotiated primarily through the means of practice.¹⁷ In a similar vein, I argue that there are several benefits in abandoning the focus on classification and systematization with regards to the different settings present in my fieldwork—whether referred to as Pagan, New Age or Goddess spirituality by the protagonists or anybody else—and regarding them as local fields of interaction and practice. People move between these fields and utilize the knowledge gained as a repertoire depending on circumstances, moods and needs.¹⁸ The women’s spirituality thus lacks systematic character, but this does not automatically mean that it should be conceptualized as operating according to inherently different parameters than religious life in other local contexts that thrive outside the confines of normative theological exegesis or scholarly classification. This approach also opens for a more processual view on religion, where it is regarded less in terms of a fully fledged worldview or stable system beyond the participants and practices at hand, but is instead constantly formed, negotiated and reworked in different fields of interaction. In Asad’s words, it is about “constructing religion in the world (not the mind), interpreting true meanings, excluding some utterances and practices and including others”.¹⁹ In this line of argument, the focus is not on any substantive definition of what is said or done, but rather how this is marked and authorized as spiritual. Thus, although the contexts in my fieldwork might seem kaleidoscopic on the level of beliefs, the fields become sites where not only a culturally defined sense of...