Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches

The study of contemporary spirituality has been dismissed by many social scientists. A vast literature exists that describes the practitioners' point of view, mostly written by researchers who are part of or sympathetic to the groups they describe. This literature often reproduces the discourse of self-empowerment commonly found in contemporary spirituality. A smaller portion of literature on contemporary spirituality consists of the polemical accounts of the rise of contemporary spirituality, 'exposing' this development as part of the ways in which the capitalist system creates docile agents. This book navigates between these two poles and points out the complex ways gender and power are performed in a context that explicitly wants to free itself from the constraining workings of power and traditional gender roles associated with institutionalized religion, developing concepts and theoretical insights that can give new direction and focus to the social scientific study of contemporary spiritualities. Contemporary distinctions between religion and spirituality can often be traced to rebellion against hierarchical institutions with biases towards women and minorities that constrain individual freedom. This opposition is carefully addressed in this volume, with greater attention paid to gender and power in the context of contemporary spirituality and how these relate to the distinction between religion and spirituality.