Healing, the Individual Search for Meaning, and Modernity

FINAL TEXT (as delivered 23 Sept, 2007) I have been asked to speak on “Healing, the Individual Search for Meaning, and Modernity”. This is a fascinating topic that connects with my own research on several levels. As some of you know, my first ethnographic fieldwork was an investigation of Sekai Kyusei-kyo, one of the 700 or so new religions founded in Japan in the 20 century – and a religion for which spiritual healing is of core importance. I have more recently been identified as a sociologist of religious individualism, and that in two senses. First, I have done quite a bit of work on the phenomenology of religious experience – that is to say, religion as it appears in the subjective consciousness of individuals. Second, I have written about radical Catholic activists, whose interior religious lives are so important that they will not let their own church speak for them in religious matters. Furthermore, my current intellectual project involves what is happening to religion in late modernity – a topic on which there are many opinions and few firm conclusions. With this work on spiritual healing, religious individuality, and the nature of late modernity, I seem to have written on all three aspects of my assigned title. Fortunately, I have some new things to say about these topics, and I have taken the opportunity of this seminar to develop my ideas about them. What I present to you today is thus new thinking, at least for me. It is therefore somewhat tentative. It is, however, formed enough to be worth presenting for your discussion. I must remind you, however, that I teach in a department of Sociology and Anthropology and I am trained in both disciplines. This predisposes me to identify and expose people’s cultural assumptions – including scholars’. There is a reason that cartoon anthropologists are so often portrayed bathing in native’s stewpots: people don’t like us because we disturb what they think sacred. If you are looking for someone to recite for you what you already think you know, then I’m the wrong guy. If, however, you want your sacred concepts dug up, turned over, and perhaps built into something more worthy, then I’ll try to serve. Let me take a moment to set a context for my remarks. The overall topic of this seminar is “the interface between spirituality and healing”. This sounds straightforward, until one examines the words a bit more closely. As one of my mentors used to say, some terms are “oblong blurs”: they have a meaning, but no one can quite say what that meaning is or identify the exact object to which the term refers. ‘Spirituality’ is one such blur. When we use