Wouter Hanegraaff has proposed that we rethink the study of religion as the study of “imaginative formations.” Much of my research has focused on something like that, or at least on the creative role of imagination in mediating the ways people come to live in the world, shape that world, and contest it among each other.
My recent review essay on the “religious imagination” covers several books that help us think through the relationships between religious creativity, imagination, and what Jacques Ranciere has called the “distribution of the sensible.” The books include T. M. Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others; Jeffrey Kripal’s The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge and Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion; Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei’s The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World; David Morgan’s Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment; Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters; and Jack Miles’s Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story.
You can read a pre-publication version of my paper here, or find the whole issue of this journal — a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture on the “‘spiritualization’ of ecology” — at the journal’s web site. (The journal is paywalled by its publisher, so if you’re at an academic institution that doesn’t subscribe to it, you can urge your library to do that. Full disclosure: I’m an associate editor of the journal.)
“With all the trends that mark the current study of religion—postsecularism, decolonization, the affective and sensorial turns, ‘lived’ and ‘everyday religion’, queer theory, and all manner of new materialisms and ontological entanglements—one thing (or two) that can hardly remain untouched is the way in which religion is imagined, and the way in which imagination is itself taken to be a central feature of religion.”
thanks for making yer article OA, when you say “experience of gods or spirits” how do you come to separate gods or spirits out from experience, are you equating imagination to something like a sense (vision, touch, etc)?
Do you mean me, or Luhrmann (whose writing I’m discussing there)? She is arguing (more or less) that the experience of gods or spirits takes place “in the head,” whereas I am arguing that it takes place in the world (the “embodied, extended, embedded, enactive, affective, and imaginal” cognition).
So I wouldn’t say I am equating imagination to “a sense.” Rather, I would say that imagination — by which I mean something like the capacity to build images (of “real” things and of “imagined” things) — takes place in and through *all* of the senses. The world as experienced is always the world as imagined, i.e., the world as built up of images (which of course aren’t just visual, but are multi-sensorial).
Gosetti-Ferencei’s book, which I discuss in that article, probably comes closest to my own definition of imagination.
I believe I’m quoting yer own words there not Tonya’s, I imagine that she would agree that just as Noe or Evans would say that “dance” isn’t literally in the head, that prayers/etc are enacted in the world, but your grammar suggests that gods or spirits exist apart from our doings in their names/images/etc, that they are somehow existing as actors in the world that we might experience, is that right and if so how do they exist?
thanks
That’s a good question, dmf. I would say that gods and spirits DO exist apart from our doings in that they are networked enactments that involve more than just human activities. Just as capitalism or authoritarian politics exist not only in people’s heads and in our behaviors, but also in architecture, urban design, clothing styles, the design of shopping malls and highways, shipping routes, borders, et al, so do religious entities exist in similar things (e.g., temple architecture, pilgrimage routes, icons and sculptures, the design of forest trails and gardens, et al.). All of these entail networked enactments involving humans and nonhumans, so once they are in place, they take on their own path-dependencies and autonomous realities. To the extent that gods and spirits also involve natural forces (volcanoes, underground water streams, air currents, seasonal weather cycles, et al.), they exist “as actors in the world” and “apart from our doings.” They are not just social constructions but relational co-constructions involve many actors, actants, entities, and forces/processes.
Thanks Adrian, this is really useful (and, as always, I very much appreciate these blog posts). I’m reviving an undergraduate module that I haven’t taught for a while next academic year on the Spiritual Revolution (alternative, pagan and new religions and spiritualities) and I was looking for ways to freshen it up. One obvious way was to expand materials on conspirituality (less David Icke and more QAnon, which you also posted on a few months ago), but expanding a session I did on religion as imagined now seems absolutely vital, and you have provided a number of new avenues/resources for going at this; with a couple now added to my Christmas list.
So, thanks very much.