Building on the work of Karen McCarthy Brown, Robert Orsi, and her own previous work, Courtney Bender furthers the growing use of ethnography and auto-ethnography in religious history in this fine monograph, a study of spirituality in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She debunks the conventional wisdom that spirituality is an isolated, individual endeavor. On the contrary, she argues that these “new metaphysicals” are connected by a network of groups, leaders, and institutions as well as a common location and history with Harvard University, the Transcendentalist Club, and William James. She demonstrates how the “spiritual but not religious” share a genealogy of religious experience through language, institutions, bodies, time, and space.
Bender casts a wide ethnographic net. Her research involves four types of groups: (1) communities of faith, including Neo-Pagans, Swedenborgians, Vedanta, Spiritualists, Unity, and Theosophists; (2) alternative, complementary, and integrative healing, such as Reiki, acupuncture, homeopathy, and energy medicine; (3) psychology, including past life regression, astral travel, and shamanic healing; and (4) mystical arts, drumming, poetry, and spiritual belly dancing. Despite differences in theory and practice, Bender discovers “entanglements” that may seem disparate or contradictory to scholars that are experienced without tension by practitioners. Participants are united in concerns for scientific evidence, resonance with modernity, and authentic personal experience. They are often active in more than one group, support each other, and are legitimated through renting space and advertising in Protestant churches.
The book has several notable strengths. First, Bender is a skillful storyteller. She permits her subjects to describe their own experiences, often at length, never over-analyzing or re-interpreting them in ways they would not recognize. She clearly respects her subjects and their practices. Second, she is attentive to her own “entanglements” and maintains a sense of humor in the liminal space she occupies as participant-observer. In one memorable incident, as she explains her enjoyment of a film about the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, her metaphysical hearers wonder if she was a Russian noblewoman in a past life. Bender laughs in frustration at her inability to convey what she means without a spiritual interpretation. Third, she places her subjects' stories in the larger context of gendered, racial, and national themes. Based on Cambridge at least, it is hard to argue with her conclusion that “America emerges as mysticism, and as a mysticism that is not yet realized” (181).
However, the book's greatest strength may be its assertion that categories routinely used by historians and social scientists to study religion, that is, individual and social, religious and secular, practice and tradition, are not only unhelpful but may be deleterious in exploring spirituality. Bender argues these divisions are blurred in American spiritual life and probably always have been. As a result, scholars have missed opportunities for fruitful engagement and research in social and political implications of spiritual spaces and mystical aspects of secular ones. Bender concludes that spirituality is multi-faceted production that resists methodologies useful to scholars of organized religions. At best Bender's work will foster similar studies in other geographical locations and further refinement of her arguments of spirituality's relevance in postmodern and postreligious United States.
Some readers may be bewildered by the book's paradoxical plethora of ideas, groups, and practices. It may be dismissed by some as the narcissistic ranting of privileged Ivy League New Agers. Yet in questioning and blurring categories overused by scholars, it makes a significant contribution to historical and sociological studies of religion. To some it may seem like a visit to a strange exotic land; however, as a resident of often-dismissed, New Age Southern California, I found the book a useful map of a landscape similar to my own.
