Abstract:

The category of experience has recently become a point of contention in the study of religion. According to a tradition that reaches from Schleiermacher to Eliade and beyond, the discipline's primary objective is to reach a sound understanding of religious experience in its various forms. For this tradition, the meaning of religion is to be found in the consciousness of the religious subject. Nowadays, however, many scholars say that experience is too subjective--and thus too private--to serve as a focal point for academic inquiry. We are advised to focus instead on bodies, social practices, and power. The debate over this proposal appears to present us with a stark choice: either we take religion to be a vessel of experience or a system of power. This dissertation argues that there is no need to make this choice and many reasons to resist it. Religion is individual and social, experiential and practical. It has to do with meaning and with power. Its practices give rise to fleeting episodes of great intensity and to lasting dispositions and habits. These in turn sometimes affect the form and content of the practices. They also subject participants to operations of power, influencing the kinds of people they become and the sorts of roles they can occupy. To understand religion fully, one needs to illumine the interplay among all of these elements, one of which, but only one of which, is the intense experiential episode. How, then, can we make the inherently subjective realm of experience an object of scholarly investigation? By breaking with Cartesian assumptions about what experiences are. Some historians and ethnographers are already showing how this can be done. Now the methodologists can follow suit.