Speaker
Description
In the past 3 years, many ethnographers of ecologically-inflected wellness movements have seen an
unprecedented rise in what Ward and Voas (2011) first termed ‘conspirituality’. Conspirituality is
both coherent with and a departure from the history of esotericism in combining fears of a
corrupted social present, and a firm belief in the inevitability of forthcoming ecological and social
revolution. Existing academic literature mostly focuses on the psychological aspects of conspiracy
culture, but it is joined by important work by religious studies scholars concerning the epistemic
power relations that designate marginalised knowledge as ‘conspiracy’ (Robertson 2022) .
Missing from this picture so far is the felt religiosity of discomfort and regulation at the heart of
body-based practices, often expressed as contagion, disharmony, coherence and resolution. The
exercise of meaning-making involved in the practice of both seekership and conspirituality can be
understood as the search for an ontology that recognises and soothes somatic discomfort. At times
of stress, this search for self-regulation can lead already somatically-anxious individuals to reify
physical intimacy at the expense of the sociopolitical good of public health interventions.
This paper is a first attempt to complete the interdisciplinary links between Douglas (2003) and
Bubandt and Willerslev (2015) , between Durkheim (Lindholm 2012) , Barkun (2015) and Porges
(2007) . In other words, by employing the epistemic capital of recent insights in neuroscience and
religious studies, might we be able to co-construct a framework capable of understanding, and even
predicting, socially-contagious responses to the apparently unending waves of global ecological
stress?
Barkun, Michael. 2015. 'Conspiracy theories as stigmatized knowledge', Diogenes (English ed.), 62:
114-20.
Bubandt, Nils, and Rane Willerslev. 2015. 'The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the
Magic of Alterity', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57: 5-34.
Douglas, Mary. 2003. Purity and danger : an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo (Routledge:
London ;).
Lindholm, Charles. 2012. '“What is Bread?” The Anthropology of Belief: WHAT IS BREAD?', Ethos
(Berkeley, Calif.), 40: 341-57.
Porges, Stephen W. 2007. 'The polyvagal perspective', Biological Psychology, 74: 116-43.
Robertson, David G. 2022. 'Crippled Epistemologies: Conspiracy Theories, Religion, and Knowledge',
Social Research: An International Quarterly, 89: 651-77.
Ward, Charlotte, and David Voas. 2011. 'The Emergence of Conspirituality', Journal of Contemporary
Religion, 26: 103-21.
