Browsing by Subject "Secularity"

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of “religious doubt”, which has emerged in recent years as a pervasive concern in American Muslim communities and discourses. The dissertation takes a two-pronged approach: an analysis of American Muslim public discourses, and an ethnographic analysis of Muslims in Boston. Firstly, I analyze how the growing sense of a “crisis of faith”—and a framing of people’s ambivalence, uncertainty, and doctrinal dissent as a problem of “doubt”—can be traced to the convergence of American secularity and Muslim discursive constructions of “faith”. Secondly, through the narratives, reflections, and exchanges of my ethnographic interlocutors, I examine how faith and doubt are experienced and navigated by individuals. Through my attention to lived experience, I argue that there is a far more ambiguous relationship than has been generally assumed between two distinct senses or dimensions of “faith”: on the one hand, people’s mental conviction in authoritative doctrines; and on the other hand, a more general sense of religious commitment, as a moral-devotional relationship and aspiration. Standard assumptions about religion typically operate with a deeply intellectualist and reified model of religion that presumes a thoroughly heteronomous subject. Such models assume a linear movement in religious subjects, from mental conviction in the foundational claims of a religion, to assent in the myriad doctrines and precepts presumably demanded by the religion, to a commitment to live faithfully in accordance with these doctrines and precepts. What my ethnography ultimately highlights, however, is that people live out their sense of faith in a far more complex and messy fashion, such that their moral and devotional commitments to Islam do not so neatly line up with doctrinal affirmation in the way these linear models of religion assume. Finally, I argue that what is central to people’s navigation of faith is personal experience and experiential knowledge, which serve as the inescapable prism through which conviction, judgment, knowledge, and commitment are shaped.

This dissertation makes sense of New Age healing practices and the spiritual currents undergirding the increasingly popular landscape of alternative healthcare. To do so, it argues, we must first determine its material ontology – the conception of materiality that shapes how New Agers understand and interact with the world around them, especially as it pertains to healing the human body using metaphysical tools. As such, it uses archival research, film analysis, and ethnography in the San Francisco Bay Area to uncover the development, not of the New Age religiosity or spirituality per se, but of its material ontology. What emerges is the primacy of musings about virtual matter, things unseen but nevertheless real as they are felt, evoked, and experienced. Things such as quantum phenomena, code, digital content, cosmic energies, chakras, auras, and ancestral DNA resonances. Within these musings lies the close relationship between techno-scientific advancements and metaphysical pursuits, which is why this dissertation is structured around exploring how quantum physics, computing, and cybertechnologies shape the New Age experience. In the New Age material ontology, the microscopic, the digital, and the supernatural can cooperate and be willed to heal, since all belong to a realm of virtuality that interacts with the physical world. This is possible because virtual matter is just matter hidden from the ocular sense, and all matter is subject to human will. Methodologically, this dissertation centralizes the human diversity within the New Age with a focused case study of Iranian-American healers, whose prominent presence in the alternative healthcare landscape demonstrates the importance of including immigrant communities in studies of American religion and culture, the diversity of New Age spirituality, and the prominence of racialized bodies in a movement largely known for being post-racial, universal, and progressive. Iranians also highlight healing in terms of their various subjectivities (national, political, and racial) and existential ailments, adding “homeland” and “lineage” the repertoire of virtual matter as metaphysical limbs of the body. Ultimately, this research contributes to the study of American religions, the anthropology of the body, science and technology studies, and inter-disciplinary conversations about materiality and the human condition.