Mahatma Gandhi, Neoliberalism, and the Bourgeois Study of Spirituality
In psychological literature, the concept of spirituality is typically defined as something private, internal and experiential that includes meaning-making, sacred values, connectedness, and/or transcendence. Thus, spirituality is distinct from social, economic, and political spheres of human life. M...
| Authors: | ; |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Brill
2020
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| In: |
Research in the social scientific study of religion
Year: 2020, Volume: 31, Pages: 43-62 |
| Further subjects: | B
Cultural sciences
B Religious sociology B Social sciences B Religionspsycholigie B Religionswissenschaften B Religion & Gesellschaft B Gender studies |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In psychological literature, the concept of spirituality is typically defined as something private, internal and experiential that includes meaning-making, sacred values, connectedness, and/or transcendence. Thus, spirituality is distinct from social, economic, and political spheres of human life. Most scholars who concern themselves with spirituality assume that it is a universal phenomenon that is essentially the same everywhere. But the isolation of spirituality as a sphere of life that is separated from other spheres is not a universal feature of human history. Mahatma Gandhi, who argued that spirituality is associated with political activism and the struggle for social and economic justice, illustrates this point. Spirituality is a modern concept with a specific history and what counts as spirituality and what does not depend on different configurations of power. In this paper, we explore why a category as amorphous and indeterminate as spirituality has maintained such a currency in the literature of the psychology of religion. We argue that the category of spirituality is a sociopolitical management technique for reinforcing political quietism, which is necessary for the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo. |
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| Contains: | Enthalten in: Research in the social scientific study of religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/9789004443969_004 |