Irrupción de la postmodernidad en el ámbito espiritual. La red de prácticas y creencias 'New Age'

Identifier:  TDX:4472

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX4472

Authors:  Merigó Puig, Graciela

Abstract:
With this thesis I want to explain from anthropology, cognitive sociology and cultural studies, in a socio-historical framework that we could call postmodern, a series of tensions, dynamics and contradictions that arise in the field of knowledge and spirituality. This thesis deals specifically with the rise and growth of the neo-spiritual phenomenon known as New Age. Ultimately, the New Age represents a proposal to reorganize the Euro-Western symbolic-cognitive heritage through the blurring of the existing epistemological barriers between science and spirituality. This work of weakening the radical separation of the spiritual and scientific spheres, as well as the validation of unregulated forms of knowledge, can be understood as a result of the disorganizing effect of postmodernity. New Age actors create discourses marked by a holistic morality with which they defend that spiritual and subjective experiences are valid means to know. In the New Age, the idea of a personal search for answers to spiritual and transcendent questions in what they refer to as their own interior is recurrent. New Agers aspire to spiritual empowerment by denying the monopoly of the interpretation of religious and spiritual facts to traditional institutional intermediaries in Euro-Western societies. They want free and personal religious experiences. However, this apparent individualization of spiritual experience is sought and constructed collectively, with the support of the group. Through the analysis of the main frames of reference that nourish the New Age ideology, an attempt is made to explain the articulation of the plane of subjective and individual spiritual experiences with the utopian ambition of a great global social change.