Researchproject on Media, Religion and Spirituality

Presenters: Juan Carlos Henríquez and Isabela Corduneanu

Links

The davinci code
What the Bleep

Presentation

Phases of the research project

• 2005-2006: qualitative research focused on uses of the movie What the bleep do you (k)now?
• 2006-2007: The Da Vinci Code (book and movie) and The Pasion of Christ, plus products as documental movies in History Channel, Discovery Channel
• Present: Add the Internet Dimension: Second Life

Objectives of the research project

• Analyze the construction and exertion of the subjectivity in the narration/performance of the belief while using media consumptions .
• Secondary objectives: Analyze the behavior of the Operational Belief System and its components when consuming media products linked with pop-esotericism

Research Questions

• Main research question
  -How subjectivity is constructed and exerted while using media consumption in the narration/performance of believing?
• Secondary research questions
  -How do the three systems of the OBS coexist without annihilating each other?
  -What is the role of pop-esotericism in facilitating this coexistence?
  -Is it a new phenomenon that generates a new macro-structure or is it already present in pre-existent structures that were ignored so far in social science studies? This is, are new spiritualities revealing new structures of something that has been already there?
  -How does the Belief system relate to the postmodern context?
  -Which are the differences between “Beliefs” and “Believings”?
  -Who/How is, ultimately, a Believer?

Methodology and methods

• Qualitative
• Focus groups (19), discussion groups (18), Delphi groups (7) focused interviews (21), narrative interview(3), in depth interview (27), participant observation (3). 35 session for What the Bleep and 50 for The Da Vinci Code and The Pasion of the Christ
• Particants: 18 to 55 years old, higher education, middle to middle-upper class, urban area (inhabitants of Mexico City and Bogotá).
• (Inter)reflexive method of analysis

Concepts: Operational Belief System

Operational Belief System (OBS):

• Set of performances organized in systems that individuals use as a platform to “operate” transcendently their reality
• Comprises three sources: Inscribed, Ascribed, Acquired.
• Inscribed: the well organized explicit creed forms which are adhered to in the primary socialization circle
• Ascribed: involves secondary socialization circles where identity roles and belongings are defined which is to say, the cultural environment beyond the first circle of socialization.
• Modulates and informs the inscribedAcquired: the processes of appropiations and colonizations, adoptions and adaptations of territories engaged in the meaning making. Expressed in narrative form and practices

Concepts: Pop-esotericism

• Any mediatic product or pop-culture item, produced and distributed by the cultural industry, to which its audience attaches the meaning of esoteric and uses it as such.
• The products are not pop-esoteric per se; the audience makes them to be that.
• ‘Pop’ refers to a symbolic form (item or media content) that belongs to the popular culture or “pop-culture”
• Esotericism: the knowledge acquired by initiates in occult beliefs and practices.
• The massive feature of pop-esotericism implies a visible non-initiatic community, with series produced pieces empowered and managed by the cultural industry (producer and distributor)

Theoretical framework

• Media and Religious Studies
• Post-estructuralism, beginning with a phenomenological and ethnomethodological approach (exploratory study).
• Strategy of research: Reflexive Sociology Perspective

Results: From de Modern Self to the Narcissus

• Narcissus: not mourning, but accepting multiple realities and voices (polyglot, nomadic subject). Multiple practices and believings.

The “Narcissus”: multiple reality, multiple practices

• “Budha had said that, as all the traditions did. What the bleep is an update of this: The mind controls matter and external reality. Of course, if you say, well you have to sit down like Budha as he did thousand years ago, well, maybe that is too sophisticated and I am living in the 21st century and, well, how is going to be that, I, well, yuk, religions, yuk the traditions of the religious days” FI-A-M
• “because theoretically this is something real, I mean if you do believe it, then it is something real real real for you. The Da Vinci Code, hummm, was a novel" (78FG-H)

The Narcissus and the discourse of Science

• (The movie What the bleep) “is very good because they indeed demonstrate (the thesis) scientifically and everything is proved” (FG.A-M1)
• “people who are very interested in science, because (the movie, What the bleep) is very well explained, one does not need to know about science, only to like it”.
• “I think that he (Dan Brown) is a person that has studied, researched, and he wants to publish and speak out, no matter who accepts it or not. I do not think that it is made to annoy someone, no, he simply presents his research” (FG82)
• “The quantum physics is more than just a science, is a Way of Living, because the point is: what are you doing with your life? (…) I am a Catholic but I am participating, for eight years now, in a group that studies quantum physics, and it is not religion, but a complement because one can belong to any religion and still participate in this group”. (DG.H-2M)

The Narcissus: relativism, multiple realities, multiple truth

• “It is a diversion, the thing that this person (i.e., Mel Gibson) makes you think that this was what actually happened and full stop, instead of making you understand that this is only the construction of the reality from the viewpoint of one person and that there are many more, to have only one is to have this one, this is, the deviance to fanaticism, to believing only one thing and … knowing moreover that the possibilities are open to many more realities and one can construct his own criterion” (FG78).
• “The Mirror Stage”
  - “The most important, I think, is that the first person in whom I believe is in myself, in Lorena. She is the only person that would never let me down, and after this, it is my family. Now, what is going on? what is religion good for? For when you are in trouble, for not feeling badly in a moment of anguish, I think this is what is good for” (FG49)
  - “And Jesus said: you are God as well, and you will be able to do bigger things than I did, so, where did this come from. So, to freak you out, for me Jesus is not God, he is just another prophet who came to teach us the road to God. Where did you listen this? Where I listened this, I told you I grew up with this, always, Jesus is not God. Jesus is God, but you are God and I am God. The same, if we are one, how something can be outside of this unity. We are all God. Jesus is not more than us, or he is more than us because he is a soul that transcended and that lovely came back to show us the way” (FI81).

The Modern Self and the OBS

• About the impact of The Passion of the Christ) it is like a gate of faith that is opened, and all that Jesus had to endure, and making us aware that we complain about trivial things while he endured without having done anything and without deserving it, and all these leads to what he came for, for giving us the form of living as Catholics, of more love, more tolerance, more endurance, and I think that this is a demonstration of love, a very cruel and blunt one” (GD39)
• “Jesus was like us in body and soul, was humane as us, less in sin, this is the only difference that Jesus had, less in the sin” (GD39)

The Narcissus vs. The Modern Self: the oneself vs. The other

• The Modern Self: reports to The Other
  “When one does a good deed, when you do a good thing for another person, then you feel well, isn´t it so? And when someone else do to you a good thing, you also feel well” (FG49).
• The Narcissus: reports to the Self
  “It locates the human being at the core of everything, it is like you are the center of all your own reality. You create your own reality” (FG.A-5M)
  “It is that the religion tells you that if you do this, that will happen to you, it puts forward a good God, when there is no such thing as good or evil, the only thing is that you be a better person (…) I have learnt that we have the responsibility of taking control of our own life” (DG.H-4H)

Conclusions

• Pop-esotericism: nest of new spiritualities for postmodern self (powerless)
  Operational Belief System (OBS) is constituted by the ascribed, inscribed and acquired sources
• These three sources can be either juxtaposed – in the modern selves – or intersected – in the postmodern, Narcissus self.
• The subjectivity constructed while consuming media products like those researched or mentioned by the participants behaves in a resonant manner with the Operational Belief system: it is a modern subjectivity when the OBS is juxtaposed and a postmodern subjectivity, rhyzomatic and polyglot when the OBS is intersected

Conclusions: Beliefs and Believings

• Beliefs: part of a creed, are propositions belonging primarily to the acquired system, even when they come from the inscribed or ascribed source. This is, one has to defend or justify his/her beliefs in a rational way, using proofs (either scientific or historical).
• ‘Believings’: haunted performances of realities that are beyond language and expressions, and beyond rational, logical operations.
• A more elusive reality that can be grabbed through social conversation and interaction, although does not completely correspond to what the subject might experiment

Conclusions: Pop-esotericism

• Prematurely to say if it is a completely new structure or if corresponds to a pre-existent structure
• Pop-science and manifestations of esoteric practices have existed in the modern times, and our participants echoes some of these practices. Although pop-esotericism might be a new form and content, its operational schema is a persistent one

Comments

From the point of view of spirituality and especially from the point of view of the mystical tradition of Christianity it strikes in this research on the Operational Belief Systems of Modern en Post-modern persons in Mexico and Columbia that the religious experience of these groups of people is above all ego-centered and in that sense narcistic. Both the historical and scientific reference systems of these research groups of ‘polyglot and nomadic subjects’ are concerned with creeds or (rational) propositions to make human life understable. It would be very interesting to see what will be the spiritual development of these persons, of the consciousness of themselves and the transcendent of divine reality. The temporarily construction of an understandable world - fit to inhabit as human persons - develops in dialogue with the surrounding culture and is therefore in part the result of the ongoing media consumption - as this research clearly shows – but arises also from the inevitable personal confrontation with the divine reality which is the origin of our human existence. Modern culture is mostly shaped by media, films, television etc. and by common speech in the dominant and global culture. The spiritual question is however how and in what way forms of self-forgetfulness – shown in the mystical traditions and present also in modern culture – are elicited by personal or common traumatic experiences (serious illnesses like cancer, earthquakes, floodings etc.) or by intense experiences of love, beauty and social engagement provoke processes of spiritual development not foreseen by the dominant culture. In many cases spirituality is put in motion by experiences of counterculture. It would be enough to think about Francis of Assisi or Ignatius of Loyola, but also modern films like ‘As it is in Heaven’ or ‘I am Sam’. Spirituality and mysticism focus not so much on constructions which offer security and footing, but above all on disturbing and confronting process of breakthrough. Might research on media consumption in modern culture be able also to give documentation about these spiritual or mystical processes which can be noticed also nowadays.