‘I Don’t Know If You Have Experience with Meditation?’

Author(s)

Sabine Grenz

Abstract

In 2020, during the height of covid, I conducted research in the German-speaking area that revealed a complexity of power relations between the secular and the religious as well as between different religious branches. The aim of this article is a method- ological contribution to post-secular research. Starting from the underlying question of how we interact with our participants in order to allow for unspeakable discourses from a secular/-ist perspective, the article engages in-depth with excerpts from qualita- tive empirical interviews and explores how discourses of cultural memory resonate in them. Based on an interpretative methodology inspired by diffractive reading, which takes the cultural history of secularisation and its discursive memory as a prism to dif- ferentiate power discourses, it focuses on the discourses of gender, colonialism, and pathologisation as well as on their entanglement with each other. While discourses of gender and colonialism have been the subject of a large body of research in empirical religious studies already, this article adds an analysis of pathologisation.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Department of Education

Journal

Religion & Gender

No. of pages

15

ISSN

1878-5417

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1163/18785417-01501001

Publication date

08-2022

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504014 Gender studies, 504025 Sociology of religion

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Gender Studies, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 5 - Gender Equality

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/b46d6e64-dc06-465e-a6cd-09b88e8d49dc