Prospects for New Age Studies

   Steven J. Sutcliffe

   

   

   I close this chapter with a brief assessment of future studies in the field. In recent years a
   fresh wave of New Age studies has emerged to challenge the consensus discussed earlier,
   although some of its concerns are certainly foreshadowed in the multiperspectivalism of
   earlier collections like Lewis and Melton (1992), the categorial analysis of Bochinger (1994),
   the close textual analyses in Hanegraaff (1996) and Hammer (2001a), and Heelas's (1996)
   engagement with cultural theory. The thematic treatment of globalization theory and New Age in
   Rothstein (2001) is a case in point, particularly the critiques of globalization as covert
   Westernization by Frisk (2001) and of New Age globalism as a neocolonial ideology promoting
   "spiritual imperialism" by Hanegraaff (2001) and Salamon (2001). Hammer (2001) begins to
   unpack hidden constraints on the content of New Age culture, pace practitioners' rhetoric that
   "all and everything" is now available for consumption.

   Often characteristic of this fresh wave of studies is a more ethnographical, historical, and
   comparative method, applied in turn to distinctive practices, discourses, and sites. Some of
   these I have already cited, such as Brown (1997) on channeling, English-Lueck (1990) on
   holistic healing, and Ivakhiv's (2001) comparative geography of Glastonbury and Sedona. Other
   contributions suggesting fruitful methodological development include Danforth's (1989)
   comparative analysis of American firewalking and Greek folk traditions, Bloch's (1998)
   qualitative interviews exploring the construction of popular American spiritual discourse,
   Prince and Riches's (2000) comparative anthropology of New Age culture in Glastonbury, and
   Wood's (2003) analysis of power in local English channeling networks. These promise to be the
   kinds of contextualized and localized case studies the field requires to develop and diversify
   its theoretical concerns.

   Let me propose five avenues of outstanding research to elucidate this assessment. First, we
   require additional ethnographies to map the richly textured heterogeneity and subtle
   diffusions of contemporary practices. Three interrelated areas are germane: healing practices;
   domestic ritual and material culture (crystals, candles, incense, dreamcatchers, domestic
   shrines, feng sui); and the dynamics of small group practice, which defines the social nuclei
   of alternative spirituality and also now infuses popular American religion-43 percent of
   Roof's (1999: 126) interview sample of baby boomers had participated in a small group of some
   kind.

   Second, New Age studies might usefully explore methodologies from the study of popular culture
   in order to recover what de Certeau (1984) calls the "practice of everyday life" and J. Rose
   (2001: 3), in relation to reading cultures, calls a "history of audiences." Radway's (1987)
   analysis of female readers' variegated responses to the superficially monotone romantic
   fiction genre is potentially instructive here with regard to the undertheorized relationship
   between the content of popular New Age texts-such as The Celestine Prophecy (Redfield 1994)
   and the Conversations with God series (Walsch 1997)-and the interpretive and practical uses to
   which it is put by readers. Also relevant is contemporary oral history: for example,
   Summerfield's (1998) exposition of the gendered dynamics of discourse and subjectivity in
   women's memories of the Second World War is readily transposable to oral histories of
   alternative spiritualities. The simple transcripts in Akhtar and Humphries (1999) offer a lead
   here, as does Bloch's (1998) more sophisticated treatment.

   Summerfield's gender concerns introduce a third consideration: despite a wellestablished ratio
   of women to men (two to one) in the New Age field, with plentiful evidence of women's
   participation as healers and channelers, we have very little sustained account of the impact
   of sex as a social and cultural variable, and practically nothing on particular constructions
   of New Age gender. In this regard New Age studies remain by and large peopled by a fuzzy
   collective subject. Largely absent, too, is ethnicity. Bruce (2002: 89) charges that ethnicity
   is "trebly absent" from New Age: minority ethnic groups are underrepresented, practitioners
   largely ignore the issue, and so do academics. Certainly available demographic data strongly
   suggest a predominantly "white" constituency of practitioners, although here again we will
   find local, qualitative studies helpful in nuancing and retheorizing the big picture.

   Finally, there is a need to develop the preliminary studies of the salience of age cohort and
   generation on the transmission of New Age values and practices, such as Heelas and See! (2002)
   sketch in England and Roof (1993, 1999) plots more extensively in the U.S. As I have argued
   elsewhere (Sutcliffe 2003: 112ff.), there is a strong correlation between the generational
   attitudes and mores of the "pioneers"-those active from around the mid-1930s to the
   mid-1960s-and the particular symbolic qualities (ascetic, transcendental, apocalyptic) of
   their early New Age discourse. Similarly, the more diffuse and idiomatic significations of New
   Age-this-worldly, therapeutic, sensual-that flourish from the 1970S onward in the wake of
   youth culture and counterculture correlate significantly with a "baby boom" generational
   profile. We need to know more about face-to-face encounters and transmissions between and
   within different generations of "alternative" spiritual practitioners, the auto/biographies of
   particular exponents in different historical periods, and the internal resistance of these
   vernacular cultures to attempts to mobilize and regulate them through the power of specialist
   cadres. In this light it would be salutary to investigate what "spiritual" values and
   practices (if any) baby boomers are in turn passing on to the "Generation X" or "baby buster"
   cohort-those born between the early 1960s and early 1980s (Beaudoin 1998; Flory and Miller
   2000).

   In short, a renewed and sustainable agenda for New Age studies would include additional
   localized ethnographies, popular cultural analyses, and closer attention to gender, ethnicity,
   and age cohort as mechanisms of symbolization and demographic transmission. This reinforces an
   important potential function of New Age studies: to connect data about alternative
   spirituality and religious innovation to comparative cultural studies, thereby helping to
   place important but neglected and often devalued strands of Anglo-American culture in proper
   historical and anthropological context. This is particularly germane since I would argue that,
   for many scholars and students of the field, the ground under our feet is, auto/
   biographically and culturally, coterminous with the footprint of New Age. That is, the field
   of practice labeled "New Age" is for many of us the vernacular religion of our own backyards
   and may thereby have influenced our own perspectives on religion-its study and practice-more
   than we allow.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   (Steven J. Sutcliffe. The Dynamics of Alternative Spirituality: Seekrs, Networks, and "New
   Age", in: James R. Lewis. The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, Oxford University
   Press: Oxford-New York 2004, pp. 481 -- 483)