In Drifting Through Samsara, Masoumeh Rahmani provides a fieldwork-based study of Goenka's Vipassana meditation movement in New Zealand. This group is distinguished by its refusal to identify as Buddhist and by a rich rhetorical repertoire for repackaging Theravada Buddhist teachings in pseudo-scientific and secular language. Drawing from qualitative research, the book examines the way the movement's discourse shapes unique processes and narratives of conversion and disengagement.
In Drifting Through Samsara, Masoumeh Rahmani provides a fieldwork-based study of Goenka's Vipassana meditation movement in New Zealand. This group is distinguished by its refusal to identify as Buddhist and by a rich rhetorical repertoire for repackaging Theravada Buddhist teachings in pseudo-scientific and secular language. Drawing from qualitative research, the book examines the way the movement's discourse shapes unique processes and narratives of conversion and disengagement.
Masoumeh Rahmani is a lecturer in Religious Studies at the School of Social and Cultural Studies in Victoria University of Wellington. She received her PhD from the University of Otago in 2017 and has previously held a research associate position in the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour lab at Coventry University. Her research interests include religious change, meditation movements, atheism and unbelief, and Asian spiritualities in non-Asian contexts. Her latest longitudinal project explored the diversity of "unbelief" in the mindfulness subcultures of the UK and the US and examined the influence of the practice on the worldviews of non-religious/atheist practitioners.
Inhaltsangabe
Abstract Acknowledgments List of Figures A Note on Terminology and Transcription Conventions of Transcription Introduction Chapter I: Conversion Career Chapter II: Tacit Conversion Chapter III: Pragmatic Leaving Chapter IV: Vipassana Disaffiliation Narratives Chapter V: Disaffiliation Trajectories Chapter VI: Deconversion: Breathing New Self into Not-Self Concluding Discussions Bibliography Appendix 1: Vipassana Ten-day Course Timetable Appendix 2: Participants' Information
