nach oben

Qualitative Sociology

Erschienen in:

01.12.2010 | SPECIAL ISSUE ON KNOWLEDGE IN PRACTICE

From Abstract Concepts to Experiential Knowledge: Embodying Enlightenment in a Meditation Center

verfasst von: Michal Pagis

Erschienen in: Qualitative Sociology | Ausgabe 4/2010

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

How do abstract philosophies turn into lived reality? Based on 2 years of ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews of vipassana meditation practitioners in Israel and the United States, the paper follows the process through which meditators embody the three main Buddhist tenets: dissatisfaction, impermanence and not-self. While meditators consider these tenets central to Buddhist philosophy, it is only through the practice of meditation that the tenets are experienced on the bodily level and thereby are “realized” as truth. This realization takes place in the situated environment of the meditation center, where participation in long meditation retreats facilitates the production of specific subjective experiences that infuse the knowledge of Buddhist tenets with embodied meaning. The paper illustrates how abstract concepts and embodied experience support one another in the construction of meditators’ phenomenological reality and suggests a general framework for studying the variety of relations that exist between the conceptual and embodied dimensions of different types of knowledge.

Vorheriger Artikel Beyond the Head: The Practical Work of Curating Contemporary Art

Nächster Artikel Organization Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Early Epistemological Function of the American Medical Association

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Interviews in Israel were conducted in Hebrew. Excerpts from these conversations were translated by the author.

Buddhist thought includes many different schools and interpretations. When I use the term “Buddhist philosophy” in this paper, I refer to the teachings of the Buddha, known as Dhamma, as they appear in the seminal texts of Theravada Buddhism. These texts were written in Pali, the scriptural language of Theravada Buddhism.

Until recently, such a study was not possible, since meditation practice was mainly a monastic practice not shared with outsiders. The recent popularity of meditation practice among lay people enables us to approach this question empirically, through following ethnographically the gradual process by which Buddhist wisdom is cultivated. See also Cook 2006.

The names of all interview subjects, as well as some details of their personal lives, have been changed to provide anonymity.

As I have written elsewhere (Pagis 2009), vipassana meditation is based on embodied self-reflexivity, one that avoids entering the realm of symbolic interpretation (i.e. the realm of thirdness), thus not searching for the cause or meaning of sensations. In the examples presented in this paper, the interpretations of experiences as connected to Buddhist tenets take place through discursive reflexivity that follows meditation practice.

Mahasatipatthāna Sutta, (1985) India: Vipassana Research Institute, p. 15

Barsalou, L. W., & Wiemer-Hastings, K. (2005). Situating abstract concepts. In D. Pecher & R. Zwaan (Eds.), Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor Books.

Bielefeldt, C. (2005). Practice. In D. S. Lopez Jr. (Ed.), Critical terms for the study of Buddhism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cadge, W. (2005). Heartwood: The first generation of Theravada Buddhism in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cassaniti, J. (2006). Toward a cultural psychology of impermanence in Thailand. Ethos, 34, 58–88.CrossRef

Collins, S. (1982). Selfless persons: Imagery and thought in Theravada Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

Collins, S. (1994). What are Buddhists doing when they deny the self? In F. E. Reynolds & D. Tracy (Eds.), Religion and practical reason: New Essays in the Comparative Philosophy of Religions. New York: New York Press.

Collins, S. (1998). Nirvana and other Buddhist felicities: Utopias of the Pali imaginaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

Cook, J. C. (2006). Vipassana meditation and the monasticization of popular Buddhism in Thailand. PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, UK.

Cook, J. (2009). Hagiographic narrative and monastic practice: Buddhist morality and mastery amongst Thai Buddhist nuns. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15, 349–364.CrossRef

Csordas, T. J. (1990). Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. Ethos, 18, 5–47.CrossRef

Csordas, T. J. (1993). Somatic modes of attention. Cultural Anthropology, 8, 135–156.CrossRef

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putnam.

Daniel, E. V. (1984). Fluid signs: Being a person the Tamil way. Berkeley: University of California Press.

De-Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dewey, J. (1969). Qualitative thought. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1992). What computers still can’t do: A critique of artificial reason. Cambridge: MIT.

Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1999). The challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment for cognitive science. In G. Weiss & H. F. Haber (Eds.), Perspectives on embodiment. New York: Routledge.

Glaeser, A. (2010). Political epistemics: The secret police, the opposition, and the end of East German socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Glenberg, A. M., Havas, D., Becker, R., & Rinck, M. (2005). Grounding language in bodily states: The case for emotion. In R. Zwaan & D. Pecher (Eds.), The grounding of cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gombrich, R. (1983). From monastery to meditation center: Lay meditation in Contemporary Sri Lanka. In P. Denwood & A. Piatigorsky (Eds.), Buddhist studies ancient and modern. London: Curzon.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–599.CrossRef

Hart, W. (1987). The art of living: Vipassana meditation as taught by S. N. Goenka. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Ignatow, G. (2007). Theories of embodied knowledge: New directions for cultural and cognitive sociology? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 37, 115–135.CrossRef

Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily bases of meaning, imagination and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jordt, I. (2007). Burma’s mass lay meditation movement: Buddhism and the cultural construction of power. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Kleiner, S. (2009). Thinking with the mind, syncing with the body: Ballet as symbolic and nonsymbolic interaction. Symbolic Interaction, 32, 236–259.CrossRef

Knorr-Cetina, K. (1992). The couch, the cathedral and the lab: On the relationship between experiment and laboratory science. In A. Pickering (Ed.), Science as practice and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kohler, R. (2002). Labscapes: Naturalizing the lab. History of Science, 30, 473–501.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books.

Latour, B. (1983). Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world. In K. Knorr-Cetina & M. Mulkay (Eds.),Science observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science. London: Sage.

Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge: Harvard University 949 Press.

Lock, M. (1993). Cultivating the body: Anthropology and epistemologies of bodily practice and knowledge. Annual Review of Anthropology, 22, 135–55.CrossRef

Mauss, M. (1973 [1935]). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2, 70–88.CrossRef

Mead, G. H. (1932). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: Open Court.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002 [1945]). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge.

Nussbaum, M. C. (1986). The fragility of goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Pagis, M. (2009). Embodied self-reflexivity. Social Psychology Quarterly, 62, 265–283.CrossRef

Pagis, M. (2010). Producing intersubjectivity in silence: An ethnographic study of meditation practice. Ethnography, 11, 309–328.CrossRef

Peirce, C. S. (1960). Collected papers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Prinz, J. J. (2002). Furnishing the mind: Concepts and their perceptual basis. Cambridge: MIT.

Rahula, W. (1959). What the Buddha taught. New York: Grove Place.

Richardson, D. C., Spivay, M. J., Barsalou, L. W., & McRae, K. (2003). Spatial representations activated during real-time comprehension of verbs. Cognitive Science, 27, 767–780.CrossRef

Rochberg-Halton, E. (1982). Qualitative immediacy and the communicative act. Qualitative Sociology, 5, 162–181.CrossRef

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: Free.

Shweder, R. A. (1994). You’re not sick, you’re just in love: Emotion as an interpretive system. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of emotion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Spiro, M. E. (1993). Is the Western conception of the self “peculiar” within the context of the world cultures? Ethos, 21, 107–53.CrossRef

Stanfield, R. A., & Zwan, R. A. (2001). The effect of implied orientation derived from verbal context on picture recognition. Psychological Science, 121, 153–156.CrossRef

Stearns, I. S. (1952). Firstness, secondness, and thirdness. In P. P. Wiener & F. H. Young (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1992). The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge: MIT.

Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social mindscapes: An invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Titel: From Abstract Concepts to Experiential Knowledge: Embodying Enlightenment in a Meditation Center
verfasst von: Michal Pagis
Publikationsdatum: 01.12.2010
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Qualitative Sociology / Ausgabe 4/2010
Print ISSN: 0162-0436
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7837
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9169-6

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 4/2010

Bureaucracy, Democracy and Exclusion: Why Indigenous Knowledge Holders Have a Hard Time Being Taken Seriously

Urban ANTs: A Review Essay

How Do they Know? Practicing Knowledge in Comparative Perspective

Beyond the Head: The Practical Work of Curating Contemporary Art

Organization Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Early Epistemological Function of the American Medical Association

The Social life of the Clinical Trial

Premium Partner