Conspiracy and co-regulation: meaning making in contemporary wellness
Global responses to the pandemic were complex and unprecedented in many ways, but included removing in-person access to community spaces of all kinds. In the years since, ethnographers of contemporary wellness practices, including yoga, have also seen a global rise in what Charlotte Ward and David V...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2025
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| In: |
Journal of contemporary religion
Year: 2025, Volume: 40, Issue: 3, Pages: 491-506 |
| Further subjects: | B
Conspiracy
B Conspirituality B epistemic capital B Wellness B somatic B Yoga |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Global responses to the pandemic were complex and unprecedented in many ways, but included removing in-person access to community spaces of all kinds. In the years since, ethnographers of contemporary wellness practices, including yoga, have also seen a global rise in what Charlotte Ward and David Voas (2011) first termed ‘conspirituality’ in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. Conspirituality is both coherent with, and a departure from, the history of esotericism in combining fears of a corrupted social present with belief in the inevitability of ecological and social revolution. Important work by religious studies scholars has already concerned itself with the epistemic power relations that designate marginalised knowledge as ‘conspiracy’. Missing from this picture is the long-term epistemological impact of practices that rely on somatic experience as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Modern yoga and similar practices pay close attention to the sensations of the body as a conduit to more accurate knowledge of the self, better health, and more harmonious living. As this article shows, motivations for the turn to conspirituality among practitioners of yoga and thus similar practices have less to do with the ontological content of conspiratorial ideas and much more to do with profound commonalities in epistemology. |
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| ISSN: | 1469-9419 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of contemporary religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/13537903.2025.2574141 |
