Is It Still Possible to Talk About New Age Therapeutic Religiosities?

Abstract

In this article, we propose to understand the specificities of the New Age therapeutic experiments, which characterize what is referred by Latour as a broader tendency for non-systemic, but as “network” globalization (not only globally or locally but intersecting the two dimensions). We understand that, on the one hand, globalization is not characterized as a systematic totality; on the other hand, the local context does not constitute a domain contrastive to the global, being marked by the ephemerality of the religious performances, and, at the same time, transforming itself and simultaneously resignifying the wider environment. As a means of elaborating and giving support to this research question, we will highlight some challenges which are faced by the studies on the New Age movement and, more specifically, by what we hereon refer as religious therapeutic experiments, which redefine New Age religiosities by its grounding on the therapeutic dimensions (with larger prominence of scientific arguments). In the end, we propose an articulation of these discussions with broader questions about the concept of religion and its relation to culture in global and local contexts.