Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality: In My Beginning is My End [1st ed.] 9783030508685, 9783030508692

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxxi
“In My Beginning Is My End” (Alvin Dueck)....Pages 1-19
Front Matter ....Pages 21-21
Prolegomena for the Development of Indigenous Psychologies of Spirituality: Colonization, Decolonization, and Indigeneity (Alvin Dueck, Michael Marossy)....Pages 23-49
Spirituality in a Civil Religion: The Chinese Notions of Harmony (Louise Sundararajan)....Pages 51-69
Front Matter ....Pages 71-71
Giving Voice to the Voiceless: A Peaceable Research Paradigm for Psychology in China (Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting, Kejia Zhang)....Pages 73-96
Psychology of Religion Instrumentation: Systematic Review with an International and Multiple Faith Focus (Kenneth T. Wang, Esther C. Tan)....Pages 97-126
The “Wonder to Behold”: Reflections on Phenomenological Research of Alienic Spirituality (Olga Louchakova-Schwartz)....Pages 127-155
Front Matter ....Pages 157-157
An Indigenous Appalachian Faith Tradition (Ralph W. Hood, W. Paul Williamson)....Pages 159-182
Indigenous Psychology as Religious: Slavic Understanding of Human Psycho-Sexual Development (Andrzej Pankalla, Konrad Kośnik)....Pages 183-202
Toward Understanding the Psychology of Emotion, Indigenous Spirituality and Christianity in Korea (Jenny H. Pak)....Pages 203-225
How India Almost Lost Its Soul: The Detrimental Effects of Ethnocentrism and Colonialism on the Psychology of Spirituality (Pradeep Chakkarath)....Pages 227-251
Savoring in Bereavement: The Javanese Journey Through Death (Risa Permanadeli, Louise Sundararajan)....Pages 253-270
Anger Toward God Among Chinese Christians (Yin Yang, Alvin Dueck)....Pages 271-291
Indigenous Psychologies of Spirituality: Remembering, Excavating, and Individuating (Alvin Dueck)....Pages 293-312
Back Matter ....Pages 313-326

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN INDIGENOUS PSYCHOLOGY

Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality In My Beginning is My End Edited by Alvin Dueck

Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology

Series Editors Louise Sundararajan Independent Researcher Rochester, NY, USA Kuang-Hui Yeh Institute of Ethnology Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan Alvin Dueck School of Psychology Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena, CA, USA Thomas Teo Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON, Canada Jeffrey Paul Ansloos Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology aims to introduce psychologists and social scientists to the indigenous psychology movement and to major theoretical and practical issues discussed in this tradition. It publishes books that make significant contributions to psychology in the era of globalization by asking important questions about the discipline, profession, and practice of psychology. The series critically appraises cultural assumptions and theoretical frameworks; sheds light on the dialectics of the universal and the particular in human subjectivity; goes beyond Western psychology in researching the ontological, epistemological, ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions of the mental life; addresses issues of structural oppression in the globalizing era; and explores possibilities for a more equitable global psychology. Given the interdisciplinary nature of indigenous psychology, this book series welcomes contributions from all disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. In particular, it welcomes scholarship that embodies a critical thinking that is informed by the local knowledge, and inspired by the spiritual strivings of a culture. If you would like to discuss a book idea prior to submitting a proposal please contact Editorin-Chief Louise Sundararajan via Commissioning Editor Beth Farrow ([email protected])

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15445

Alvin Dueck Editor

Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality In My Beginning is My End

Editor Alvin Dueck School of Psychology Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena, CA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology ISBN 978-3-030-50868-5 ISBN 978-3-030-50869-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: pixy-nookshutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

Indigenous Psychology and the Moral Challenge of Robust Cultural Pluralism This culturally nostalgic and heritage affirming collection of essays is largely concerned with the toxic effects of the idea that the West is best and the envy of the world. The book is a critique of the assumption that Western nations promote progressive social development when they use their power (hard and soft) to spread “Western” goals, values and pictures of reality to all corners of the globe. It is a critique of the view (so typical of the perspective of many liberal Western developmental theorists) that the “indigenous peoples” of the world are the slaves of their dead ancestors and would benefit by being liberated from their traditionladen way of life, including their entrenched and outmoded conservative social customs and their superstitious and super-natural beliefs. The book aims to fairly and accurately represent the persistence of the goals, values and pictures of reality of various alternative cultural traditions. Special attention is given to collective resistance to Western globalization (or socalled neo-liberalism) and to local rejections of various hegemony-seeking

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Western ideologies: anti-communitarian individualism, competitive capitalism, and reductive and “soulless” secular materialism. Hence the focus in these essays on the spiritual nature of human beings, harmonious communalism, and the transcendental value and organic interdependent character of nature itself. To my eyes, the book is a contemporary expression of a centuries old romantic philosophical and social science tradition skeptical of universalism, ecumenism and cosmopolitanism. The collection is an embrace (perhaps even a love affair) with particular ways of life grounded in durable bonds of ethnic, cultural, and religious community. Here in these essays the research discipline (and political movement) known as “indigenous psychology” gives voice to several of the tenets of the historical romantic rebellion against Western Enlightenment thought, for example, by rejecting the idea and ideal of unilinear progressive societal development. The major aims of the book resonate well with an observation by the political and moral philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who draws the following contrast between enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and Condorcet and the great romantic rebel (and in a sense a founder of indigenous psychology) Johann Herder. He writes: For Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach, Condorcet, there is only one universal civilization, of which now one nation, now another, represents the richest flowering. For Herder there is a plurality of incommensurable cultures. To belong to a given community, to be connected with its members by indissoluble and impalpable ties of a common language, historical memory, habit, tradition and feeling, is a basic human need no less natural than that for food or drink or security or procreation. One nation can understand and sympathize with the institutions of another only because it knows how much its own mean to itself. Cosmopolitanism is the shedding of all that makes one most human, most oneself. (quoted in Gray 1996, p. 122)

Viewed as a contemporary voice of romanticism, this collection of essays seeks to restore what makes us most ourselves: community and

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divinity (that sense of being on speaking terms with something transcendental), ancestor worship and respect for the past, origin stories and teleology (the ends or ideals that are there in the beginning of any distinctive way of life and there too within ourselves, if we remain loyal and dedicated to the thick cultural heritage of a particular people). The essays in the book also highlight a certain paradox for robust cultural pluralists (such as myself ) who work on the indigenous psychology of morality. I specialize in the discovery of the moral foundations of diverse cultural traditions, both liberal and illiberal. There is more than a little irony in this type of calling. In fact, many (perhaps most) of the diverse cultural and religious traditions and indigenous peoples studied (and, in the case of the essays in this book, often admired) by cultural anthropologists and indigenous psychologists are notably illiberal in their beliefs and practices. These are local communities where the “folk” feel viscerally attached to a particular historical ethical community grounded in its own identity-defining metaphysical beliefs and origin stories or received legends of one sort or another. These are communities where the locals draw strong in-group versus outgroup distinctions, do not believe that there but for fortune goes you or goes I, do believe that gods, goddesses and the spirits of the dead play a continuing part in human history, feel duty bound to live up to the briefs for behavior distinctive of their social status in the community (which is often embedded in hierarchical interdependent relationships), and frequently discriminate in favor or against other individuals on the basis of sex, age, kinship ties, ethnicity and religion; while many of the robust cultural pluralists (including many professional indigenous psychologists) who study those traditions are themselves quite liberal and tend to equate the moral domain with values such as individual autonomy, non-discrimination, social justice, equality and freedom of choice. An investigator whose own moral thinking is steeped in a liberal ethics of autonomy seeks to understand and fairly represent the moral thinking of indigenous peoples and alternative cultural traditions whose moral thinking is rooted in an ethics of community and an ethic of divinity. It’s quite a challenge.

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Some cultural pluralists struggle with that irony throughout their careers, while trying to find ways to be robust cultural pluralists and ethical liberals at the same time. In that respect I have suggested in some of my own writings (for example, “Shouting at the Hebrews”, which is a liberal pluralist’s defense of the ancient Jewish custom of neonatal male circumcision) that the moral domain is much broader than the ethics of autonomy alone and thus the illiberalism of a practice is not necessarily a measure of its immorality (Shweder 2009). Indeed the reconciliation of robust cultural pluralism and liberalism is rapidly becoming a major moral and public policy challenge both domestically (especially in various multi-ethnic multi-cultural politically liberal countries) and on a global scale. As the late great anthropologist Clifford Geertz presciently remarked some years ago, while writing with a sense of urgency in our migratory post-Cold War conflict-ridden world: Positioning Muslims in France, Whites in South Africa, Arabs in Israel, or Koreans in Japan are not altogether the same sort of thing. But if political theory is going to be of any relevance at all in the splintered world, it will have to have something cogent to say about how, in the face of a drive towards a destructive integrity, such structures can be brought into being, how they can be sustained, and how they can be made to work. (Geertz 2000, p. 257)

Such is one of the themes of this book. So too is the theme that globalization is a flawed process leading to a problematic world-flattening “neo-liberal” order that has been hazardous to the well-being of its presumed beneficiaries, including the poorer countries and indigenous peoples of the world. There are calls in these essays for remedies and greater equality and reciprocity of voice in intergroup relationships. Finally there is the emphasis on spirituality, in a sense that encompasses what might be referred to as “the big three of religion.” In the history of thought about the religions of the world it seems to me theorists tend to come in three kinds – those who define religion by focusing on the concept of the soul, those who define religion by focusing on

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the concept of the sacred, and those who define religion focusing on the idea of superior or super-natural beings. The soulful, the sacred and the super-natural are the three “S’s” of religion. Here I recapitulate some thought about the three “S’s” that I have briefly mentioned in other writings (Shweder 2015). Human selves are capable of experiencing and recognizing themselves as soulful and supernatural in the sense of being capable of being the “unmoved mover”, able to initiate actions in ways that distinguish the “I” from other moved movers such as robots and other artifacts of the material or “natural” world (the equation of “Atman” – the animated personal self - with Brahman – the world soul or the divine - in Hinduism is an indigenous doctrinal version of this recognition). Normal human beings are also capable of feeling a direct connection to what they experience as an elevated or dignifying realm of truth and value (a sacred realm, in the sense of being unquestionably good) that is inherently a potential source of human integrity. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” is but one rather theistic way to give expression to the virtues or goods associated with the ethics of divinity or spirituality. Presumably one can even be an atheist (and reject all versions of the “Old Man in the sky pulling the strings” conception of divinity) and still experience the moral domain guided by self-regulatory goods such as cleanliness, purity, pollution, sin, salvation and sanctity. The Enlightenment recoil against the institutions of organized religion, the ultimate distrust expressed by many positive scientists of all metaphysical notions and the embrace of various versions of philosophical materialism may have inoculated many contemporary secular social scientists against words like “soul”, “sacred” or “super-natural.” But the concepts underlying those words are deeply embedded in the human experience of value and choice; and they play a part in the socialization of children and in the significance and meanings conveyed in daily activities such as the preparation of food, eating, bathing, going to bed and even how you dress in the morning and prepare yourself to meet the world. All this is well known to the various indigenous peoples and alternative cultural traditions you will encounter in this collection of essays on the

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“Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality.” “In the beginning is my end” is an appealing and uplifting invitation to the encounter. Richard Shweder Harold Higgins Swift Distinguished Service Professor Department of Comparative Human Development University of Chicago Chicago, USA

References Geertz, C. (2000). Available light: Anthropological reflections on philosophical topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Gray, J. (1996). Isaiah Berlin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shweder, R.A. (2009). Shouting at the Hebrews: Imperial liberalism v liberal pluralism and the practice of male circumcision. Law, Culture and the Humanities 5, 247–65. Shweder, R. A. (2015). Foreword. In L. Arnett Jensen (Ed.), Moral development in a global world . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Preface and Acknowledgments

During the years 1918–1926, the Russian civil war raged in Ukraine. At the time, there were some 150,000 Mennonites living there–a religious group that had separated from the Protestants and Catholics during the Reformation. In the civil conflict, nearly 100,000 Mennonites lost their lives. My family survived the holocaust by emigrating to Canada. I am grateful for the resilience my German/Ukrainian mother demonstrated after fleeing the war, losing her father shortly after arrival in Canada, and then having her husband drown in an accident after four years of marriage. To survive, she depended on her Mennonite religious convictions, the community of faith, and the nurturance of the customs she grew up with. I remember her singing German hymns and reading Luther’s translation of the Bible. We ate Ukrainian verenyky, borscht, pierogi, cabbage rolls, and pirozki. I attended German language school on Saturdays. Years later I visited the villages constructed in Ukraine and were then replicated in southern Manitoba, Canada. When my family moved to Winnipeg in the 1940s, they clustered in neighborhoods like their Ukrainian villages.

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There were psychologists who viewed these communities as enmeshed, and religionists who saw them as sectarian and anti-cultural isolationists. Eventually Mennonite children encountered Canadian modernity. Some left behind their religious and ethnic roots. Some returned to recover an earlier vitality. My interest in the impact of culture on indigenous spirituality and psychological understanding emerged at the confluence of these social forces. I have spent many decades in my professional scholarly pursuits reflecting on the experience of my Mennonite people. I seek not to idealize my indigenous past but I do wish to mine it for psychological and spiritual wisdom. I also acknowledge the impact of aboriginal communities have had on my scholarship as I witnessed their struggle to survive and to reclaim their culture in Canadian society. I met Quiche widows in Guatemala, whose husbands were murdered and who reconstructed their communities in order to survive. The rural Chinese mountain people I encountered after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake were struggling to recover their cultural roots and many simply disappeared into the cities. I am grateful to the general editor of this series, Louise Sundararajan, for her encouragement and guidance and to the contributors who spent many hours writing chapters for this volume. I wish to express appreciation to the staff at Springer who have shepherded the manuscript to publication. Also, I thank The Templeton Press for granting permission to include portions of a chapter written by the editor entitled “Psychologies of Spirituality: Remembering, Excavating, and Individuating” in Chapters 1, 2, and 13 in the present work. The full chapter will be published in T. A. Sisemore and J. J. Knabb, (Eds.). The Psychology of World Religions and Spiritualities: An Indigenous Perspective. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press. Pasadena, USA January 2020

Alvin Dueck

Praise for Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality

“This excellent volume is not just a comparison of religions in different cultures, but also a spiritual calling from the depths of indigenous peoples’ souls. It refreshes readers beyond modern Western religious/spiritual thinking by delving into the infinite possibility of religious imagination and spiritual meaning. The volume presents empirical research findings and methodological and theoretical viewpoints in religious/spiritual psychology that are the most enlightening I have ever read and will provide valuable insight to any scholar.” —Kuang-Hui Yeh, Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and the current President of Taiwanese Psychological Association “In Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality: In My Beginning is My End , Alvin Dueck has assembled a critical volume for our time. Threading together the fields of psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, critical ethnic studies, religious and theological studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be an important text and required reading for the years to come. Dueck has brought together an impressive group of contributors

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to consider a range of conceptual and methodological issues at the intersection of Indigenous psychology of Spirituality. At the heart of this work is a nuanced reckoning with the topics of decoloniality and indigeneity. Dueck and his contributors call readers towards complex ethical reflection on the entrenchment of the field of psychology in the projects of modernity, and how to reimagine the field to be anchored in the promotion of diverse indigenous life. Most persuasively, Dueck connects the work to his own personal reflections of his life, professional contributions, and community. For that I am immensely grateful because within those reflections is a demonstration of the value of relational practices in psychology. This book is persuasive, timely, and a significant contribution to the field.” —Jeffrey Ansloos, Canada Research Chair of Critical Studies in Indigenous Health and Social Action on Suicide and Assistant Professor of Indigenous Mental Health and Social Policy, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada “This book is inspiring, though I too am disappointed with the way that current psychology as a discipline and profession has been influenced by globalization of religion, politics, and capital which have become oppressive in terms of national, ethnic, and ideological identity. It creates anxiety about personal and spiritual identity. The preface gave a snapshot of the editor’s familial history. It touched me while other readers have their own history and traditions, rituals, festivals, and family events that shaped them. Spiritual peace is the key element of mental harmony (Sundararajan). Therefore, the subtitle of the book cited from T. S. Eliot, ‘In my beginning is my end,’ was wise. I am grateful to the authors for giving theoretical and empirical consideration to the role of culture in spirituality. This has not been given sufficient attention in mainstream of psychology of religion. I am confident that the readers of this book will be nurtured and blessed.” —Han Buxin, Professor of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, President of the Chinese Psychological Society, President of the Asian Psychological Association, and Past Secretary General, International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP)

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“Dueck and an exceptional group of collaborating authors offer a glimpse into indigenous psychologies of spirituality from all around the world. In doing so, they enrich our psychological understanding of culture and spirituality and challenge homogenizing Western approaches by proposing a thick understanding of local narratives as an alternative. This book is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on decolonizing psychology and spirituality, and a timely offering when there is an increasing urgency to find a way for us to live as an intercultural, intergenerational society that thrives in its diversity.” —Josephine Hwang, Professor of Psychology, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Lima, Peru “This book expands the field of psychology of religion by asking questions that matter to the majority of non-WEIRD people. In the mosaic of human experiences, we don’t have enough pieces to see the whole, for we see in part and know in part. Too often we have blindly assumed that the few pieces that are known can represent the whole of human experience; this book lays down more pieces of that mosaic but more importantly calls our attention to not draw conclusions too quickly but notice what’s missing and do our part to find the pieces collaboratively with indigenous others. The chapters are a heartfelt exploration, full of insight for those of us who want to understand the fullness of human experience with respect to the human psyche, spirit, and heart. I was most emotionally touched by Javanese savoring of grieving, most intellectually intrigued by implications of two ethnic Yi groups suffering differently due to their distinct socio-cultural context, most challenged and aware of my own biases by reinterpreting snake handlers as tradition of obedience and faith. For spirituality to be integrated with lived-in realities of all people groups, I have had to take a much humbler stance.” —Annie Tsai, Professor of Psychology, Tunghai University, Taiwan “A rich collection of chapters on Indigenous views of the world rooted within the editor’s lived experience within his Ukrainian Mennonite roots. The chapters each echo the importance of grasping the Indigenous perspective ... the idiosyncratic position that each psychology is unique to its historical and contextual circumstances. What is unique are the many

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perspectives (lenses) that cross the diverse presentations, from Confucian views of harmony to the use of phenomenological methods. The chapters are divided into three sections which define the nature of indigenous views, address methodological issues and nuances, and ultimately embed the concepts—and procedures—into the macro web of spirituality. Spiritual is the sine qua non—the foundation for all non-western Indigenous ways of knowing, ontological references, and practices. In brief, this is a substantive contribution by scholars that can serve as an introduction to Indigenous psychology’s growing core and canon and will inform other scholarly volumes.” —Anthony J. Marsella, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Hawaii, Hawaii “If you are vulnerable, as I am, to the tendency to think of one’s own culture as the norm for understanding a given phenomenon (in this case, the psychology of religiousness and spirituality), this book will make you think again. Not only does its focus on Indigenous psychologies of religion and spirituality provide a much needed-corrective to a discipline dominated by a rather narrow and thus limited Western Judeo-Christian understanding of the complexity and richness of spiritual beliefs and practices, but it is also quite simply highly educational. It will deepen your understanding and appreciation of psychological processes through the varieties of spiritual experience rooted in ethnoreligious communities.” —Peter C. Hill, Professor of Psychology, Rosemead School of Psychology, La Mirada, CA, USA, and former editor of the Journal of Psychology and Christianity “An ethical call to turn from the seductions and reductions of modernity and colonialism, Dueck and his collaborators invite us to listen, anew and with reverence, to the deep well-spring of psychologies living in culture and tradition. The flattening work of modernity isn’t finished and this brilliant text attempts to reverse its effects and re-envision our methods for knowing ourselves and one another.” —David Goodman, Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives & External Relations, Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College, USA

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“In their endeavor to strive against colonialism and the market fundamentalism of neoliberalism, this book signifies an important contribution of indigenous psychologists in many areas of the world towards a peaceable psychology of multiculturalism.” —K. K. Hwang, Professor Emeritus of Personality and Social Psychology at National Taiwan University, Taiwan and National Chair Professor at Kaohsiung Medical University, Taiwan “Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong has put forward this guiding maxim for dealing with different cultural relationships: ‘各美其美, 美人之 美, 美美与共, 天下大同’ (‘Every form of beauty has its uniqueness; precious is to appreciate other forms of beauty with openness; if beauty represents itself with diversity and integrity, the world will be blessed with harmony and unity’). This proverb applies to this book. The research approach combines spirituality, psychology, and culture. The study of psychology of religion should not be confined to one culture if its theory and method is to have universal significance and value. We must look at different regions and different groups, reflect on the limitations of traditional psychology, and seek universality in the uniquenesses of different cultures.” —Henghao Liang, Researcher, Institute of World Religions, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China “A psychology worthy of its name needs to do justice to the full complexity of human mental life. The book accomplishes that aspiration not only by contributing to an understanding of spirituality but also by extending Western-centric forms of intuition to include indigenous psychologies of religion. This is an important contribution to the project of the psychological humanities that embrace expressions of the psyche in all its forms and varieties around the globe.” —Thomas Teo, Professor of Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology at York University, Canada, and Editor of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

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“This book encourages me to explore psychological insight or wisdom from my own culture. It expands the horizon of psychology far beyond the psychology that I was taught. The authors seek to prevent Indigenous communities from being threatened, diminished and devoured by mainstream western psychology. Professor Al Dueck and the authors are ardent encouragers as well as protectors of psychologies that grow and develop in all cultures of the world.” —Xuefu Wang, Director, Zhi-mian Counseling Center, Nanjing, China

Contents

1

“In My Beginning Is My End” Alvin Dueck

Part I 2

3

1

Deconstruction and Reconstruction

Prolegomena for the Development of Indigenous Psychologies of Spirituality: Colonization, Decolonization, and Indigeneity Alvin Dueck and Michael Marossy Spirituality in a Civil Religion: The Chinese Notions of Harmony Louise Sundararajan

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51

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Contents

Part II 4

5

6

Methodologies Reconsidered

Giving Voice to the Voiceless: A Peaceable Research Paradigm for Psychology in China Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting and Kejia Zhang Psychology of Religion Instrumentation: Systematic Review with an International and Multiple Faith Focus Kenneth T. Wang and Esther C. Tan The “Wonder to Behold”: Reflections on Phenomenological Research of Alienic Spirituality Olga Louchakova-Schwartz

Part III

An Indigenous Appalachian Faith Tradition Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson

8

Indigenous Psychology as Religious: Slavic Understanding of Human Psycho-Sexual Development Andrzej Pankalla and Konrad Ko´snik

10

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Indigenous Psychologies of Religion

7

9

73

Toward Understanding the Psychology of Emotion, Indigenous Spirituality and Christianity in Korea Jenny H. Pak How India Almost Lost Its Soul: The Detrimental Effects of Ethnocentrism and Colonialism on the Psychology of Spirituality Pradeep Chakkarath

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Contents

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11 Savoring in Bereavement: The Javanese Journey Through Death Risa Permanadeli and Louise Sundararajan

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12

Anger Toward God Among Chinese Christians Yin Yang and Alvin Dueck

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13

Indigenous Psychologies of Spirituality: Remembering, Excavating, and Individuating Alvin Dueck

Index

293 313

Notes on Contributors

Pradeep Chakkarath is an Indian-born cultural psychologist at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and (together with Jürgen Straub) Co-Director of the Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Center (KKC) for Cultural Psychology and Historical Anthropology. He is Vice President of the German Society for Cultural Psychology, fellow alumnus of the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and Co-Editor of the German language journal Psychosozial . Currently, his main interests are human development from an interdisciplinary perspective and the history/methodology of the social sciences, with a special interest in the so-called indigenous traditions of discussing, explaining, and understanding psychological phenomena. Alvin Dueck is the Distinguished Professor of Cultural Psychologies at Fuller Theological Seminary, School of Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy. He has been a consultant to cultural psychological programs in China, Guatemala, and Africa. He was the recipient (with Dr. Han Buxin) of several grants from the John Templeton Foundation to support cultural psychology of religion research in China and to encourage intellectual exchange with American psychologists of religion.

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Notes on Contributors

He is the author of Between Jerusalem and Athens: Ethical Perspectives on Culture, Religion and Psychotherapy (1995) and a book titled A Peaceable Psychology (2009). He is co-editor with Dr. Han Buxin of an issue of Pastoral Psychology, entitled “Psychology of Religion in the People’s Republic of China” (2012). Ralph W. Hood Jr. is Professor of psychology, LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professorship of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and UT Alumni Association Distinguished Professor. He currently is co-editor of Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion and Editor-in-Chief of Psychology and Religion. He is a past president of Division 36 of the American Psychological Association and a recipient of its William James award for research in the psychology of religion. He has engaged in extensive documentation for over thirty years of the serpent handling tradition of Appalachia in cooperation with W. Paul Williamson. Konrad Ko´snik is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna´n, Poland. His specialty is history of psychology, Slavic indigenous psychology, and contemporary identity processes in Poland (mainly connected with national identity). Co-author of a book (in Polish): Indigenous psychology of Slavs (2018). Author/co-author of articles on Slavic psychology, modern Slavic neopaganism, and pseudoscientific historical narratives. Olga Louchakova-Schwartz is Professor Emerita of Psychology and Comparative Religion, Professor of Philosophy of Religion, and Clinical Professor at the University of California at Davis. Her research of Tibetan Meditation at the Neurophenomenology Center in the Silicon Valley (which she founded and for several years directed) was featured on BBC and Science Daily. She is the Founding President of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience. She published more than 200 articles and book chapters in comparative philosophy of consciousness, spirituality, emergent religious phenomena, and phenomenology of life. She is the editor and contributing author of The Problem of Religious Experience: Case Studies in Phenomenology, with Reflections and Commentaries (Springer 2019), an editor of guest series of issues with Open

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Theology (De Gruyter), and is currently working on two books, Husserl and Suhrawardi: A Phenomenological Dialogue (Springer), and Religious Experience and Description: An Anthology (Lexington Press). Michael Marossy is a Ph.D. student in the Clinical Psychology Program at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology studying under Dr. Alvin Dueck. He received his Master’s in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, and his research interests include psychological/theological integration, the impact of neoliberalism on psychology and theology, indigenous psychologies, and relational psychodynamic psychotherapy. Michael is passionate about contributing to psychological conversations that recognize the central importance of culture and spirituality in clinical contexts, and he strives to create an atmosphere of equity and inclusivity in which all voices are listened to, honored, and respected. Jenny H. Pak (Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, University of Southern California) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary (CA) and chair of Cultural and Community Psychology Track. She is a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Task Force on Indigenous Psychology. Dr. Pak’s interests include cultural psychology, identity formation, narrative analysis, trauma, and integration of psychology and religion. She is the author of Korean American Women: Stories of Acculturation and Changing Selves. Andrzej Pankalla is Associate Professor and Head of the Center of Anthropological Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Cardinal Stefan Wyszy´nski University in Warsaw, Poland. His specialty is history of psychology, cultural psychology, and psychology of religion. He is the author of books (in Polish): Psychology of Myth (2000), Mythocentric Cultural Psychology of Ernest Boesch (2012), and Culture of Psychologists (2014). He is co-author of Psychology of Culture (2005), Psychescapes (2007), Mythotherapy (2010), and Indigenous Psychology of Slavs (2018). He is an organizer of psychocultural research expeditions (Ecuador, Guatemala, Buryatia, African countries, etc.). Risa Permanadeli graduated from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris-France, where she studied the Social Representations

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Theory. She returned to her home country and focused her research activities on local social phenomenon such as power, women, urban movements, oral traditions, ghost stories. She does so in order to identify the social genesis of these phenomena in non-modern/western society, that is, Indonesian society. Currently she is the Director of Center for Social Representations Studies, in Jakarta-Indonesia, and is a member of Reseaux Mondial Serge Moscovici of the Foundation of Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, France. Louise Sundararajan received her Ph.D. in History of Religions from Harvard University, and her Ed.D. in Counseling Psychology from Boston University. She is founder and chair of the Task Force on Indigenous Psychology, which is joined by over two hundred researchers from around the globe. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), and recipient of the Abraham Maslow Award for 2014 from Division 32 (Society for Humanistic Psychology) of APA. She is associate editor of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and editor-in-chief of Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology. She is the author of Understanding Emotion in Chinese Culture: Thinking Through Psychology, and co-author with R. S-k. Ting of Culture, Cognition, and Emotion in China’s Religious Ethnic Minorities: Voices of Suffering Among the Yi. Esther C. Tan is currently a doctoral student in Psychological Science, at Fuller Theological Seminary. She has received her Master of Education in Risk and Prevention-Counseling Track, from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and has worked as an educator in Singapore for the past 20 years. Her current research focuses on socioemotional development Third Culture/Cross-cultural Kids and Adults, vocational psychology, perfectionism of religious believers in China, and research on thriving of spiritual exemplars. Dr. Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting is currently a full-time senior lecturer and coordinator for Master of Counselling Program at Monash University (Malaysia). She holds a B.S. in Psychology from National Chung-Cheng University (Taiwan), an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Wheaton College (IL, USA), an M.A. in Theology, and a Ph.D. in Clinical

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Psychology from Fuller Graduate School of Psychology (CA, USA). She has worked in the United States, China, and Malaysia, training and supervising students from clinical psychology, social work, and counseling program. She found her passion in engaging in research on indigenous psychology, psychology of religion, Chinese diaspora’ mental health issues, and suffering among ethnic minority groups. Kenneth T. Wang is a Professor in Clinical Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary. He received his Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Penn State University. His research focuses on perfectionism, psychological measurement, cross-cultural psychological adjustment, and the intersection of these topics with religion and spirituality. He coauthored the textbook Research Design in Counseling 4th Edition. During Kenneth’s early career, he had the privilege to work alongside Professor Kuo-Shu Yang, the founder of indigenous Chinese psychology. W. Paul Williamson is Professor of Psychology at Henderson State University (Arkansas). He presently serves as Book Review Editor for the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, and is a recipient of the Margaret Gorman Early Career Award and the Distinguished Service Award, given by Division 36 of the American Psychological Association. He has collaborated with Ralph W. Hood Jr., for some 30 years in field research among Appalachian serpent handlers and is co-founder of the extensive Hood-Williamson Research Archives for the Holiness Serpent Handling Sects of Southern Appalachia at Lupton Library, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Dr. Yin Yang obtained his Ph.D. in Psychology at Peking University, and is an Associate Professor at School of Psychology, Beijing Sport University. He was a visiting scholar at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology and completed postdoctoral studies at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science. His main research interests include emotional experience in clinical populations (e.g. anger in antisocial personality disorder, hedonic experience in schizophrenia) and nonclinical populations (e.g. anger toward God in religious people), as well as how culture shapes the way individuals interpret and express their emotional experience.

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Kejia Zhang (Ph.D.), Associate Researcher, Southwest Minzu University, Chengdu, China. She is primarily engaged in religious, social, and cultural research of Yi ethnic people in Southwest China. It includes: study of the infectious diseases of Yi living in Liangshan from the perspective of indigenous psychology (2019–2022), theoretical analysis of the traditional religious identity of Yi people in Liangshan (2019), and a study of the Calendar ritual of the Yi people of Liangshan (2015).

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 11.1

Fig. 11.2

Schematic representation of the Daoist cosmogony according to Taiyishengshui (The great one gives birth to water) (Allan, 2003) (Note = vertical recursion; = horizontal recursion; = generating) Flowchart of search and selection process We completed the offering with a cup of hot coffee and cigarette, a glutinous rice snack and flowers Source Courtesy of the first author The offering that we prepared for his birthday, 2 months after his death, with the traditional yellow rice, and his favorites dishes Source Courtesy of the first author

56 103

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List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 8.1 Table 12.1 Table 12.2 Table 12.3 Table 12.4

Indigenously developed non-christian measures Best practices principle and guidelines Slavic model of psycho-sexual development Interviewee category based on emotion experience and demographic characteristics Factor loading of the 2-factor model for the 14-item AGS (N = 569) Internal consistency and sex difference on Yuan and Nu scales of AGS Partial correlation table of Yuan and Nu with other measures (N = 569)

105 115 189 279 285 285 286

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1 “In My Beginning Is My End” Alvin Dueck

In the midst of the Second World War, T. S. Eliot opined “We can have very little hope of contributing to any immediate social change; and we are more disposed to see our hope in modest and local beginnings, than in transforming the whole world at once… We must keep alive aspirations which can remain valid throughout the longest and darkest period of universal calamity and degradation” (quoted in Gordon, 2000, p. 353). In terms of “local beginnings,” Eliot may have been referring to East Coker, a small community in Somerset, England that brought for him a measure of hope. It was directly connected to his ancestors, who had lived in this village for some 200 years. In retrospect, he penned these words about East Coker. In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, A. Dueck (B) School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_1

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Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. Houses live and die: there is a time for building And a time for living and for generation And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto. (Eliot, 1943/1968, p. 23)

The poem, East Coker, articulates the hope that the English communities would survive the war as the writers of this manuscript hope for the survival of indigenous communities and their spirituality—in spite of the violence perpetrated against them by modernism. The poem is applicable to those indigenous peoples who seek meanings in their origins, in their beginnings. As Eliot suggests, ours is a time when cultures rise and fall, are destroyed and restored; a time for building and generative living, and a time to shake the dust from ancient arras (tapestries) for wisdom today. In addition to encouraging those who seek meaning in their roots, this book also seeks to encourage the psychological community to take more seriously the role of local cultural contexts as they attempt to understand how culture and psychological processes shape spiritual experiences and practices. A third motivation is for our research to serve as a moral witness to the suffering of indigenous communities caused by the toxic effects of Western globalism, neoliberalism, and secularism. The effects of colonialism have been devastating: the loss of mother tongues, traditions, rituals, practices, and beliefs. At the current rate, 60–90% of the world’s some 7000 languages may be at risk of extinction within the next 100 years (Nettle & Romaine, 2000). Not surprisingly, there are calls by indigenous peoples for a recovery of what has been lost (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005), a return to beginnings.

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What interventions might help recover the beginnings of a people? In the Canadian province of British Columbia, there are some 200 aboriginal groups—some of which have suicide rate 800 times the national average. However, for 50% of the groups suicide is essentially unknown (Chandler & Lalonde, 1998). What accounts for this difference? Chandler and Lalonde found that some communities had greater cultural resources and commitment if they had: 1. Taken steps to secure an aboriginal title to their traditional lands; 2. Taken back from government agencies certain rights of selfgovernment; 3. Obtained a degree of community control over educational services; 4. Developed police and fire protection services; 5. Developed their own health delivery services; and 6. Established within their communities officially recognized ‘cultural facilities’ to help preserve and enrich their cultural lives. The number of youth suicide rates were directly correlated to the presence or absence of these cultural resources in their community. Chandler and Lalonde tested the impact of the presence or absence of all six cultural resources in a given community on the suicide rate in that same community and obtained astonishing results. The suicide rate was near 137.5 per 100,000 if none of the six factors were present. If all six cultural continuity factors were present, the suicide rate plummeted to almost zero. “In my beginning is my end.” The recovery of original cultural resources in a communal context may be a source of life and an antidote to suicide. The presence of cultural institutions fosters mental health and a sense of cultural identity that is protective for the adolescent. A deep awareness of one’s culture and resilience are positively correlated. The data suggests that reestablishing cultural institutions may create a sense of community and cultural pride that protect youth from despair.

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Beginnings Millennia before the West developed the formal discipline of psychology, there were indigenous ethnoreligious communities that possessed what today would be called “folk psychologies.” These folk psychologies encompassed lay views of what it meant to be human, have relationships with one another, mature over time, interpret and interact with nature, acknowledge a deity (or deities) or what is transcendent, address suffering and illness, develop modes of healing, encounter death, and so on. Over time, these psychospiritual understandings were, in some communities and in varying degrees, rationally systematized, elaborated in stories, and incarnated in practices. These hunter-gatherer communities understood the significance of nurturing their young with touch, attending to their needs, and embedding the emerging adult in a closeknit community (Narvaez, 2014; Narvaez et al., 2019)—all of which are psychological processes. In other words, they became what Geertz (2008) called a local culture. These societies and their spirituality have existed for most of human history and have accumulated psychological wisdom that is hidden in their spiritual practices. Some of these communities emerged to become major modern religions, whereas others did not. As they transcended their local cultural roots and began to encounter other communities, they refined their own convictions, sense of identity, and similarities. In turn, these refinements created a sense of cohesion and differentiation from the cultures of other communities (Harvey, 2000). These communities developed over time a normative discourse to support and interpret their experiences, daily practices, and convictions. For example, Buddhist discourse encouraged letting go of desire (Cohen, 2010) and Pentecostal Christians’ discourse valorized personal conversation with God (Luhrmann, 2012, 2017). Appalachian serpent handlers included in their discourse an explanation for their practice of handling poisonous serpents in their worship by pointing to God’s promise of faithful protection (Hood & Williamson, 2008). The Amish engage in a spiritual practice which includes forgiving their enemies as enjoined by Jesus Christ. This was evident after the Nickel Mines incident, when five Amish girls were raped and killed and

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the perpetrator was publicly forgiven by one of the Amish leaders (Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, & Nolt, 2013; Kraybill, Nolt, & Weaver- Zercher, 2010). Like aboriginal peoples around the world, traditional Chinese Yi people have a nosology of spirit possession and consult with shamans for healing (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). These ethnoreligious communities have unique and implicit folk psychologies in their spiritualities that undergird their ethical practices and beliefs. These folk theories are the focus of this book, which seeks to honor their indigenous psychologies of spirituality.

The Emergence of Indigenous Psychologies of Spirituality The question asked in this book is whether the Western paradigm of Psychology of Religion, contextualized as it is within its 100-year history, is capable of understanding indigenous spirituality. It has viewed itself as embedded within mainstream psychology, with its commitments to scientific objectivity, operational definitions, and generalizability. However, the presumption of universality creates significant problems for appreciating the particularities of indigenous religious communities. Additionally, the hegemony of scientific psychological discourse may undermine local psychological and epistemological discourses (Gergen, Gulerce, Lock, & Misra, 1996; see also Teo, 2010, 2019 on “epistemic violence”). Gantt and Williams (2018) have pointed to the ways in which scientific psychology overreaches when it presumes to be the only reliable source of knowledge about human nature. What is the problematic that stimulated indigenous research on spirituality? For the present volume, the issues and responses are fourfold. First, mainstream psychology tends to utilize universal linguistic categories, categories largely borrowed from Aristotle: mind-body, perception, motivation, memory, thinking, attitudes, and so on (Aristotle, 2010). These, however, may not be the categories used by Confucians, Buddhists, Christians, Daoists, Muslims, or animists for describing psychological processes correlative to their spiritual experiences. Instead, religious communities have their own implicit psychologies—a point

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which was argued by Cox (2010/1973) more than four decades ago. The investigation of indigenous psychologies emerged, in part, in response to the disregard of the impact of local language on the understandings of the psyche and its relationship to spiritual maturity. An indigenous approach does not attempt to develop a universal psychological language; instead, it begins with what a religious community can teach us about psychological processes in its own language. This new information can then be added to the larger picture of what it means to be human. Second, in the past half century, Western psychologists have become increasingly aware of their social location (Buss, 1975; Gergen et al., 1996; Jacoby, 1975). The assumption that the scientific psychology constructed in America is universal (Danziger, 2009) fails to understand that American psychology is indigenous to American society (Long, in press; Sundararajan, 2019; Yang, 2012). It is largely constructed on data provided by North American participants with little input from research conducted elsewhere (Arnett, 2008). Indeed, this is the genesis of the “universal” psychology that has been exported around the world as both Westerners and non-Westerners graduated from Occidental psychology programs and established facsimiles of Western psychological curricula in their local universities. However, some of these psychology graduates changed their minds about the local relevance of the tinted Western model. In many cases they started over—from the beginning. Virgilio Enriquez, a graduate of Northwestern University, returned to the Philippines to teach psychology in his native tongue, Tagalog, and created a psychology sensitive to the Filipino context (Enriquez, 1988). Ignatio Martín-Baró studied at the University of Chicago and then taught a psychology in El Salvador that was culturally sensitive. However, his teachings also represented a political threat in the chaotic situation of his time and resulted in his murder (Martín-Baró, 1994). K. S. Yang and K. K. Hwang, who graduated from the Universities of Illinois and Hawaii, respectively, returned to Taiwan to articulate a psychology with a Chinese face (Yang, 2012). Hwang (2011) wrote on the Confucian foundation of a Chinese psychology. And the list of indigenous psychologists goes on: Nsamenang (1997) in Cameroon; Long (2013) in South Africa; Pankalla and Ko´snic (2016) in Poland; Doi (2005) in Japan; Chakkarath (2005) in Germany; Shweder

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and Bourne (1984), Ratner (2008), and Sundararajan (2015) in the United States; Ting and Sundararajan (2018) in Malaysia; Yeh (2019) in Taiwan; and Grieves (2008), Dudgeon and Walker (2015) in Australia. Third, the growing recognition of the central importance of cultural sensitivity in psychological discourse around the world was a consequence, in part, of the lament of these indigenous psychologists. In the United States, Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) review article on the impact of culture on cognition and emotion is still a key point of reference for the development of a culturally sensitive psychological research. They argued that fundamental psychological processes such as one’s selfconcept, cognitions, emotions, and motivation are co-emergent with culture. The major publications by Kim and associates were critical as well (Kim & Berry, 1993; Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006) in developing a more sensitive and adaptive approach to cultural psychology. The two volumes of the Handbook of Cultural Psychology by Kitayama and Cohen (Cohen & Kitayama, 2010; Kitayama & Cohen, 2019) provided an overview of how culture shapes psychological processes, with topics such as attachment, personal identity, and subjective well-being (For a recent summary of the history of cultural psychology, see Kashima [2019]). Fourth, an emphasis on indigenous psychologies emerged in response to contradictory findings in mainstream psychology. Repeatedly, research results assumed to be universal have turned out to be local phenomena. The fundamental attribution error may hold in the United States but was not corroborated in Chinese families (Wu, Zhang, & Lai, 2008). Attachment research, with its focus on the parent-infant relationship, appears to be limited to Western settings (Dueck & Xu, 2017; Levine, 2014). In his classic, The Geography of Thought, Nisbett (2004) noted that thinking which is field dependent appeared to be more common in some cultures and communities than others. White (1994) and Sundararajan (2015) have reminded psychologists that emotions assumed to be personally generated also have cultural origins. Jackson et al. (2019) contested the assumption that there are six universal emotions. His team discovered indeed some categories that are universal but there were significant variations between cultures in the number of words available for a particular emotion suggesting that the meaning of an emotion shifted with culture.

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An early example of an indigenous psychology is the classic research conducted by Shweder and Bourne (1984) with the Oriya of India. They found that the Oriya use descriptions of actions when explaining the nature of a friend whereas Americans use abstract labels or personality traits. Oriya, for example, would say, “She brings cakes to my family on festival days,” but Americans would be more likely to say, “She is friendly”; “He shouts curses at his neighbors” versus “He is aggressive and hostile”; “He does not disclose secrets” versus “He is principled.” The Oriya more frequently provided a context, whereas the Americans tended to give acontextual responses. In a subsequent study, they found that Oriyan informants had the ability to recognize objects in terms of overarching categories. Shweder and Bourne (1984) proposed that what really differentiates the Oriya from Americans is that the former place so little value on differentiating (e.g., person from role), generalizing (e.g., “treat outsiders like insiders”), or abstracting (e.g., the concept of “humanity”) and, the relativist is quick to point out, they show so little interest in such intellectual moves because Oriyas, Balinese, and other such folk live by [an organic] metaphor and subscribe to a world-premise that directs their attention and passions to particular systems, relationally conceived and contextually appraised. Indeed, a central tenet of a relativist interpretation of context-dependent person perception is that the metaphors by which people live and the worldviews to which they subscribe mediate the relationships between what one thinks about and how one thinks. (p. 189, italics in original)

This study illustrates the importance of privileging an emic approach to understanding cognition rather than imposing Western categories. The focus of indigenous psychologies is not on the broader culture of a society but on smaller, isolated groups, whose boundaries are thicker but still permeable. They appear to have greater communal coherence due to their unique rituals, language, convictions, values, and moral practices. Indigenous psychologists eschew the privileging of Western psychological categories external to the group studied and tend to work from the bottom-up, favoring a local psychological vocabulary. Methodologically, indigenous psychologists use a wide range of approaches sensitive to the spiritual norms and expressions of local

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culture: focus groups, interviews in the local language, text analysis, computational linguistic programs, and grounded theory analysis of text. The lack of generalizability of indigenous findings is usually considered a limitation by those committed to models of human nature that are universal. However, a view of the person as a mosaic of attributes, with some characteristics more pronounced in some sub-cultures or communities than others, decreases the significance of universalizability. Carefully conducted research may isolate a local dimension of the psyche that can enrich our view of human potentialities. If one takes seriously these developments in understanding the relation of culture to psychology, what are the implications for our understanding of psychological processes in the religious experiences of participants in various ethnoreligious communities? As research on how culture impacted psychological findings increased, there was a concurrent rise in awareness of the potential implications for understanding religious expression. Religious/spiritual individuals in different communities utilized psychological processes in their experiences that were not universal in scope and function but shaped by particular sub-cultures. Hence, the spirituality of a particular community that migrated from one culture to another may manifest very different expressions of their religious sentiments, convictions, and moral practices.

An Overview of the Book To think indigenously is to think historically. Each indigenous community develops a historical memory that nourishes the community. Those who knew the community in an era of vibrancy have memories that continue to support them in the present. An emphasis on indigeneity is then an awareness of social and spiritual beginnings. As the community is shaped by the larger culture, there are those who sense the difference between who they have become and an ideal to which they strive. Each author of the chapters that follow responds, in his or her own way, to the issue of loss of social identity. One author may note the residual resilience amidst suffering that is a product of times past. Another author describes the love of deceased father who is buried in the

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complex rites remembered from the past. Serpent handlers engage in a dangerous practice with the memory of ancient biblical teachings that God will protect them. The four sections that follow are organized as follows. Part I contains a pair of essays that are deconstructive and constructive in turn. Both honor “beginnings.” While the former essay strikes a more critical tone, the next essay has a more constructive agenda. In their essay, “Prolegomena for the Development of Indigenous Psychologies of Spirituality: Colonization, Decolonization, and Indigeneity,” Alvin Dueck and Michael Marossy suggest that a recovery of “beginnings” requires an analysis of the colonial imposition of neoliberal versions of religion, psychology, and psychology of religion. The alternative, they propose, is that instead of viewing indigenous spiritualties through the Western lens of “religion,” local spiritual practices can provide the external markers of the spiritual tradition. A tradition-sensitive approach to indigenous psychology would not take modern psychologies as its point of departure but would elucidate the folk psychology that governs the indigenous person’s sense of identity. In her essay, “The Chinese notions of Harmony: Cognition, Emotion, and Morality of a Strong-Ties Society,” Louise Sundararajan drills down into her own Confucian heritage and the ancient Daoist text known as Taiyishengshui (The Great One Gives Birth to Water) (Allan, 2003; 4 BCE). There she discovers that the notion of harmony, as an ultimate reality, functions as a transcendent worldview, a religion. Harmony, as a root metaphor, “…calls for an expanded framework of religion that has room for the immanent, embodied manifestations of ultimate reality, or the Dao” (this volume, p. 51). Harmony focuses on the pragmatics of life instead of serving transcendent being. Rather than promulgating a theology, the notion of harmony has a unique yin-yang epistemology. It does not follow the sacred-secular dichotomy because all of life is to be influenced by the Dao. The notion of harmony, Sundararajan suggests, may assist China in shifting from a traditional, familial culture to a more public space of unrelated strangers where harmony brings freedom through community, where new life emerges with mutuality and helpfulness, and where equilibrium is broken and restored. The harmony of the in-group, the family, is extended to the out-group, the stranger.

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In Part II of this book, the focus is on indigenous methodologies that are peaceable (Ting & Zhang, pp. 73–96), indigenous (Wang & Tan, pp. 97–126) and phenomenological (Louchakova-Schwartz, pp. 127– 155). The first essay in this section by Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting and Kejia Zhang proposes a research paradigm that is peaceable in nature. Their chapter, “Giving Voice to the Voiceless: A Peaceable Research Paradigm for Psychology in China,” attempts to construct an epistemology and methodology that is more sensitive to indigenous religions. They lament the fact that in China indigenous religions have received so little research attention. Ting and Zhang carefully described indigenous religions and found that they emphasized communal, external, and participatory rituals in their spirituality. On the other hand, Western psychology and institutional religion placed greater emphases on individual, private, and transcendent mental states. The Yi people who participated in their research project reflected a spirituality that was more grounded, embedded, and holistic. The authors caution the use of Western instruments in indigenous Eastern cultural contexts given the differences between indigenous spirituality and institutional religiosity, and the differences in how family-oriented spirituality and religion function in more collectivized cultures. The second essay in this section by Kenneth T. Wang and Esther C. Tan is entitled “Psychology of Religion Instrumentation: Systematic Review with an International and Multiple Faith Focus.” The authors begin with the assumption that culture, religion, and psychology are deeply intertwined. They engaged in a systematic search for measures that have been translated, adapted, or indigenously-developed for nonJudeo-Christian populations, with an emphasis on Islamic scales. They propose best research practices that include taking seriously the theological structure of particular traditions rather than using the same questions across religious groups. They also illumine the importance of good sampling and data collection practices that include and incorporate a good spread in levels of commitment in religious believers within a group. Finally, Wang and Tan emphasize both the importance of developing trust with the selected sample and providing adequate psychometric properties.

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The third essay develops a phenomenological research approach to understanding indigenous spirituality. In her essay entitled “The ‘Wonder to Behold’: Reflections on Phenomenological Research of Alienic Spirituality,” Olga Louchakova-Schwartz suggests that the phenomenological method is able to clarify obscure forms of spiritual experience because of its sensitivity to historical development and semantic cultural contexts. Indigenous spirituality is understood as spirituality of the other, of an alienic form of experience. LouchakovaSchwartz utilizes Waldenfels’ responsive interculturalism and Husserl’s historical reduction in her phenomenological research. She makes a distinction between psychological and spiritual experiences, and explains “why cultivating wonder comprises a necessary condition of possibility for accessing spiritual experience of the other on its own terms” (this volume, p. 127). In Part III, the essays focus on the unique psychological processes of specific indigenous groups and the impact of such processes on their spiritual experiences. Since mainstream psychology aspires to be universal, encountering authentic indigeneity requires building up local psychologies from the “beginning”—that is, from the bottom-up. In different ways, authors reinforce the themes of recovering beginnings, discovering cultural roots, and honoring cultural configurations that have impacted local spiritualities. The first essay by Ralph Hood and Paul Williamson (“An Indigenous Appalachian Faith Tradition”) reports on a serpent handling tradition indigenous to the Appalachian region in southern USA. For some 25 years the writers have built a relationship of trust with this religiously and psychologically marginalized community. In their chapter, they demonstrate how the cultural context of the group can help us understand the serpent handling tradition as an indigenous tradition. Unique to this tradition is their religious practice of handling venomous serpents as part of their worship services. They do so in obedience to a perceived mandate of Christ found in the Bible (Mark 16: 17–18). The authors detail an indigenous theology the worshippers use to explain bites and deaths of handlers. Hood and Williamson conclude that “what often is observed by many as only an aberrant and unfortunate practice can be seen from a cultural perspective as a powerful and meaningful sacrament

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that allows for transcendent experiences with eternal significance” (Hood & Williamson, this volume, p. 159). In the next essay, two Polish psychologists, Andrzej Pankalla and Konrad Ko´snik, examine sexuality among pre-Christian Slavs in their essay “Indigenous Psychology as Religious: Slavic Understanding of Human Psycho-Sexual Development.” They propose that the knowledge and beliefs of pre-Christian Slavs regarding sexuality and psycho-sexual development of a human being constituted their religion. Specifically, Slavic sexuality included polygamy and extramarital sex, which were perceived as desirable activities. Pankalla and Ko´snik reconstruct a psycho-sexual developmental model for these pre-Christian communities based on Slavic rites of passage in six stages. Themes from this indigenous developmental model include a naturalistic/biocentric approach to human life, reproduction as a central human task, and the crucial meaning of women in a Slavic metaphysics of sexuality. In her essay: “Towards Understanding the Psychology of Emotion, Indigenous Spirituality, and Christianity in Korea,” Jenny Pak suggests that an ancient folk psychology that is animist in character has influenced contemporary Korean spirituality. Long before the arrival of Christianity, religion in Korea took the form of belief in spirits and shamans. Pak argues that Shamanism shaped all imported religions—including charismatic Korean Christianity. The latter includes mystical spirituality and, at times, syncretism with shamanistic notions of prosperity and healing. Religious experience, then, is not a purely rational activity that involves explicit, conscious judgment. She states: “The wide range of indigenous beliefs and spiritual practices have existed long before Christianity was introduced, it is critical to examine the various strands woven into distinctively Korean Christian passion, spirituality, and character which must be understood in the complex historical and cultural context” (this volume, p. 203). In his chapter, “How India Almost Lost its Soul: The Detrimental Effects of Ethnocentrism and Colonialism on the Psychology of Spirituality,” Pradeep Chakkarath aims to show how a cultural-psychological approach can deepen our understanding of psychology of religion. He begins by differentiating “spirituality” and “religiosity.” He makes the observation that the devaluation of psychological contributions from the

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non West emerges from Eurocentric philosophical traditions. As a result, Western psychologists have privileged Hellenistic psychological discourse and exported it globally. Chakkarath addresses the charge that Indian philosophy is irrational by elucidating the complex Indian understandings of human development and epistemologies implicit in Hinduism. He concludes: “It should also become apparent that these Indian accounts about religion, the self, spirituality, psychological methods of self-control, and self-observation, which serve scientific as well as therapeutic purposes, can quite easily be appreciated as an Indian contribution to the psychology of religion” (this volume, p. 227). Risa Permanadeli and Louise Sundararajan compare bereavement practices in Javanese and Western societies in their essay “Savoring in Bereavement: The Javanese Journey through Death” (pp. 253–270). Western societies tend to experience death as more terrifying and final than do some other cultures. The Javanese talk about savoring the grieving process, about the fragrant presence of the departed loved one. Central to Javanese spirituality is the cultivation and refinement of emotions such as grieving. This spirituality holds that a good death is possible—that death can be peaceful, with little suffering, so that the end is like falling asleep with a smile on one’s face. However, attaining a good death demands a life-long journey of letting go, of self-emptying. Javanese practices of bereavement are understandable “from the perspective of emotional refinement (Frijda & Sundararajan, 2007), which posits that all experiences, including negative ones, can be savored, if one knows how to properly cultivate one’s emotions” (this volume, p. 253). The first author reports on her father’s death and her process of bereavement. In their essay, Yin-Yang and Alvin Dueck report on studies focused on anger toward God among Chinese Christians (pp. 271–291). In the West, anger toward God is a form of spiritual struggle that is threatening to mental and spiritual health. The authors propose that a relational cognitive style nurtured in a collective culture may impact one’s willingness to express anger toward a deity. Chinese Christians were recruited and interviewed about their reported discontentment, anger, resentment, or disappointment with God. The data based on their verbal reports suggested that it was important to differentiate Nu (anger) from Yuan (resentment). Nu anger attributed unfairness to God while Yuan anger

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was a milder form of sadness and resentment that perhaps God did not care for or protect the individual. In the final essay, “Indigenous Psychologies of Spirituality: Remembering, Excavating, and Individuating” (pp. 293–312) Alvin Dueck, following the lead of Chakkarath (2013), suggests we remember some of the pioneers of indigenous psychology of religion. Dueck highlights the work of Catholic missionaries like Matteo Ricci working in China and Sagahún in Mexico, who were forerunners in their careful research on culture and their reflection on national character. Dueck goes on to present the innovative research of psychologists who excavate psychologies embedded in ancient religious traditions that existed long before Christendom or major world religions like Hinduism or Buddhism and are still extant today. Dueck reports on a study of the impact of cultural niches on cognition and emotions and its impact on religious expression and sources of help (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). The final section raises the question regarding the influence of powerful transnational forces on indigenous religious communities and indigenous psychologists and their ability to differentiate from inimical social forces.

References Alfred, T., & Corntassel, J. (2005). Being indigenous: Resurgences against contemporary colonialism. Government and Opposition, 40 (4), 597–614. Allan, S. (2003). The great one, water, and the Laozi: New light from guodian. T’oung Pao, 89 (4–5), 237–285. Aristotle. (2010). De anima: On the soul . Newburyport: Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Co. Arnett, J. J. (2008). The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less American. American Psychologist, 63(7), 602–624. Buss, A. R. (1975). The emerging field of the sociology of psychological knowledge. American Psychologist, 30 (10), 988–1002. Chakkarath, P. (2005). What can Western psychology learn from indigenous psychologies? Lessons from Hindu psychology. In W. Friedlmeier, P. Chakkarath, & B. Schwarz (Eds.), Culture and human development: The importance of cross-cultural research to the social sciences (pp. 31–51). New York: Psychology Press.

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Chakkarath, P. (2013). Bernardino de Sahagún and Matteo Ricci: Catholic missionaries as forerunners of a culture sensitive psychology. In A. Loretoni, J. Pauchard, & A. Pirni (Eds.), Questioning universalism: Western and New confucian conceptions and their implications (pp. 185–198). Pisa, Italy: Edizioni ETS. Chandler, M. J., & Lalonde, C. (1998). Cultural continuity as a hedge against suicide in Canada’s first nations. Transcultural Psychiatry, 35 (2), 191–219. Cohen, D., & Kitayama, S. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of cultural psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press. Cohen, E. (2010). From the Bodhi tree, to the analyst’s couch, then into the MRI scanner: The psychologization of Buddhism. Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 8, 97–119. Cox, R. H. (Ed.). (1973/2010). Religious systems and psychotherapy. Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers. Danziger, K. (2009). The holy grail of universality. In T. Teo, P. Stenner, A. Rutherford, E. Park, & C. Baerveldt (Eds.), Varieties of theoretical psychology—ISTP 2007 (pp. 2–11). Toronto: Captus. Doi, T. (2005). Understanding amae: The Japanese concept of need-love. Leiden, The Netherlands: Global Oriental. Dudgeon, P., & Walker, R. (2015). Decolonising Australian psychology: Discourses, strategies, and practice. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 3(1), 276–297. Dueck, A., & Xu, H. (2017). Culture, attachment, and spirituality: Indigenous, ideological and international perspectives. Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, 28, 255–277. Eliot, T. S. (1943/1968). East coker. In T. S. Eliot, The four quartets. New York: Mariner Books. Enriquez, V. G. (1988). From colonial to liberation psychology: The indigenous perspective in Philippine psychology. Manila: De La Salle University Press. Frijda, N. H., & Sundararajan, L. (2007). Emotion refinement: A theory inspired by Chinese poetics. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(3), 227–241. Gantt, E. E., & Williams, R. N. (Eds.). (2018). On hijacking science: Exploring the nature and consequences of overreach in psychology. New York: Routledge. Geertz, C. (2008). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Gergen, K. J., Gulerce, A., Lock, A., & Misra, G. (1996). Psychological science in cultural context. American Psychologist, 51(5), 496–523. Gordon, L. (2000). T. S. Eliot: An imperfect life. New York: W. W. Norton.

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Grieves, V. (2008). Aboriginal spirituality: A baseline for indigenous knowledges development in Australia. Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 2, 363–398. Harvey, G. (Ed.). (2000). Indigenous religions: A companion. London: Cassell. Hood, R., & Williamson, W. P. (2008). Them that believe: The power and meaning of the Christian serpent-handling tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hwang, K. K. (2011). Foundations of Chinese psychology: Confucian social relations. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Science & Business Media. Jacoby, R. (1975). Social amnesia: Conformist psychology from Adler to Laing. Boston: Beacon Press. Jackson J. C., Watts, J., Henry, T. R., List, J-M., Forkel, R., Mucha, P. J.,… Lindquist, K. A. (2019). Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure. Science, 366, 1517–1522. Kashima, Y. (2019). A history of cultural psychology: Cultural psychology as a tradition and a movement. In S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology (pp. 53–78). New York: Guilford Press. Kim, U., & Berry, J. (1993). Indigenous psychologies: Experience and research in cultural context. Chicago: Sage. Kim, U., Yang, K., & Hwang, K. (2006). Contributions to indigenous and cultural psychology: Understanding people in context. In U. Kim, K. Yang, & K. Hwang (Eds.), indigenous and cultural psychology: Understanding people in context (pp. 3–26). New York: Springer. Kitayama, S., & Cohen, D. (Eds.). (2019). Handbook of cultural psychology. New York: Guilford Press. Kraybill, D. B., Johnson-Weiner, K. M., & Nolt, S. M. (2013). The Amish. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kraybill, D. B., Nolt, S. M., & Weaver-Zercher, D. L. (Eds.). (2010). Amish grace: How forgiveness transcended tragedy. New York: Wiley. LeVine, R. A. (2014). Attachment theory as cultural ideology. In H. Otto & H. Keller (Eds.), Different faces of attachment: Cultural variations on a universal human need (pp. 50–65). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, W. (2013). Rethinking “relevance”: South African psychology in context. History of Psychology, 16 (1), 19–35. Long, W. (in press). Psychology and oppression. In W. Pickgren (Ed.), Oxford encyclopedia of the history of psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God . New York: Vintage.

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Part I Deconstruction and Reconstruction

2 Prolegomena for the Development of Indigenous Psychologies of Spirituality: Colonization, Decolonization, and Indigeneity Alvin Dueck and Michael Marossy

Imperial expansion has, in the modern world, given way to a process of globalization dominated by neoliberalism, market capitalism, secularism, and the valorization of happiness—all of which undermine traditional societies. Alas, its effects are in many ways similar to colonialism. And as neoliberalism, masked as it is within globalization, permeates traditional societies, it leaves destabilization and untold suffering in its wake. It does so by reducing cultural complexity and richness to a single dimension such as economics (Baudrillard, 1990), by making pre-capitalist collective communities economic misfits (Sundararajan, 2019), and by imposing Western notions of human nature and spirituality as “truth”— a premise which is reinforced through Western military and economic prowess. However, one response to colonialism, ancient and modern, is the yearning by the colonized for political autonomy, for recovery of A. Dueck (B) · M. Marossy School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_2

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tradition, and for a renewed cultural vision. Canadian First Nations psychologists, Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel (2005), state boldly: Indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. The communities, clans, nations and tribes we call Indigenous peoples are just that: Indigenous to the lands they inhabit, in contrast to and in contention with the colonial societies and states that have spread out from Europe and other centers of empire. It is this oppositional, place-based existence, along with the consciousness of being in struggle against the dispossessing and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples, that fundamentally distinguishes Indigenous peoples from other peoples of the world. (p. 597)

A psychology of religion that uncritically perpetuates neoliberalism’s universalizing assumptions will unwittingly view local spiritualities from perspectives of psychology and religion developed in globalizing contexts. This creates an occasion for inevitable misunderstanding. Perhaps it is for this reason that First Nations writer Dale Turner does not think that Settler society will ever understand their spirituality: In a sense, this [spirituality] is the most significant difference between indigenous and European world views. As indigenous people, many of us believe we can explain our understandings of the “spiritual” and that the dominant culture will some day “get it.” But history has shown us that at least at this time in the relationship, we must keep to ourselves our sacred knowledge as we articulate and understand it from within our own cultures, for it is this knowledge that defines us as indigenous peoples. (2006, p. 110, italics in original)

Why is it that Settler societies do not understand indigenous spirituality? What is it in our understanding of culture, psychology, and religion that blinkers our vision? Perforce we must examine each of these terms from the perspective of indigenous peoples. The United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2008) emphasizes that the nurturing, understanding, and exercise of indigenous spirituality is to

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be honored. Hence, a cultural psychology of religion that honors indigenous spirituality will seek to understand emically how psychology and spirituality are expressed and experienced by local, indigenous peoples. We propose that an indigenous psychology of spirituality involves two reconsiderations. First, a tradition-sensitive approach (Dueck, Ting, & Cutiongco, 2007; Dueck & Reimer, 2009; MacIntyre, 1988) would not take modern psychologies as its point of departure but would elucidate the folk psychology (Bruner, 1990) that governs the indigenous person’s sense of identity. This field privileges a local group’s understanding of their ethnic boundaries, their sense of separateness, their experience of transcendence, and the grammar of their psychological language. We assume that indigenous identities will vary in hybridity as the individual and community are exposed to other indigenous communities—including Settler societies. A universalizing psychology may not be sensitive to this blend. Second, since indigeneity in the title of this chapter is the modifier of psychologies of spirituality, local understandings of religion will be our point of departure. We argue that indigenous psychologies of spirituality must not begin with the understanding of religion as exemplified by the so-called “World Religions.” We do not assume a universal religious instinct or core experience from which the diversity of religions emerges. Instead, we focus on the spirituality of indigenous communities as they represent it. Local spiritual practices provide the external markers of the spiritual tradition. If the core of the indigenous person’s worldview is spiritual, then an indigenous psychology of religion will give epistemological priority to cognitive styles and affective grammars that flow from the local culture and impact its spirituality. In varying degrees, what is common to the work of indigenous psychologists of religion is the assumption that an indigenous study of psychological processes in religion/spirituality may require a process of decolonizing the colonizer’s understandings of psychology (Harvey, 2000). What is necessary is to uncover more indigenous, local understandings, a process Garroutte (2003) calls a “radical indigenism.” Intentionality in promoting such “radical” indigenization may prove effective for nuancing our psychological vocabularies and expanding our ability to engage diverse religious/spiritual perspectives.

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We do not think a colonial psychology and a colonized religion will enable us to understand the spirituality of indigenous peoples. It is entirely possible that an alien understanding of psychological processes and a systematized view of religion will distort local spiritualities. And so, we begin with reflection on the meanings of colonization, globalization, decolonization and indigeneity. We then apply these understandings to indigenous folk psychologies and spirituality. Addressing issues of colonization, decolonization, and indigeneity in psychology of religion will serve as prolegomena for research into indigenous psychologies of spirituality.

Culture Given the myriad of definitions of culture, we will delimit the specific construction that shapes his essay. We begin with an exploration of the meanings of culture as indigenous. It may be that the received view of the notion of culture as universal is colonial in nature and that the first task is to decolonize our understanding of culture. If the notion of culture is too abstract, ahistorical, or acontextual, it may fail to include the impact of oppressive cultures on local psyches (Dueck, Ansloos, Johnson, & Fort, 2017). If our understanding of culture leans toward the cognitive, as is the case with Geertz’s (1973) definition, then the profound spiritual yearning of the indigenous and the poor may not register in our understanding of culture. To decolonize conceptions of culture will move us toward indigeneity, not because it is the logical and linguistic opposite, but because it may help us to attend to indigenous peoples’ expressed desire for the recovery and reconstruction of their particular tradition as a way of meeting their present challenges. The organization of this section is as follows. First, as noted above, one cannot understand the construal of indigeneity apart from the distortion occasioned by colonization and globalization. Second, the processes of decolonization and the affirmation of the recovery, renewal, and restoration of indigenous cultures continue apace with the encouragement

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of the United Nations (UNDRIP, 2008). Third, in our contemporary context, the continual process of interacting with majority cultures changes the face of indigenous communities.

Colonization Colonization is a willful use of power and coercion to subjugate a people by denying land claims, isolating people groups, forbidding the use of one’s mother tongue, forcing resettlement (Australia and Canada), disparaging the spirituality, rejecting home rule, denigrating of selfworth, ignoring intellectual property rights (e.g. medicinal; Incayar, Wintrob, & Bouchard, 2009), and more. Indigenous peoples’ religion is dismissed as superstition and their psyche viewed as primitive. Colonizers tend to disregard local knowledge systems (Geertz, 2008), including concepts of wellbeing. Prior to colonization Aboriginal peoples had control over all aspects of their life. They were able to exercise self-determination in its purest form. They were able to determine their ‘very-being,’ the nature of which ensured their psychological fulfillment and incorporated the cultural, social and spiritual sense. (National Aboriginal Health Strategy Working Party, NAHSWP, 1989, p. ix)

Colonization, in the form of historical, political, cultural, and social shaping in Settler societies, has impacted all dimensions of indigenous wellbeing (Dudgeon, Bray, D’costa, & Walker, 2017). It has impacted body, mind, and soul whether the colonization is external (oppressor) or internal (self-colonization, Hwang, 2016). In addition to overt struggle, there is the subtle psychological process of the erasure of history. Writing some five decades ago, Frantz Fanon (1963) comments: Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today. (p. 210)

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Decolonization may then be viewed as the process of recovery of one’s history and heritage in conversation with other cultures.

Decolonization: Indigenizing Colonized Culture As indicated above, indigenizing involves the recovery of a way of life deemed lost through colonization, regardless of whether the colonizing agents are historically a contextual scientific research, Occidental psychological paradigms, or the reductionist forces of globalization. An emphasis on indigeneity affirms the right of indigenous peoples to recover their language, customs, spirituality, land, and self-government. The defense of indigenous rights is occasioned by the long-term consequences of colonization. The process of decolonizing culture makes evident the ways in which colonization has impacted society and the ways indigenous peoples seek to remedy the situation. Our understanding of the meanings of indigeneity draws heavily on the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2008). It is based on the concerns raised by indigenous peoples, and the declaration was eventually signed by all United Nations members. It opens with the following affirmations: Indigenous peoples have the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law. (Article 1) Indigenous peoples and individuals are free and equal to all other peoples and individuals and have the right to be free from any kind of discrimination, in the exercise of their rights, in particular that based on their indigenous origin or identity. (Article 2)

The declaration goes on to encourage the development, revitalization, and maintenance of institutional structures, distinctive customs, spiritual traditions, and customs. Indigenous communities thus have the right to express, practice, develop, and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs, and

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ceremonies to the next generation. (Note the inclusion of spirituality in the indigenous recovery of tradition, something we will address in the next section). They have the right to protect their own knowledge, “including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts” (Article 31.1). Most importantly they have the right to the dignity and diversity of their cultures, traditions, histories, and aspirations. In the hope that this declaration captures the hopes and dreams of First Nations peoples globally, this articulation will be our point of departure for understanding the nature and goal of decolonization and indigenization. Consistent with the UNDRIP, Eva Marie Garroutte (2003), in her book Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America, has called for a radical indigenism that would shape our understanding of Aboriginal people. Rather than imposing etic knowledge systems, Garroutte argues that a radical indigenism would be based upon the teaching of the tribal elders, extant sacred stories, and our current knowledge of the ways that healthy native communities have functioned historically (p. 146). It assumes that Aboriginal …peoples possess complete philosophies of knowledge and models of inquiry that include not only the sources just named, but also knowledge that is received through ceremonial means: dreams, through communication with the nonhuman relatives that habit the universe; through collective ritualized seeking of spiritually faithful communities; and through interactions with land and language for which the conventionally defined academic disciplines have no name and no place. It will likely ask the academy to allow for different constructions of the “observable,” of the relationship between mind and body, of the nature and powers of language, of the meaning and utility of “subjective” knowledge and have unique (not repeatable) events – and much more.” (p. 146)

Radical indigenism insists that the academy learn from native communities because: [B]y accepting indigenous perspectives on knowledge conventional scholars might discover things that they presently do not know, and

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have no means to note, because of the limitations of the intellectual frameworks within which they operate. (p. 151)

Radical Indigenism points to differences in assumptions about knowledge that result in the dominant culture’s misunderstanding of indigenous knowledge. It proposes the rebuilding of indigenous knowledge from its fundamental principles. While western scholars struggle with the myriad of meanings of indigeneity, the question that ends up getting sidelined is that of the self-perception of the very groups referred to as “indigenous.” What do they struggle with, mourn over, and hope for? Survival, security, safety, nutrition, and employment are often the concerns of particular groups. Edward Sapir (1924) proposed at the beginning of the last century that the foundation of culture is the emotion of yearning. He argued that a genuine culture is one that “gives its bearers a sense of inner satisfaction, a feeling of spiritual mastery” (p. 420). He suggested that culture is a collective, spiritual effort. To the extent that local peoples concur with the United Nations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2008), activists and researchers are justified in the use of the language of indigeneity. Such advocates would do well to honor the indigenous yearnings expressed, the customs revered, and the images of common life engendered. In other words, understandings of indigeneity obtained from local peoples should be privileged over definitions created in the Western academy. In spite of the conflict over definitions of indigenous discourse, the language of “indigenous rights” has gone viral as a counter-narrative to modernization, globalization, and neoliberalism. From the pragmatic activists’ point of view, the notion of indigeneity has contributed to the notion of collective rights and the empowerment of the indigenous peoples’ movement. Activists argue for the rights of indigenous peoples to access resources and to respect the dignity of their culture. In the current climate in which modern states increasingly lean toward greater cultural homogeneity over diversity and cultural inclusion, an emphasis on particularity, locality, and uniqueness seems most appropriate. At the same time, however, we do not frame our understanding of indigeneity in terms of homogeneity or isolation. Instead, as local peoples

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come in contact with the customs of other peoples, they must be empowered to choose to incorporate the customs they find helpful and to ignore those they do not. This essay honors the yearning of colonized peoples to live out their lives in traditional ways in spite of colonization. Indigenous persons have the right to define their own identity.

Religion We have proposed that imagining a future for indigenous psychology of religion must involve coming to terms with a culture characterized by the excessive use of power: colonialism. Now we extend that concern to the meanings of religion and spirituality. Just as the reality of colonialism is critical for understanding indigenous experiences of culture, so also is the Western notion of religion. In fact, the latter has played a critical role in the colonizing Western and non-Western societies through its assumptions regarding the nature of religion and spirituality. We argue in this section that reified (Smith, 1964) and global understandings of religion are problematic for an indigenous psychology of religion. We propose that the work of Lindbeck (1984) can prove helpful in moving us toward an emic understanding indigenous spirituality.

Colonization and Globalized Religion Colonizers dismissed traditional forms of spirituality as magic, superstition, primitive, or mere animism. Frantz Fanon (1963) states clearly how the colonizer’s own religion was imposed on the colonized: I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. … Inside a single nation, religion splits up the people into different spiritual communities, all of them kept up and stiffened by colonialism and its instruments. (pp. 42, 161)

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This process of colonization of spirituality is evident in the practice of colonial education of indigenous peoples from the United States, Central/South America, and Canada to the Russian Federation, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, which involved systematic re-education of indigenous peoples through what became known as the residential school system (Smith, 2009). In this system, “the Canadian government believed it was responsible for educating and caring for the country’s aboriginal people. It thought their best chance for success was to learn English and adopt Christianity and Canadian customs” (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2008; CBC, italics inserted). Indigenous notions of spirituality were cast aside in the name of preparing indigenous peoples for participation in global capitalism. As this process continues in our current milieu, globalized neoliberalism’s more subtle form of colonialism has remade religion and spirituality into commodities (Carrette & King, 2005) available to consumers whether in Tibet, China, Mombasa, or Kenya. A full array of spiritualities is available to the seeker where commitment is not required and abandonment of traditional religion is assumed. The result may be a wholesale adoption of, or selective fusion with, the religious beliefs, practices, and attitudes of Settler societies. Meanwhile, aspects of indigenous spiritualities that are deemed to have no currency in the religious free market of neoliberalism are left by the wayside. Yet, from our view, the question that begs to be answered is: What exactly is the “religion” that is researched so studiously in the global field of the psychology of religion? Is it that of the colonizer, a spirituality that assumes subservience that is imposed on the colonized? Is it a spirituality so abstract that it is unrelated to the reality of indigenous peoples’ colonized existence? We argue that a Western, colonizing notion of religion is powerful enough to impose alien forms of spirituality on indigenous communities. It is thus to a closer examination of the history and assumptions of this Western notion of “religion” that we now turn.

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Reified Religion The semantic journey of the concept of religion in the West appears to have followed the same trajectory as that of the notion of culture (Dueck, Ansloos, Johnson, & Fort, 2017), namely, toward abstract, intellectual systematization. Historically, spiritual experience began with the piety of relating to a transcendent being or object (Bellah, 2011). However, with the rise of modernity, faith traditions became systematized religions. Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1964) suggests this process, beginning in the sixteenth CE century, is a consequence of members of spiritual traditions becoming culturally aware of other spiritual communities/cultures. In the process of comparison, similarities and differences are noted. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, religion thus emerged as a “concept of schematic externalization that reflected, and served, the clash of conflicting religious parties, the emergence of a triumphant intellectualism, and the emerging new information from beyond the seas about the patterns of other men’s [sic ] religious life” (Smith, p. 44). In short, we had the emergence of “religion” as a concept. It was Hegel who so powerfully asserted that religion could be seen as something real in itself that demanded to be reckoned with. The notion of homo religiosus was born. Smith (1964) summarized his argument as follows: The concept ‘religion’, then, in the West has evolved. Its evolution has included a long-range development that we may term a process of reification: mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective systematic entity. In this development one factor has been the rise into Western consciousness in relatively recent times of several so conceived entities, constituting a series: the religions of the world. (Smith, p. 50; emphasis, added)

Smith (1964) went a step further: He proposed a moratorium on the use of the word “religions,” a word that is not available or easily translated into languages outside of Western civilization (p. 22). Throughout history there are persons who were capable of being religious without the help of an intellectual analysis of the term. Smith avers: “I suggest that the term ‘religion’ is confusing, unnecessary, and distorting” (p. 48).

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He thinks that the vitality of personal spirituality has been seriously harmed by the language of religions (pp. 49–50). We are compelled to ask whether the imposition of an abstract notion of religion is toxic for indigenous communities, whose spiritualities may be more concrete, communal, and immediate.

Decolonizing Religion There are scholars engaged in religious studies who do not begin by assuming the existence of a universal paradigm for conceptualizing religion. Long time Yale professor, the late George Lindbeck, is one of them. This comes as no surprise once one takes his personal history into account. Lindbeck grew up in Loyang, China. His seventeen-year sojourn in this city resulted in a deep love for Chinese literature and culture. He listened in on the conversations his highly Sinicized parents had with their Chinese visitors and concluded that it was possible to be religiously hybridic: to be Christian in spirit and yet Confucian to the core (Wood, 2006). Lindbeck called his approach to religion the “cultural-linguistic alternative.” That is, religion is like a language and religious beliefs are like the grammar of this language. This language is prior to experience— and, of course, the language varies with culture. “Religions are seen as comprehensive interpretive schemes, usually embodied in myths or narratives, and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world” (p. 32). In this way, for Lindbeck, the interpretive framework of religion organizes all of life: thought, affect, and behavior. “Like a culture or language, it is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivity of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities” (p. 33). It is connected to a form of life. “It’s doctrines, cosmic stories or myths, and ethical directives are integrally related to the rituals of practices, the sentiments or experiences it evokes, the actions it recommends, and institutional forms it develops. All this is involved in comparing religion to a cultural linguistic system” (33). Lindbeck (1984) argues:

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Religious change or innovation must be understood, not as proceeding from new experiences, but as resulting from the interactions of a culturallinguistic system with changing situations. Religious traditions are not transformed, abandoned, or replaced because of an upwelling of new and different ways of feeling about the self, world, or God, but because a religious interpretive scheme (embodied, as it always is, in religious practice and belief ) develops anomalies in its application in new settings. (p. 39)

Different religions then do not thematize the same experience; different religions thematize different experiences. “In fact, different religions seem in many cases to produce fundamentally divergent depth experiences of what it is to be human. Empirically available data seem to support a cultural-linguistic rather than an experiential-expressive understanding of the relation of religion and experience” (p. 41). A First Nation person’s experience of love for the earth is thus not necessarily analogous to the Christian’s wonder about a world created by God. Karuna for Buddhists, fraternité for the French Revolutionary, and agape (love) for the Christian assume three different ways of configuring the self in the world. They are not identical transcultural experiences, but (pace Wittgenstein, 1953) a set of family resemblances. Lindbeck’s argument thus heightens the incommensurability of religions and serves as a corrective for universalistic psychologies of religion. There is no common framework with which to understand all religions. Each religion constitutes a world of its own shaped by sacred texts and a grammar of belief and emotion. It is a strong argument for the importance of research of indigenous spiritualities with indigenous psychology by indigenous researchers who know their spirituality best.

Psychologies So far, we have noted the importance of affirming a spiritual yearning for indigenous culture after peeling back the layers of colonialism. We have critiqued views of religion/spirituality that fail to take into consideration the experiential flow of some indigenous spiritualities and that impose a reified model of systematized and rationalized “religion” on

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indigenous peoples. In this section, we endeavor to uncover aspects of religious/spiritual psychologies that undergird daily life and are more resistant to the hegemony of neoliberal psychological forces. We argue that when contemporary psychologies are colonized and exported by the neoliberal tradition, the consequences may be harmful to indigenous peoples whose culture is diametrically opposite to the telos of neoliberalism. The process of decolonization will require recognition that indigenous spirituality is potentially distorted by neoliberal psychological perspectives. Bhatia (2002, 2017) argues that early EuroAmerican psychologists were deeply implicated in the colonizing project (Bhatia, 2002; Hall, 1904; Spencer, 1851/1969) in their views of the non-Western as innately intellectually inferior. Hall wrote that “savages in most respects are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of adult size” (p. 649). Today, this threat continues to be perpetuated through the dissemination of neoliberal ideology by religionists, institutions (IMF), and psychologists. Since the early 1990s, a spate of books and articles have emerged delineating the features of neoliberalism (Binkley, 2014; Brown, 2005; Davies & Bansel, 2007; Harvey, 2007). In a review of the literature on liberalism, Boas and Gans-Morse (2009) identify three views of neoliberalism. First, it is a socio-political and economic form of life (Wittgenstein, 1953) that has been shaping Western cultures, and increasingly other cultures around the world, for past centuries—but especially since the nineteenth century. It is committed to a free market, maximal competition, deregulation, privatization of public institutions, and limited government. Second, neoliberalism is a development strategy advocated to developing countries (Hoksbergen & Madrid, 1997) as a recipe for growth and/or modernization. A key ingredient within this recipe is a political project to carry out the prescriptions. Third, and most relevant to our purposes here, neoliberalism is an ideology with normative ideas about collectivities, individualism, and the overarching value of personal freedom. Boas and Gans-Morse (2009) comment: “If a neoliberal development model is a specific plan for how certain society will be organized, a neoliberal ideology is a more general statement about how society should be organized” (p. 144, italics in the original). Situating

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his conceptualization of neoliberalism within a critical neo-Sprangian approach, Thomas Teo (2018) describes such a neoliberal ideology as emerging from within “a new form of life and subjectivity … [that] has been emergent from the earliest development of a capitalist mode of economy … [and] colonizes all other forms of subjectivity” (3). However, the outcome of the proliferation of neoliberalism has been less than stellar. As the conceptual driving force behind global capitalism, neoliberalism tends to disregard consequences to the environment, persons with few resources, and fragile cultures. In Western societies, neoliberalism has colonized a wide swath of life: art, politics, government, education, business, hospitals, military, and prisons. The discipline of psychology, some suggest, is a primary resource for neoliberal colonization.

Neoliberal Colonization of Psychology A second wave of publications on the topic of neoliberalism thus proposed that psychology as practiced in the West reflects neoliberal world-views, assumptions regarding human nature, the nature of pathology, and mental health. Foucault (2008) proposed a connection between power (governmentality) and subjectivity. He believed that the neoliberal emphasis on the free enterprising self emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. The emphasis in this psychologically colonized culture was on self-reliance, risk taking, and self-control. The individual views him or herself as: a set of assets—skills and attributes—to be managed, maintained, developed, and treated as ventures in which to invest. As enterprising subjects, we think of ourselves as individuals who establish and add value to ourselves through personal investment (in education or insurance), who administer ourselves as an economic interest with vocabularies of management and performativity (satisfaction, worth, productivity, initiative, effectiveness, skills, goals, risk, networking, and so forth), who invest in our aspirations by adopting expert advice (of psychotherapists, personal trainers, dieticians, life coaches, financial planners, genetic counselors),

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and who maximize and express our autonomy through choice (mostly in consumerism). (Sugarman, p. 104)

With increased emphases on rational choice, autonomy, and personal responsibility, failure is now truly the personal/economic failure to effectively self-brand—to be the CEO of one’s self as a company. Indeed, such is the reality in an enterprising culture that demands enthusiasm, extroversion, and the taking of initiative (Hickinbottom-Brawn, 2013). The result, Sugarman (2015) argues, is that neoliberal society is characterized by social anxiety, for which the drug Paxil serves as the antidote. A second correlate of neoliberalism, according to Sugarman, is the injunction to work on one’s self to gain the aforesaid virtues—with therapy as a good venue to achieve such happiness. Binkley (2014) proposed that happiness is an entrepreneurial project that comes as a result of becoming more independent and self-sufficient and letting go of debilitating interdependencies. The explosion of articles in happiness in positive psychology is also noteworthy from a neoliberal perspective. It is assumed that positive thinking activates the potential for innate happiness. Friendship, kindness, and generosity are instrumentalized to gain happiness. Sugarman (2015) proposes that a third area, education, has also been colonized by neoliberalism. Martin and McLellan (2013) suggest that neoliberal education is less about history, tradition, and citizenship and more about personal fulfillment, self-defined goals, and entitlement in an enterprise-based model. Neoliberalism focuses on personal subjectivity rather than the collective good. The emphasis on “self care” may perpetuate the notion that one does not need others for support in being successful, and the price we pay is an implicitly reduced emphasis on political activism and public virtue. Expanding upon the implications of what he calls the “neoliberal form of subjectivity,” Teo (2018) addresses four psychological dimensions colonized by neoliberalism: self, thinking, feeling, and agency. In the neoliberal form of subjectivity, the self becomes central, but in a way that the distinction between an ego and the self is no longer relevant. Neoliberal thinking is reduced to utilitarian, calculating thinking

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in all domains of life from work, to interaction, and to identity. Feeling is considered to be more relevant than thinking and is used to manage stress while aiming for happiness, which is core to this subjectivity. It is argued that agency is reduced to self- and family-interests…. (p. 1)

Teo’s critical framework for conceptualizing the neoliberal form of subjectivity thus provides a compelling example of how the socioeconomic pressures of living in a neoliberal society perpetuate the effects of colonization by establishing pervasive limitations on the range of possible subjective experiences that members might encounter. In this way, the cost of neoliberalism involves not only the loss of indigenous beliefs and values, but of the subjective experience of indigeneity as a way of life.

Decolonization Occidental psychology has had the power to define the non-Western other. Western psychologists played a role in the colonizing process through research that demonstrated the intellectual superiority of the West (Bhatia, 2002, 2017). However, with the advent of the emerging field of critical psychology (Teo, 2015; Prilleltensky & Fox, 1997), there is an increasing desire to emancipate Western psychology from its universalistic, scientific, and EuroAmerican assumptions evident in disciplinary areas such as human development (Nsamenang & Dawes, 1998), social psychology (Hammack, 2011), social constructionism (Danziger, 1997), selfhood (Cushman, 1995), and epistemology (Christopher, Wendt, Marecek, & Goodman, 2014). Chakkarath uses the term “indigenous psychology” to “mark psychologically relevant concepts that were developed in the culture of investigation and that need not necessarily be congruent with psychological concepts that were developed by Western mainstream psychology” (2005, p. 31). The APA Division 32 Task Force on Indigenous Psychology described its purpose on its website as based on the following factors:

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1. A reaction against the colonization/hegemony of Western psychology. 2. The need for non-Western cultures to solve their local problems through indigenous practices and applications. 3. The need for a non-Western culture to recognize itself in the constructs and practices of psychology. 4. The need to use indigenous philosophies and concepts to generate theories of global discourse (APA Div. 32 Taskforce on Indigenous psychology, n.d.). The Division 32 Task Force on Indigenous Psychology was established to facilitate this process of growth and transformation in psychology at the global level. The webpage states that the task force “reiterates the need to recognize the legitimacy of all indigenous forms of knowledge and the ultimate benefit of global sharing and collaboration” (Indigenousps ych.org). There is a growing reaction against globalized neoliberal psychologies characterized by an emphasis on the discovery, construction, and affirmation of indigenous psychologies that reflect the history and culture of local peoples (Allwood, 2018) and at the same time incorporate selectively insights of psychology and spirituality from beyond their borders. Taiwanese psychologist K. K. Hwang (2011) has made an articulate case for a Confucian-sensitive psychology. Chinese psychologist Regina Ho (2018) has explored indigenous Chinese themes in an analysis of Emotion Focused Therapy with a Mainland Chinese couple. Virgilio Enriquez taught his classes on indigenous Philippine psychology in Tagalo, not Spanish (1993). Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994) was murdered for his commitment to an indigenous, liberating psychology that was sympathetic to writings on Liberation Theology. Canadian First Nations psychologist Jeffrey Ansloos (2017) argues for the role of an indigenous psychology that supports Canadian aboriginal adolescents in their struggle for identity and survival. While the decolonizing process is critical in perspective and deconstructive in nature, the effort at honoring and encouraging indigenous psychologies is a constructive process (See Bulhan, 2015; Enriquez, 1993; Muchemi, 2018). Decolonizing Western psychology involves

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revealing how Western psychology reflects Western culture and how that psychology has been etically imposed on local communities.

Indigenous Psychologies of Religion Building on Smith, we wonder whether in the past century the focus of Western psychology of religion has been on perpetuating this reified form of abstract religion. By conceptualizing and assessing religiousness in the universal terms (e.g., How important is religion to you? How often do you attend religious events?) we have made religious phenomena focal and the numinous peripheral. The current state of affairs in Western psychology of religion is such that its ideology may undermine the immediacy of indigenous spiritualities. If our aim is to construct an approach to engaging indigenous spiritualities that is sensitive and attentive to their distinct voices, our understanding of religion needs to be decolonized (See Dueck, Song, & Marossy, 2020). Given the complaint by aboriginal peoples that their spirituality is misunderstood by Settler societies, one would do well to ask: are there are psychologies that increase that obfuscation or mitigate it? We have argued in the previous section that understandings of religion that focus more directly on personal experience, on narrative accounts of spiritual experience, and that bracket essentialist explanations may garner greater mutual understanding with indigenous peoples. Would not research on the religion of a colonized community through the lens of the oppressor’s psychology only reinforce the oppressor’s presence and undermine local spiritualities? Eleanor Rosch (2002) provides us with an example of how close listening to religionists may contribute to a global psychology and conversely how the neoliberal paradigm potentially distorts the insights to be gained from indigenous religious experiences. Expanding upon James’ (1902) original call that religious experience has something to contribute to psychological knowledge, Rosch provides a compelling explication of how even James’ own assumptions regarding the primacy (read: foundationalist view) of consciousness and the individualistic mind—assumptions that remain engrained in our Western paradigm for

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imagining religious experience today—risk missing the contribution that religion might make to a general psychology. The problem she asserts is that “modern psychology, like modern politicians, seems able only to talk at religions rather than to listen to them.” (p. 37, italics in original). Her purpose is to challenge this status quo by demonstrating a variety of ways in which psychological knowledge might be expanded by attending to the indigenous Buddhist experience of “awareness.” Our argument is the flip-side of hers. While she encourages an etic reading of religion for the sake of the expansion of psychological knowledge, we focus on the consequences of the etic imposition of a universalizing Western psychology on indigenous spiritualities. The central thrust of Rosch’s argument begins by showing how James’ approach of defining religious experience as “special states of mind … that are essentially different from ‘normal waking consciousness’” assumes a Western paradigm of conceptualizing religious experience in which the individual’s “normal consciousness” functions as a universal foundation (p. 41). In response, Rosch notes that the Buddhist presupposition that the most basic experience of the human person is not in fact rooted in consciousness, but in an “alternative and more comprehensive form of knowing [called] awareness” (p. 40, italics in original). This awareness is not wholly distinct from consciousness, nor is it analogous to it. Instead, because “all experience is actually made out of awareness” in an indigenous Buddhist paradigm, Rosch argues that the Buddhist notion of awareness functions as the wider context of human knowing and experience within which consciousness is but a subcategory (p. 41). Hence, religion qua Buddhism, if listened to carefully (i.e., emically), would expand our understanding of the individualistic Western conscious mind. On the other hand, if the dominant psychological understanding is limited to religion in consciousness, then the description of Buddhist experience that results would be partial. Failure to see the whole would be to commit the epistemological “sin” of synecdoche, or worse, the distortion of Buddhism. A second dimension of the Buddhist experience from Rosch’s article that challenges the limited Western construct of religious experience is that of perception. Ordinary perception is focused but Buddhist perception views the entire cosmos in the particular. A perception of the world in terms of interacting billiard balls fails to be aware of networks

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beyond what reason can consciously analyze. This is an organismic, interdependent frame of reference. Such an expanded view of phenomena challenges the notion of single causes, if not the notion of causality itself. A non-causal, systems way of understanding provides a new epistemological paradigm that could be brought into constructive dialogue with Western models of cognition. The potential value of such dialogue is illumined by complex dynamic system theory’s contributions to the recent explosion of research in the emerging field of embodied cognition (Shapiro, 2014). Conversely, to explain culture and religion in general and Buddhism in particular in terms linear causality would distort how Buddhism is practiced as a meditative and contemplative religious sensibility. Third, Rosch shows how polarities in consciousness are organized around the self, the ego, and personal desires. Lazarus (1991) argued that appraisals of how an event may affect oneself is the source of basic emotions. Economic models assume the consumer chooses on the basis of self-interest. The Buddhist notion of the centeredness, however, stands in contrast to such assumptions (Rosch, 2002). For the faithful Buddhist, intentional and unbiased reflection on the vicissitudes of our physiological experiences through the practice of centeredness provides an opportunity to understand our emotional impulses in a way that transcends the natural human proclivity for self reference. By developing an awareness of their emotions and desires in a centered state, the Buddhist gains a more direct experience of their physiological impulses that is no longer mediated by the thought patterns and conceptual habits of the conscious self. Once more, then, Rosch’s argument shows that while the Western paradigm of religion assumes an inherent egocentrism in its limited understanding of how emotions function vis-à-vis conscious human experience, within Buddhism, the emotional preoccupation of the egocentric, conscious self represents the problematic for which centeredness is the solution. Rosch’s article goes on to show how the limitations of the Western construct of religious experience might be expanded through insights learned from the Buddhist notions of the real, timelessness, freedom, inherent value, and spontaneous action. However, our analyses of the examples above provide a glimpse at what can be lost when we impose

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our Western paradigm of religious experience onto indigenous spiritualities. While we applaud Rosch’s dialectical impulse and agree that Western psychology has much to learn from non-Western religions, we do not think etic analyses of indigenous spiritualities is the best method for achieving this goal. Instead, our aim is to empower indigenous researchers to become the authorities on their own spiritualities by creating opportunities to describe their beliefs and perspectives in their own terms.

Conclusion Prolegomena for the development of an authentically indigenous psychology of spirituality necessarily involves critical reflection on how the Western neoliberal assumptions engrained within our colonizing psychology and colonial notion of religion threaten to undermine and distort indigenous spiritualities. By decolonizing our psychology and relinquishing our universalizing modern framework for understanding religion, we open ourselves up to the possibility of more effectively engaging indigenous spiritualities through a radical form of indigenism that empowers indigenous communities to describe their spiritualities in their own terms. The imperative to engage in such reflection is ethical in nature, as indigenous communities have been extended the right to such self-expression through declarations made by UNDRIP and Division 32 of the APA. Thus, the ultimate end of attending to such prolegomena is not only the expansion of our very framework for understanding what constitutes psychological knowledge, but, more fundamentally, our discipline’s fulfillment of our commitment to honor colonized people’s yearning for a sense of history, autonomy, and self-expression across the world today. That yearning is evident in the following. Apache scholar Bernadette Adley-Santa Maria remembers her grandmother’s injunction: If you do not sing the songs – if you do not tell the stories and

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if you do not speak the language – you will cease to exist as “Ndee” (Apache). (quoted in Hernández-Ávila, 2003, p. 62)

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3 Spirituality in a Civil Religion: The Chinese Notions of Harmony Louise Sundararajan

If religion is defined in terms of ultimate reality and concern (Tillich, 1957), then harmony is religion par excellence for the Chinese. Yet, judging by the modern yardstick of religion, harmony seems like an inadequate specimen, as it has no deities, nor temples of worship. The inadequacy, however, may lie on the side of modern psychology. Harmony calls for an expanded framework of religion that has room for the immanent, embodied manifestations of ultimate reality, or the Dao. This expanded framework challenges the over-drawn distinction, prevalent in the field, between the sacred and the profane, a dichotomy that renders religious phenomena something unusual, reserved only for Sundays as it were. Contrary to this narrow definition of religion, the Chinese notions of harmony suggest that the Dao permeates in every aspect of our lives, from cooking to government (Sundararajan, 2015). L. Sundararajan (B) Rochester, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_3

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In this respect, harmony is what Robert Bellah (1967) calls civil religion. But not all civil religions are created equal. Harari (2011) claims that the capitalist-consumerist ideal is “the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do” (p. 391). In contrast to the market is democracy—both are civil religions, but only the latter, not the former, meet our needs for spirituality. What is the difference between religion and spirituality? Spirituality refers to a dimension of religion or culture that is driven by an aspiration to keep climbing uphill in the fitness landscape. More often than not, social systems, including religion or culture, tend to cling to or settle for low-fitness peaks that compromise their potential for growth and development. For the fitness of a system to be optimized, it is necessary to escape the local optima, and search out the higher peaks of fitness— this is the task of spirituality. If religion or culture may be compared to settled lives that thrive in a bee colony, spirituality is akin to the scouting bees in searcher of a better site. The more a scouting bee likes the site, the more complex is the dance, in the hope of convincing other bees to visit the site and, upon their return, join in the dance. As the groups of dancing bees expand, and the number of a site’s supporters increase, a collective decision may be reached in favor of that particular site. This analogy makes the important point that spirituality is always associated with human’s collective, effortful striving for new possibilities and higher potentials. Thus Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (1991) points out rightly that: Spiritual values, spiritual ideas, symbols, beliefs and instructions for action… point to possibilities to which our biological inheritance is not yet sensitive. The sensate deals with what is, the spiritual deals with what could be. (pp. 17–18)

Or as Robert Browning puts it more succinctly: “Ah! but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?” (Andrea del Sarto). In this chapter, I first broach harmony as a cultural phenomenon with both peaks and valleys in its fitness landscape, and then present an analysis of harmony as spiritual aspiration toward a world order that is worth our striving for.

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Harmony as a Product of Strong Ties Society What is harmony? Harmony pertains to the relationship between terms (systems, organisms, persons, etc.), a relationship guided by a value concern—for all to flourish in co-existence. To understand the rationality behind harmony, I situate it in the context of strong ties society and compare it with democracy which is a product of weak ties society. According to Mark Granovetter (1973), strong ties are networks of those near and dear, whereas weak ties capitalize on networking with unrelated strangers. Sundararajan (2015) extended the networking theory to the framework of ecological rationality which posits that strong ties and weak ties societies differentially privilege inner versus outer or private versus public space. Those who are near and dear can share their inner/private space, which is off limits to strangers encountered in the public space. In sharp contrast to weak ties societies which capitalize on the public space to solve social problems with law and justice, in none of the cardinal relationships of Confucianism—the king and the subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brothers, friend to friend—is the stranger ever factored in. In contrast to democracy which operates in the public space, harmony’s natural habitat is not the public space, but rather the shared private space—a space of intimacy, both intrapersonally as well as interpersonally. Indeed, much investment in the shared private space among well-connected individuals can leave the public space neglected as no-man’s land, as Granovetter (1973) points out that strong ties “breeding local cohesion, lead to overall fragmentation” (p. 1378) and a paucity of public services. A host of problems—such as corruption and oppression—in strong ties societies may be attributable to the under-development of public space, rendering difficult the sound development of law and democracy. The weak ties societies, on the other hand, have their own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. While providing the necessary condition for law and democracy, the public space is deficient in fostering community. Macmurray (1993) draws a distinction between community and society—the former inhabits the shared private (personal) space, whereas the latter the public (impersonal) space. Society and community differ in goals—the former’s goal is co-operation, whereas the latter’s goal is

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fellowship. As Macmurray (1993) points out, democracy by itself does not constitute community: Political freedom is abstract and impersonal. It abides in the character of co-operative relationships, and these are compatible with personal indifference…. but personal freedom is incompatible with such motives. It can be achieved only in fellowship. (p. 48)

One of the ramifications of this difference in networking is identity formation. Identity in the natural community of those near and dear (strong ties) is affect-based. Identity in a quasi-community of strangers relies on category-based membership, and a constructed collective identity such as political parties and nationality. The contrast between these two collectives may be boiled down to that between “we-ness” and “weare” (de Rivera & Carson, 2015, p. 313)—the former is affect-based, whereas the latter, identity-based. The public space is rife with identity politics fueled by the “we-are” type of collectives such as nations and states—membership-based identities which are likely to perpetuate cultural clashes and wars around the globe (Rosenmann, Reese, & Cameron, 2016). As Winter (2016) points out that nation-states strive to achieve internal peace at home, but transfer violence “to the interstate arena, where it is played out with destructive weapons” (p. 164). Turning to the spiritual dimension of cultures, I argue in the rest of this chapter that harmony embodies the freedom through community, which according to Macmurray (1993) is more important than freedom through power or politics. To shed some light on the freedom that flourishes in harmony, I borrow the notion of symmetry from quantum mechanics. At the risk of oversimplification, symmetry refers to undifferentiated wholeness, whereas spontaneous symmetry breakdown, difference making. To be more exact, Bolender (2010) defines symmetry in terms of unlimited admissible transformations; and symmetry breaking, constraints in admissible transformations. In plain English, a transformation is “a rule for moving things around” (p. 10), thus symmetry entails the freedom for things to move around in anyway without causing any changes, whereas symmetry break down, restricted freedom in moving things around. For instance, in the common-sense world of asymmetry,

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time flows in one direction only, whereas in the world of quantum mechanics, there is unlimited admissible transformations such that time flows in both directions, and scrambled eggs can be unscrambled again, or as Schrödinger puts it, the quantum cat is in a superposition state of both alive and dead at once.

Harmony as Symmetry To apply an analysis of harmony in terms of symmetry, spontaneous symmetry breaking, and symmetry restoration, I examine an ancient Daoist text, known as Taiyishengshui (The Great One gives birth to water) (Allan, 2003; Niu, 2015) dating back to the fourth-century BC, which was unearthed in 1993 in one of Guodian tombs in Hubei Province, China. The text is written on fourteen bamboo strips as part of the collection called the Guodian Chu slips. As the earliest record of Chinese cosmogony available, the text opens with the following statements (slips 1–3): The Great One gave birth to water. Water turned around (fan) to assist the Great One, thus producing the sky. Sky turned around (fan) to assist the Great One, thus producing the earth. The sky and earth again (fu) assisted one another, thus producing the gods and spirits. The gods and spirit again (fu) assisted one another, thus producing yin and yang. Yin and yang again (fu) assisted one another, thus producing the four seasons. The four seasons again (fu) assisted one another, thus producing cold and heat. Cold and heat again (fu) assisted one another, thus producing moisture and aridity. Moisture and aridity again (fu) assisted one another, thus producing a year and that was all. (adapted from Allan, 2003, p. 261, emphasis added)

As the recurrent motifs (in bold) make clear, the evolution of new life forms is the result of mutuality and helpfulness (“assisted one another”), or in biological jingle, symbiosis, to be explored later. For now, let us pay attention to the fact that generation of new life form entails symmetry

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breakdown, since novelty invariably creates differences. This consideration alerts us to the important role symmetry restoration (as indicated by signs of recursion in Fig. 3.1) plays in this Daoist creation myth. The Great One Water

Water/ The Great One

sky

Sky/water

Earth Earth vs Sky

g o d s a b o v e v s b e l ow

Yin vs yang

The four seasons

Hot vs Cold

Wet vs Dry

Year Fig. 3.1 Schematic representation of the Daoist cosmogony according to Taiyishengshui (The great one gives birth to water) (Allan, 2003) (Note recursion;

= horizontal recursion;

= generating)

= vertical

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Two Phases of Symmetry Restoration There are two types of recursions in this text—a vertical recursive feedback loop— “turned around (fan)”—and a horizontal one, marked by “again” (fu). Recursion is a process in which a function calls itself during its operation, resulting in a repetition (“again”). For instance, water is generated by the Great One, but water (repeated for the second time) loops back to form a relationship with the Great One in such a way that the two becomes inseparable (water/the Great One), thereby producing the sky. As shown in Fig. 3.1, this (vertical) pattern of recursion is repeated up till the earth, which starts a new cycle of horizontal recursion. The new cycle started by earth goes something like this: The sky generated the earth; (then) the earth and sky turned around to assist each other, thus producing the gods and spirits. Here a different marker of recursion is used—“again” (fu). This “again” formula, initiated by earth, continues for the rest of the sequence: Sky generated the earth—earth and sky again assisted each other, thus producing the gods and spirits— the gods and spirits again assisted one another, thus producing yin and yang—yin and yang again assisted each other, thus producing the four seasons—the four seasons again…. and so on. The vertical recursion—which runs through the great One, water, and sky—forges a relation of mutuality between two planes of being—the creator and the created or whole and part—thereby the part folds back into the whole, resulting in symmetry restoration. This process stopped with earth which, instead of folding back to merge with the sky, is differentiated from it. The different treatment of sky and earth is revealed in Slips 10: What is below is soil, but we call it ‘earth’. What is above is vapor, but we call it ‘sky’. (p. 258)

Sky and its generator—the celestial river—correspond to vapor and water hence can easily merge, but earth and its generator cannot merge, since the solid and vapor stay distinctly different. The horizontal recursion starting with the sky and earth pair, then, is a post-symmetry breaking

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event, in which difference looms large, and symmetry restoration necessarily takes on a different task. The two different patterns of recursion, marking two types of symmetry restoration, correspond to the two types of harmony intimated in the following passage from The Doctrine of the Mean (1971): While there are no stirrings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, or joy, the mind may be said to be in the state of EQUILIBRIUM. When those feelings have been stirred, and they act in their due degree, there ensues what may be called the state of HARMONY. (p. 384, emphasis in the original)

Here the term harmony is used as the synonym of equilibrium, with the difference being that it is the equilibrium in a post-perturbation state. Implicit in this formulation of harmony is the notion of symmetry breaking which goes something like this: In the mythical beginning was the undifferentiated wholeness or equilibrium, which, through spontaneous symmetry breaking, gave rise to differences. The original symmetry, referred to as equilibrium, is characteristic of the preperturbation state of the mind. Emotional episodes result in symmetry breaking; successful symmetry restoration is referred to as harmony. In the words of Fung (1962): “To have the emotions welling up and yet in due proportion is also a state of the mean [equilibrium]” (p. 107). To be differentiated from the original, pre-perturbation equilibrium, harmony is also referred to as dynamic equilibrium. Corresponding to these two types of harmony are two phases of symmetry restoration that can be located in the Daoist text Taiyishengshui (Allan, 2003).

Symmetry Restoration, First Phase (Marked by Vertical Recursion in Fig. 3.1) Unlike the creator God in Genesis, the Great One and her creation are inseparably merged. A few references to this merge can be found in Allan (2003): Slip 6 states that “the Great One hides in (cang ) water and moves with the seasons” (p. 261). How can that be? One exegesis suggested that “the Great One did not ‘produce’ water, but was ‘transformed into’ it.

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This suggestion solves the problem of consistency with the second part, in which the Great One ‘hid in’ water” (p. 264). Very ingenious interpretation, but leaving us completely confused as to who is the creator and who the created. While such confusion of the ontological difference between the creator and the created would be taboo in the Genesis, it is an example of the unrestrictedness in admissible transformations, characteristic of symmetry. The Great One and water became one and the same in another apocryphal text of unknown date, which stated: “Great One is the honorific style (zi) given to water. It [Great One/water] was first the mother of the sky and earth, and later the fount… of the myriad living things” (p. 276). Further information on the great One comes from religious cults of the pole star, which according to Allan (2003) was the utmost point of the cosmos before the genesis of the world from water. In both the popular cult during the Warring States Period and the later Han imperial cult the Great One was the spirit of the Pole Star. In this context, water refers to the Milky Way, streaming into the sky from the Pole Star (p. 275). In this scenario, the sky and water seem to be co-existent: “the water that flowed from the pole… can be understood as the Milky Way the Celestial River that flowed across the sky…” (p. 279). In this light, the focus of this text may not be on creation so much as the relation among co-existing terms such as part and whole relationship. But even here, it is not clear as to which is part and which whole. For instance, Allan suggests that “Cosmologically, when the Great One is taken as the Pole Star, the water may be understood as a river, namely, the Milky Way, in which the Pole Star may be hidden” (p. 264). This part (the Great One = star) and whole (Milky Way) relation is reversed in the passage that refers to water as “the celestial river that flows unceasingly from”—i.e., as part of the whole— “the womb of the Great One” (p. 283). But if we relax the logic of cause and effect, and celebrate instead the superposition of multiple states as admissible transformations in symmetry, then the message of this ancient Daoist text is clear: The Dao/the Great one/the Pole Star is “the ultimate ancestress, a never-ending source for the celestial river and all living things” (p. 264).

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Symmetry Restoration, Second Phase (Marked by Horizontal Recursion in Fig. 3.1) But after the earth came into existence, it is no longer possible to go back to the undifferentiated wholeness of the beginning—differences are here to stay. How can we restore symmetry in the post-symmetry breaking world awash with differences? The answer lies in applying the parity principle of symmetry, which treats all differences as so many transformations each equally admissible as the other. A classic example of this principle is the yin and yang dialectic, in which antipodes and oppositions are considered each indispensable to the other. This is reiterated in the Chinese notion of complementarity, which is well articulated by Zen Tsu: “The salt flavoring is the other to the bitter, and the bitter is the other to the salt. With these two ‘others’ combining in due proportions and a new flavor emerging, this is what is expressed in ‘harmony’…” (Fung, 1962, p. 108). Using the analogy of cooking, this statement makes three important points: first, without differences (the other), life is incomplete; second, it is through the interplay of differences that novelty (new flavor) is created; and third, the free combination of differences is not possible without moderation (due proportion of things). Moderation is needed to prevent loss of diversity due to the hegemonic takeover of any particular element in the system. This consideration adds new insights to the general observation that the Chinese prefer low arousal states (Tsai, 2007). High arousal of any emotion would result in a loss of diversity—when rage predominates, it is difficult to feel sadness at the same time. But experienced at a moderate range, anger can be a composite of sadness, sorrow, and other feeling states. It is written in the Book of Documents: “When the eight instruments are in good accord and do not encroach upon one another, then the spirits and man will be brought into harmony” (Holzman, 1978, p. 23, emphasis added). Not unlike musical instruments, emotional states need freedom to play, and play well together. This notion of harmony as non-interference that makes room for all to flourish in co-existence has far reaching ramifications for all relationships, ranging from interpersonal to international (see Sundararajan, 2013).

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In the final analysis, harmony is a matter of having the right relationship between terms. There are two possible relationships between any two terms, A versus B: either/or versus both-and. Let A stands for “alive” and B, “dead.” In the either/or relationship, admissible transformations are greatly constrained—the cat can be either live or dead, but not both at the same time. By contrast, both-and relationship places no constraint on admissible transformations, as symbolized by Schrödinger’s cat. For illustration, consider a coin toss. The first coin toss operates in the condition of both-and, in which both head and tail are admissible transformations. In the second coin toss, however, symmetry is broken (a difference—head or tail—is created by the first coin toss), such that admissible transformations are highly restricted—only the matching toss wins. Since it operates in the either/or condition of restricted admissible transformations, the second coin toss carries more weight for the outcome of the game—and hence tends to be blamed for the loss. But if one were to revert to the both-and logic—to consider both coin tosses admissible transformations—it might be possible to get out of the blaming mindset. This is how it actually worked: Miller and Turnbull (1990) examined a coin toss game, in which two individuals (Jones and Cooper) could win big money, if their heads or tails match. “Jones goes first and tosses a head; Cooper goes next and tosses a tail” (p. 12). They lost. To get us out of the tendency to blame Cooper, the authors used the following logic: … they both contributed equally to the final outcome…. It is true that if Cooper had tossed a head they would have won the $1000, but it is equally true that they would have won the $1000 if Jones had tossed a tail. (p. 12)

This argument is subtended by the principle of parity, which states that if A = B, then B = A, where A and B stand for the first and second coin toss, respectively. Waving the wand of this logic, we have restored symmetry, where time can flow both ways, and the second coin toss is as innocent and free as the first one, in which any outcome, head or tail, is an equally admissible transformation like any other, so the argument goes.

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Harmony indeed is a condition akin to the first coin toss, brimming with the freedom of unrestricted admissible transformations. Consider for example the “dynamic equilibrium” of emotions. With moderate arousal, one may experience the full diapason of emotions—an undulating undercurrents of anger, sadness, hurt, sorrow, consolation, and whatnot, all being admissible transformations such that one state may freely elide into the other. But when rage prevails, one enters the second coin toss, with admissible transformations highly restricted— some expressions of rage might even get one into serious trouble— such that one may be in need of anger management or the intervention of emotion regulation strategies. Back to the Daoist text. The centrality of the both-and relationship is manifest in the recurrent formula “A and B again assisted each other, thus producing C and D” throughout the second part (marked by the horizontal recursion, see Fig. 3.1) of the text. This suggests that each step of the way, when differences are created due to the generation of novelty (when gods and spirits are produced by earth and sky, for instance), restoration of symmetry through mutuality (gods and spirits again assisted one another) immediately sets in to preempt the symmetry breakdown of an either/or relationship, such that the generation of a term without its “other” (the either/or condition) is postponed till the end of the creation cycle, when the linear time (the year) is generated.

Potential Contributions to Spirituality The high peaks discovered by the scouting bees of a culture are not always climbed. More often than not, cultures and religions tend to settle for lower peaks—in the case of harmony, this would be the widely known phenomena such as fitting in or self-effacement for the sake of maintaining the status quo of a group. Akin to the Daoist text, Taiyishengshui, buried for thousands of years, the spiritual dimensions of harmony remain paths less traveled. In the following sections, I highlight the relevance of this Daoist text to spirituality in the modern world.

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An Alternative Perspective on Evolution Extinction of the species—old and less adaptive species die to make room for new and more adaptive ones—is a central theme in Darwinism. Darwin suggested that “The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead” (Quammen, 2018, p. 7). Quammen (2018) explained: “Coral seemed apt…because the lower limbs and base are lifeless calcitic skeleton, left behind like extinct forms of ancient lineages as the soft polyps advance upward like living species” (p. 8). A very different picture about the origin of life is found in the Daoist creation myth: The ancestral form, the Great One, is never dead—it simply went hiding, and lives inside the new form of life, water. In the subsequent chain of events, the same pattern is repeated—new forms of life do not replace the old ones, but instead include the latter in their co-creation process. This scenario foreshadows the biological accounts of symbiosis—two organisms, two genomes, amalgamate into one living partnership. A well-known example is our mitochondria—some bacteria, an ancient form of life, were swallowed by some sort of single-celled organisms which offered their innards as habitat, and the bacteria in turn took up residence and, making themselves useful, served as the power house of the host, so the story goes. Thus some biologists have argued that merge and combination of one life-form with another had done more in generating evolutionary novelty than the incremental variations, the random mutations, that supposedly fueled natural selection (Quammen, 2018). This point is put more succinctly by the Daoist creation myth: It takes two to tango—with the exception of the Great One giving birth to water in the beginning, all subsequent new forms of life are generated by more than one actor “helping each other.” Thus mutuality or co-creation is the mechanism that drives the evolution of new forms of life each step of the way. Furthermore, the ubiquitous recursions (see Fig. 3.1) implicated in the Daoist creation myth suggest that the branching forms of life turned around toward one another and merged—a possibility that calls into question Darwin’s tree of life. To the extent that trees can only branch out and do not turn around to form recursive loops, the Daoist cosmogony is joining forces with the symbiosis accounts of life to suggest

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that evolution is not a tree so much as—you would have guessed, if you have been following Granovetter (1973) all along—a network or web of relations (Quammen, 2018). The symbiosis account of evolution also calls into question our conventional notions of identity. To the extent that our genomes are mosaics of different life forms including that of virus and bacteria, we are all symbiotic complexes. The hybrid nature of our identity is again foreshadowed by the Daoist text, in which the creation process started with a hybrid—a composite being of the Great One/water—to generate a chain of compounds, yin and yang, etc. This scenario of composite identity muddies the waters for Darwinism. Identity in the sense of a clear lineage is needed for the doctrine of survival of the fittest. Without a clear lineage, how do we keep track of the winners and the losers of evolution? However, a much more serious question confronts us today— the survival of our biosphere, which is hanging by a thread as global warming continues unabated. The logic of symbiosis is more relevant than ever—we will make it in the twenty-first century, only if we work together as one global community. Or as de Rivera and Carson (2015) put it, it is imperative for us today to revise our “models of personal identity” (p. 313).

Toward a Global Identity There are quite a few proposals for an inclusive global identity (McFarland, Webb, & Brown, 2012; Rosenmann et al., 2016), such as identification with all of humanity or the global community. These global visions tend to capitalize on the moral universalism (Crimston, Bain, Hornsey, & Bastian, 2016) of weak ties societies to counter the “tribal morality” of strong ties societies. But weak ties rationality that fosters the category-based group identity also hinders the development of a global identity. Since such categorical group identities require contrasts and comparisons to be articulated, Allport (1954/1979) alluded to a “special difficulty in fashioning an in-group out of an entity as embracing as humankind” (p. 43). To the extent that a superordinate “Human” category will gain traction only when we go into war with another species

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or aliens from outer space, this category-based global identity contradicts the intention of moral universalism to transcend in-group and out-group distinctions. How do we get around this inherent limitation of the category-based group identity? Enter the “we-ness”-based communal identity.

A Blueprint for Global Identity According to de Rivera and Carson (2015), the difference between group and communal identities fall along the divide between “we-are” and “weness”: “The ‘we-are’ness of group identity… involves group categories that both homogenize and depersonalize” (p. 313), whereas “The ‘weness’ identity involves an awareness of being mutually related to others in a community” (p. 313). The same distinction is drawn by the authors along the line of: A conceptual grouping versus a living group—the former involves conceptual social cognition involved in group identification, whereas the latter, personal relationship in which the self does not exist apart from co-active relationship with the other. (p. 312)

In sum, communal identity does not need an out-group to contend with in order to function, since it rests not on group belonging so much as on personal relationship, which is “an existential, active way of mutual living, and the concomitant self-identity and self-concept that issue from within common living and are rooted in and arise from within this web of activity” (p. 323). This notion of community is well articulated in the Daoist text, Taiyishengshui. To wit, all the terms in the text follow Macmurray’s formulation of mutuality (cited in de Rivera & Carson, 2015, p. 312), in which the “I” (be it water, or sky, or yin or yang) exists only as one element in the complex “You and I” (water and sky; yin and yang, etc.). The Daoist text also has much to say about the development of identity in communal terms, especially with regard to the two attributes that, according to de Rivera and Carson (2015), contribute

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importantly to a sense of global community: First, “a network of cocreative agency” (p. 329); and second, “all together through each other” (p. 329).

Strategies for Developing Global Identity Macmurray (1993) and others have argued that the hope for world peace may lie in transcending personal and group identities to form a global community based on “we-ness”—an affect-based, not identity-based, community. In light of the difficulty in developing a global identity on the basis of conceptual grouping, it would be a good idea to tap into the resources of communal living—such as attunement, resonance, collective effervescence through rituals—in strong ties societies. However, there is the apprehension that these resources will come with the parochialism, such as the in-group and out-group distinction, associated with strong ties societies. Not to worry, de Rivera and Carson (2015) assured us: “… there is no need to obliterate these boundaries. The need is to transcend them so the caring encouraged within the community is extended to outsiders…” (p. 324). Thus, while the sense of community originates in strong ties societies, it has the potential to expand beyond it. Is there any evidence for this assumption? Vertical recursions in the Daoist text we examined intimated a world order that comes close to OM (Oceanic Merging), a term coined by Bolender (2010) in reference to the highest order of symmetry, which is a “maximally symmetric relational model” (p. 106), in which everything merges into an all-pervading sense of oneness. A better-known example of an expanded sense of community is found in the Daoist notion of universal altruism (Lee, Chen, & Chan, 2013) that goes beyond reciprocity and in-group favoritism. The expansion of community to the universal and cosmic level has also been a practice throughout history by Chinese artists/hermits, who famously found their kith and kin in trees, rocks, mountains, and rivers (Rowley, 1959). This sense of expanded “we-ness” is well articulated by the Tang poet Li Po’s (701–762) mutual

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gazing with a mountain: “Never tired of looking at each other—Only the Ching-t’ing Mountain and me” (Liu & Lo, 1975, p. 110). de Rivera and Carson (2015) lamented the fact that the global community “is currently more imagined than real” (p. 323). Having identified the experience of communal living as the missing ingredient, the authors created rituals to promote a felt sense of global community and identity. Along this line, the Daoist visions and practices of an expanded ‘we-ness” has much to contribute toward the development of a more compelling and felt sense of global consciousness and identity.

Concluding Remarks Science and technology that flourish in the public space of weak ties societies give us the freedom through power, whereas community that is nurtured in the shared private space of strong ties societies gives us freedom through fellowship. If as Macmurray (1993) has argued persuasively that humans are in need of both types of freedom in order to flourish, we will have to figure out how to combine resources from both cultures—weak ties and strong ties. Those who are skeptical of this possibility need to be reminded that (mindless) combination of cultures happens all the time. For instance, when the parochialism of strong ties societies gets a booster shot from the category-based identity of modern states, we have a full-blown nationalism much more virulent than the simpler version. The question concerning the merge and combination of cultures is, therefore, not whether but how. In the mixing and matching of cultures, spirituality requires us to go beyond the low adaptive peaks of civil religions in search of possibilities better suited for higher aspirations of the human race. To render such possibilities accessible, the scouting bees of spirituality need to engage in active search for sites so far neglected or un-thought. Toward this goal, this chapter has presented a few lofty peaks in the Chinese landscape of harmony as sites that are worth our visiting and dancing about.

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Niu, W. (2015). Chinese creativity: Past, present and future. In S. Kakar & G. Blamberger (Eds.), On creativity (pp. 63–108). Gurgaon, India: Penguin Books India. Quammen, D. (2018). The tangled tree: A radical new history of life. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Rosenmann, A., Reese, G., & Cameron, J. E. (2016). Social identities in a globalized world: Challenges and opportunities for collective action. Perspective on Psychological Science, 11, 202–221. Rowley, G. (1959). Principles of Chinese painting. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sundararajan, L. (2013). The Chinese notions of harmony, with special focus on implications for cross cultural and global psychology. The Humanistic Psychologist, 41, 1–10. Sundararajan, L. (2015). Understanding emotion in Chinese culture: Thinking through psychology. New York, NY: Springer SBM. The Doctrine of the Mean (J. Legge, Trans.). (1971). In J. Legge, The Chinese Classics, Vol. I (pp. 382–434). Taipei: Wen Shih Chi. (translation first published 1893). Tillich, P. (1957). Dynamics of faith. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Tsai, J. L. (2007). Ideal affect––Cultural causes and behavioral consequences. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(3), 242–259. Winter, D. G. (2016). Taming power: Generative historical consciousness. American Psychologist, 71, 160–174.

Part II Methodologies Reconsidered

4 Giving Voice to the Voiceless: A Peaceable Research Paradigm for Psychology in China Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting and Kejia Zhang

Introduction Though psychology of religion (POR) has gained recognition worldwide, it is indigenous to Euro-American culture and potentially limited in explaining indigenous religious phenomena. This reality is just beginning to be recognized (Dueck & Han, 2012). Our chapter aims to diversify the epistemology and methodology of POR by describing various ethnic religions including indigenous religions (aka folk religions) found among ethnic minorities in China. While many Chinese researchers are aware of the difference between native religious traditions (E.g., Confucianism, Taoism, etc.) and the indigenized institutionalized religions R. S.-K. Ting (B) Monash University Malaysia, Subang Jaya, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] K. Zhang Southwest Minzu University, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_4

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(Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.), unique indigenous religions originating in ethnic minority groups are often ignored by mainstream POR. These types of indigenous religions are sometimes referred to as spirituality or shamanism in the West (Laufer, 1917). Unfortunately, native religious practices were often deemed “superstitious,” “backward,” “irrational,” “materialistic,” and “secular” under the scrutiny of scientism and positivism embedded in modern psychology. As a result, younger generations have lost their ethnic identity and communal involvement due to the under-recognition of their native religion. Due to the hegemony of modernism and positivism these ethnoreligious communities appear to have paid a high emotional price (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). After reviewing the current published psychological literature on ethnic minorities in China, Ting, Zhang, & Huang (2018) found that scholarly efforts were still predominantly invested in the uncritical importation of psychological instruments (such as using Symptom Checklist-90 (Derogatis & Cleary, 1977) and Subjective Well-being Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) and of classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory in explaining the function of native religion among ethnic minorities (e.g., Ma, Qin, Yang, Chen, & Zhang, 2011; Yang, Li, & Zhang, 2013; Zhang, 2009). Though China has 56 ethnic groups, most of the samples studied were drawn from the Han majority and ethnic minorities were often lumped together as one homogenous comparison group. This tendency not only risked diminishing the rich traditions in each ethnic group, but also imposing Western values, personality structures, and religious constructs on ethnic minorities. In order to promote a more peaceable psychology (Dueck & Reimer, 2009) when studying POR among indigenous people, this chapter will first differentiate and define three major native religions from the perspective of local Chinese groups. Native religions are rooted and originate in local communities in contrast to “secondary religions” which were introduced by foreigners and originated in foreign cultures (Zhang, 2015). Native religions are grounded and intertwined in native culture and ethnic identity. They were embedded in these social networks and

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religion was diffused from birth to death into the everyday life of the people. Its membership was normally drawn by bloodlines, geography, and ethnicity. Since its social boundary was very different from that of the institutional religions, the second part of the chapter will advocate for theory-building (epistemology) for indigenous POR by introducing a few theories using, for example, the Ecological Rationality framework (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). We argue that this new epistemology would affirm religious practices that originated in both weak-ties and strong-ties societies (Granovetter, 1973) and could be adapted and expanded to explain the unique spirituality and rituals among native religions. In the last part of the chapter, we advocate for a more peaceable and less intrusive research methodology: an anthropological and psychological approach with native religious communities that will take into account their complexity, diversity, dynamic composition, and power struggle with the mainstream culture. This new research paradigm would be reflexive and communal. The cultural backdrop of the researchers would be analyzed and deconstructed as well. We hope this chapter will enrich the meaning of “religion” in a postmodern era, and construct an IPOR that gives voice globally to ethnoreligious minorities (Bhatia & Priya, 2018).

The Composition and Characteristics of Chinese Ethnic Religions In this section, we will describe the complex characteristics of ethnoreligion among various Chinese groups. The boundary of ethnicity is especially questionable for some tribal groups as is the intersectionality of ethnicity and religion that comes in many forms. We will then explore the limitations of current POR in interpreting and understanding the spirituality of native religion.

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Heterogeneity Vs Homogeneity of Ethnic Identity The famous Chinese sociologist, Fei (1999), summarized Chinese nationality as a form of “pluralistic integration” based on geographical settlements, religious affiliations, cultural traditions, and languages. There is no single unified definition of the “ethnic group” in China. The diversity within the ethnic group can be as wide as that between ethnic groups. It is hard to identify each ethnic group with a particular religious tradition and affiliation. For example, the Liangshan Yi tribal group (Nuosu) practices Bimo tradition and ancestral worship, but some Yi tribal groups (Luowu) in Yunnan province accepted Christianity four generations ago. Another Yi group in Weishan practices a form of “Tuzhu worship” which combines ancestor worship with folk beliefs (Li & Cai, 2011). Since different ethnic groups have had different levels of exposure to globalization, the transmission of world religions also varies. Take the Miao (Hmong) ethnic group in China as an example. The Qing (green) Miao rejected Christianity, while the Hua (floral) Miao accepted it centuries ago. Therefore, in order to study the religiosity of ethnic minorities in China, we need to be aware of its within-group diversity, and avoid adopting the ethnological stereotype of “homogeneity.”

Intersectionality of Religious Identity and Ethnic Identity The intersectionality of religion and culture refers to the dynamic interaction and integration of foreign religions and native culture of ethnic minorities. In China, the five major world religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, and Islam) and various folk beliefs have influenced the daily life and customs of all Chinese populations (Jin, 2002, 2018; Zhang, 2016).1 Due to the unique ecological and geographical environment, social and cultural traditions, and national identification (Han-acculturation), the topographies of ethnic religious cultures are often different than that of the institutionalized religious systems studied in the West.

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For example, Wang (2009) found that Islamic tradition among Hui ethnic people was deeply engrained within the patriarchal system (Men Huan; al —Tariqah) in Northwest China. He observed that Islamic mysticism was integrated with the Chinese patriarchal system and ancestor worship forming the traditional pattern of integration of Sufism and patriarchal lineage. This religious system in turn stabilized the transmission of their ethnic identity and value system. Hence, we can argue that ethnic identity is a critical factor when studying the psychology of religion in China. In summary, ethnic believers in China either practice the five major world religions by contextualizing them into their cultural ecology, or by adhering to their indigenous religions which we will describe below.

Indigenous Religion and Spirituality “Indigenous religion” (原生性宗教) emerged from the native soil of ethnic minorities, an area understudied by psychologists and sociologists. The indigenous religion differs from “folk religion” which is defined by the intersection of multiple Chinese traditional beliefs. We define “Indigenous religion” as a religious formation that originates in the unique ecological system of the particular ethnic group, which is rooted and co-evolves with the ethnic tradition, society, culture, and customs, and is still actively practiced by the locals (Zhang, 2015). This form of religiosity is often found at the “bottom level” of the ethnic group’s culture and belief2 and usually consists of ancestor worship, nature worship, belief in a spiritual realm, and sacrificial rituals as main components. Often these types of religious traditions are represented by “witch-doctors or priests” as the icons and core figures and serve as a medium to the spiritual realm. Their religiosity is displayed through communal ceremonies and transmitted through family lineage. All of the following could be categorized as indigenous religions: the Shamanic tradition among Northern Mongolian groups, Shibi (释 比) tradition of the Qiang ethnic group, Badaixio (巴岱雄) tradition and Huqing (呼清) tradition of the Miao ethnic group, Heng-P (亨—

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批) tradition of the Huayao Dai ethnic group, Dongba (东巴) tradition of the Naxi ethnic group, Daba (达巴) tradition of the Mosuo ethnic group and Bonismo (本教) of the Tibetan group, Dongsa (董 萨) tradition of the Jingpo ethnic group, and Bimo (毕摩) tradition of the Yi people. These are groups who still take pride in the “purity” of their tradition by refusing to be assimilated into mainstream Han culture. Their ethnic identity is interconnected with this religious identity, and scholars also equate some indigenous religion to “ethno-religion” or “folk religion” (Jin, 2002; Wang, 2009) Unfortunately, due to lack of understanding, some Western scholars (Waley, 1955) have utilized a reductionist approach by reducing the diverse and rich traditions of Chinese ethnic spirituality to “shamanism” or “animism.” Moreover, the latter has not been included in the major textbooks of the psychology of religion (e.g., Hood, Hill, & Spilka, 5th edition, 2018). Some would describe indigenous people as possessing a “spirituality,” yet “spirituality” itself is a Western concept, and does not capture and honor local religion. In a recent systemic review, Ting, Zhang and Luo (2020) have identified that many China ethnic minorities group still practice the indigenous religion as the core of their tradition and cultural identity. Hence it would be important to include these cultural traditions in the scope of POR.

Limitation of Mainstream Psychology in Studying Indigenous Religion After many years of researching indigenous healing tradition among the indigenous people in Canada, Africa, and Fiji Islands, Katz (2017) pointed out that, even as a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist, he felt disillusioned with modern psychological approaches which focus too heavily on pathologizing indigenous tribes and fail to recognize the benefits of their spirituality. He explained that the indigenous healers actually are the “first psychologists” in their cultural context and their approach should be honored and studied. Similar to his stance on Western psychology, in this section we reflect critically on the current mainstream psychology of religion.

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First, compared to the organized and institutionalized religions, the “diffusion” (mi man xing ) of indigenous religions does not draw a clear boundary between their believers and the organizational system. Their religiosity permeates the social structure and identity of ethnic minorities, and is embedded in daily life practices from birth till death. Therefore, the existing standardized psychological scales for religiosity measurement which assume an independent organization and membership might not be appropriate for the study of indigenous religions. Second, indigenous religion is deeply grounded (di ceng xing ) in the social network of ethnic minorities or indigenous communities. Often their religiosity is expressed by the collective customs and rituals, which cannot be measured by religiosity scales that privilege internal states and intrinsic motivation (such as the Hoge Intrinsic Religiosity Scale, Hoge, 1972). Third, most indigenous religions are practiced in strong-ties networks where family, clan members, and tribal villagers are essential participants in the rituals. They serve to bless and regulate the community behaviors in good times and bad. Traditional Western psychology pays more attention to internal states of religiosity and spirituality, such as the relationship to a deity/universe, attachment issues, conversion experiences, religious identity formation and so on (Dueck, Ansloos, Johnson, & Fort, 2017; Ting, 2012), which are seldom a concern for ethnic religionists who are more externally oriented. Even the concept of “active religious coping” might not be applicable to indigenous religions. For example, Ting (2016) found that Tibetan earthquake survivors adopted communal coping strategies, such as an accepting and open-hearted attitude toward death in their funeral ceremony. The radical acceptance of their reality could be seen as a “passive coping” strategies in the classic religious coping literature (Pargament, Koenig, & Perez, 2000). Ethnic religion, particularly indigenous religion, seeks to empower individuals to seek help or healing through ceremonial participation, and hence their so-called “coping behaviors” cannot be examined in isolation or individually. Fourth, while for many world religions and spiritual traditions the concept of “holiness” or “transcendence” are the highest goals to pursue, indigenous religions may regard “holism” as their ultimate telos, which

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is a balanced harmony between person and nature, and a spiritual realm. The shadow of Cartesian dualism has influenced mainstream psychology and even their approach to the psychology of religion. Religiosity is seen as a success of “mind over matter” and being able to transcend material desires is a symbol of holiness for many religious believers. If we use “transcendental religiosity” to conceptualize ethnic religions that emphasize communal feasting and animal sacrifices, we might not only miss the nuance of the “killing and feasting” in a particular context, but also label their religion as “secular and worldly.” For instance, Bimo tradition was once deemed as “superstitious” and being attacked as their religious practice is not institutionalized and associated with “feudalism” during cultural revolution movement in China (Du, 2018; Yuan, 1992). This kind of psychology of religion could be potentially violent, aggressive, and non-peaceable treatment of the indigenous tribes. Lastly, since many indigenous religions are typically polytheistic, the “attachment” between the individual and God (or ultimate power) is not as essential as the “attachment” with their ancestors and their ancestral lands. We cannot not simply apply “attachment theory” developed in the West to explain the worshipping behaviors and rituals of many indigenous ethnic groups. This strong emotional bonding with their bloodline lineage should be studied in a more communal framework, than just an individualistic perspective. In order to counterbalance the myopia of Western psychology indicated above, we hope to propose a few alternate theoretical frameworks and methodologies in the study of indigenous religion that aim to bring peaceable hermeneutic understanding ethnic minorities groups in China.

Proposing a Peaceable Epistemology in Understanding Indigenous Worldviews and Spirituality Since the social boundary of ethno-religions is very different from that of the institutional religions, this section attempts to introduce two different theories or epistemologies for indigenous POR––the Ecological

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Rationality framework (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018; Todd, Gigerenzer, & The ABC Research Group, 2012), and Peircean semiotic analysis (Hoopes, 1991). They are chosen due to their sensitivity to the unique spirituality and communal ecology among native religions.

Ecological Rationality Framework: Religion as an Evolving Ecology Ecological Rationality theory (Todd et al., 2012) is one framework that could be applied to study the psychology of religion and that may capture both micro and macro levels of analysis. With this framework, any cultural system could be deemed as an ecological system that co-evolves with a unique form of human cognition and emotion (Sundararajan, 2015). Cast in the context of evolution and stated in simplest terms, Ecological Rationality posits that the cognitive skills of an organism evolved to serve the purpose of its ecological niche as well as shaping it. For example, in the ecological niche of the beaver, it is advantageous to build dams, such that beavers have evolved such skills. This theory also has been extended to explain the suffering of ethnic minority in our recent study of Yi people in China (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018), where religion was treated as a subculture that together with a language system could coevolve with unique emotional expression and cognitive features of the indigenous people. In our framework of cultural analysis, we posit two evolutionarily ancient ecological niches—strong ties and weak ties (Granovetter, 1973)—each privileging the development of certain cognitive styles and not others. According to Granovettor (1973), a strong-ties society consists of the private sphere of families, close friends, and relatives (mostly blood-tie relationship), and the weak-ties society consists of the public sphere of strangers or acquaintances. We further posit that different religious traditions could be plotted on a continuum of weakties vs strong-ties structure. Different cognitive orientations (attentional focus), external focus on the physical space versus internal focus on the mental, also could be plotted on another axis of cultural comparison.

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Religion and Social Ties For illustration, our earlier study of the suffering experiences of Yi community in Liangshan area, showed that their Bimo tradition revolved around bloodlines and the family clan (jia zhi) network where the religious rituals are organized by family members (Ting, Sundararajan & Huang, 2017). This religious ecology co-evolves with the cognitive features of Yi-Bimo ethnic group where their cognitive appraisal of suffering is more externally oriented, and their emotional expression are more somatic and concrete (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). Their helpseeking practices were also based on the strong-ties connection, namely, reliance on Bimo priest for external orchestration of rituals. Communal space in the Yi-Christian group is portable and expandable—portable due to the tendency to internalize God such that you do not lose the divine company when you travel and expandable due to the tendency to form ties with strangers. By contrast, communal space in the Yi-Bimo group is not portable, as it is externally located in the physical space of one’s home town. Nor is their communal space expandable to include strangers, due to the clear in-group and out-group distinction of the strong-ties society. This difference in communal space has far-reaching consequences in a globalizing era in which weak ties prevail. This is also why the Nuosu-Yi group had more drug addiction problems among migrant youths (Liu, 2015) than the Yi-Christian group whose religion allows them to seek help through weak-tie system (e.g., brothers and sisters in Christ who were once strangers) and internalized mental space (e.g., prayer) (Wang, Ting, Tian, & Zhang, 2018).

Religions and Cognitive Styles In the framework of Ecological Rationality, all cognitive styles are equally useful in the ecological niches in which they evolved to function adaptively and creatively. Thus, internal focus is not necessarily better than external focus. Nor does external focus need to have connotations of superficiality, lack of depth, and so on. For instance, the fact that the Nuosu-Yi think their souls might fall off the surface of their bodies

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(Swancutt, 2012) does not make their souls superficial or lacking depth in any way. In comparing different religious traditions, we could use this framework to map out the psychological concepts (such as worldview, religious coping, and healing mechanisms) along the continuum of cognitive styles (internal vs external). We found that even though the Chinese Yi are supposed to be a “collective” societal group, its religious diversity could not be aptly explained by the “individualismcollectivism” cultural hypothesis. As we are all living in a “culture in making” global village (Gergen, Sharma, Sameshima, Wu, & Yang, 2018), we need a framework such as Ecological Rationality theory to address the within-group diversity and cultural misfit. If we adopt a psychology of religion that favors internalized spirituality and abstract thinking, we may overlook the “money counting” narrative expressed frequently by the Yi-Bimo (such as mentioning the debt in numbers, or number of livestock being sacrificed) as a discrete emotional expression. Rather than labeling the Yi-Bimo worldview as “superstitious,” their emotions as “repressed,” and their coping behavior as “materialistic,” our study bracketed those stereotypes toward the Yi people by honoring their language of suffering within their cultural system (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). We believe the Ecological Rationality framework could be extended to study other ethnic groups whose ecological niche is informed by their religious tradition.

Semiotic Analysis: Healing Mechanism Embedded in Communal Religious Rituals Many psychologists have disclosed the therapeutic nature of indigenous religious communities (Katz, 2017; Kirmayer, Dandeneau, Marshall, Phillips, & Williamson, 2011) from anthropological and systemic perspectives. Aside from the macro-level (bird-eye) analysis (such as Ecological Rationality framework) of the healing mechanism, we would add micro-level (worm-eye) analysis on the emotion and cognition changes embedded in the healing process. This semiotic analysis originally developed by Charles Sanders Peirce (Hoopes, 1991), was applied by Sundararajan (2011) to interpret the spiritual transformation and

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healing practices of tribal peoples. A sign is anything that represents something else, such as religion. According to the semiotics theory, a fully developed sign consists of three modes of representation (icon, index, and symbol), each of which contributes uniquely to the overall efficiency of the sign as a system (Deacon, 1997): 1. Icon is a concrete expression of experience. It embodies a relationship of spatiotemporal contiguity between the sign and what it represents. This could be the Buddha statues in the Chinese temple, the Black Stone in Mecca, and even the material possessions for the Yi-Bimo group (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). For ethnic minorities who are more perceptual in cognition, animal sacrifices, or food sharing would be a predominant sign of religious expression. 2. Index is also an implicit, experience-bound type of representation. The difference between icon and index is summed up by Parmentier (1994) as follows: whereas an icon provides some information about reality, such as the speaker’s suffering and distress, an index “directs the mind to some aspect of [that] reality” (p. 7). An example would be non-conscious automatic display of emotions, such as crying, blushing, dancing, or salutation in the religious ceremony. Another example is the gesture of pointing or chanting in the ceremony. 3. Symbol refers to linguistic expressions, which unlike index and icon, have an arbitrary relationship with what it represents. For instance, blushing has a physical connection with the feeling of embarrassment, but the word “embarrassment” does not. The relationship between word and feeling is arbitrarily determined by culture. An example of using religious symbols would be scriptures, prayers or blessings, cursing, or other standardized words. According to Peirce, a fully developed sign system is capable of integrating its multiple functions of representation: subjective experience (foregrounded by the index), concrete expression (rendered visible by the icon), and abstract understanding (rendered explicit by the symbol). For instance, an integration of “my heart was just like this” (index), with “my memory is not good any more” (icon) and “miserable inside my heart” over the loss of family members results in a fully developed sign

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that adequately represents the experience of suffering for someone from Liangshan Yi minority culture (See Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). For a strong-ties society and culture, the sign system could be embodied communally. For instance, we found that Yi from Bimo religious tradition utilizes many concrete expressions (icons) of emotion, such as “money counting” or “bodily aches.” Yet, there is not much abstract and symbolic expression of bona fide emotion (e.g., sadness, grief, and upsetness) when talking about their suffering experience. Instead, the ecological feature of strong-ties society can compensate and finish the sign system through ritual participation (index), and scripture recitals of the Bimo priest (symbols). Instead of using emotion words such as “miserable” to articulate their experience of suffering, the Yi minority group could resort to their native Bimo tradition, which has a large store of symbols that not only explain the cause of their suffering but also provide the means of solving problems that cannot be solved by secular means. For instance, if a sick male member of Yi community had enough money, he could pay for a healing ritual, in which every detail of his physical symptoms would receive symbolic elaboration with narratives of ghosts, spirits, curses, and so on. Furthermore, even if his medical condition cannot be improved, his spirit would be lifted by the collective effervescence of the healing ritual to which the entire neighborhood is invited. In short, a complete sign system is a buffer to mental illness and emotional disorders. Historically, the Yi-Bimo tradition is able to keep a balance between its sensory-bound reality space, sustained by iconic and indexical sign use, on the one hand, and the virtual space of symbol use, sustained by a rich tradition of myths and rituals, on the other. Sundararajan (2011) points out that in the healing rituals of many indigenous cultures, the triadic structure of the sign is kept intact by a division of labor: the burden of symbolic representation by means of linguistic expression and interpretation is carried by the spiritual healer, while the client only has the responsibility of avowal (“yes, it hurts”), an indexical function that validates the representations presented by the healer. Through this division of labor, the healing ritual restores the integrity of the sign system and thereby the health of the sign user. Put another way, since the ritual expert can perform the symbolic function more than

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adequately, the limited capacity of the clients to express their emotions verbally (symbolically) become inconsequential. This is also why we need to have a different epistemology of POR as traditional POR is built on an individualistic norm of psychological research, and is not able to capture a more collective and holistic religious experiences of others in the nonwestern world. Division of labor is the way all minds work, not simply those of preindustrial societies. A modern example would help. Just as the Yi-Bimbo delegate to the religious experts important mental functions such as manipulation of symbols (myth and ritual), we delegate (via off-loading or outsourcing) to the Smartphone equally important mental functions, such as memory and spatial navigation. Individuals who depend on GPS to go places, and digital memory to carry on daily routines would be seriously handicapped when they lose their Smartphones. Likewise, we can expect disruption in functioning for the Yi-Bimo when they can no longer outsource to religious experts to take care of many important mental functions, such as diagnosing or interpreting suffering. Cast in the framework of Peircean semiotics, the integrity of the sign system, in this case the Bimo religion, is compromised in modern times. When their myths and rituals are labeled “superstitions” (mi xin) and when their ritual specialists declined drastically as a profession, then as spiritual leaders of the community their communal mental space for symbol use is impoverished. As the communal mental space shrinks, the individual is thrown on his or her own resources to function with limited capacity for symbol use. Contributing to the accumulating evidence that suggests a buffering effect of religious coping (Pargament et al., 2000), the foregoing analysis sheds some light on the cognitive mechanism of such a buffering effect. More specifically, our analysis suggests that religion has a buffering effect only to the extent that its sign structure is intact. For instance, the YiBimo put much emphasis on the virtual space of symbols, as evidenced by the prestige given to the ritual specialists since antiquity. Thus the sign structure of their religion is intact only to the extent that their iconic and indexical expressions of affect are nicely counterbalanced by the rich myths and rituals that flourish in the symbolic communal space. When

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their rituals are branded as superstitions (mi xin), however, their religion loses its effectiveness as a buffer. Indeed, it is the breakdown of their symbolic space that renders the condition of Yi-Bimo alexithymic, the hallmark of which is poverty of the symbolic space. However, the Yi-Christian group in our research (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018) fared relatively better, thanks to their abstract/conceptual mode of processing and internal orientation. This internalization process, according to the theory of mentalization (Fonagy, 1991), helps to build the cognitive resource and structure in the psyche thereby rendering the individual relatively less vulnerable to drastic changes in the environment. We may recall that some Yi-Christians were able to continue their worship during the time when their religion was prohibited by the government because prayer was an internal activity invisible to the outsiders. By contrast, the mentalization of the Yi-Bimo group entails a very different trajectory in which symbolic function along with its cognitive resources is located primarily in the communal space of the collective, rather than in the individual psyche. To such a community in which the mind is embedded in the body, which in turn is embedded in the collective life of myths and rituals, a Western individualistic theory of mentalization is not applicable. What we need instead are perspectives from semiotics and community psychology (Kirmayer et al., 2011). The foregoing analysis suggests that one way to help the Yi-Bimo group to cope with the ravages of modernization is to promote their unique course of mentalization by restoring their symbolic communal space, and empowering their ritual specialists to revive the myths and rituals that have given life meaning since time immemorial.

Proposing a Peaceable Research Methodology and Agenda In this section, we propose a cross-disciplinary collaboration between religious study, psychology, and anthropology that values a mixedmethod research paradigm, field study, teamwork, and reflexivity.

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A Theory-Driven Mixed-Method Paradigm By adopting a rigorous mixed-method approach, we hope to bring indigenous psychology to the wider context, beyond the lab or college setting. We believe indigenous psychology needs to start from ground up in any culture, and be rooted in the language from the field, in order to break the classism inherent in the hegemony of psychological discourse. Therefore, we need to break out of our research lab and venture into an anthropological psychology, a cross-disciplinary effort. Taking our past study with Yi ethnic group as example, to employ a mixed-method approach, we created diversity intentionally in picking our research team. We used a multidisciplinary research team that consisted of sociology, psychology, social work, and religious study majors. The team members also came from three different countries, though we were all Chinese, and rooted in different cultural backgrounds. All of us (10 people) were also diverse in age, generation, and level of education (ranging from sophomore student to senior scholars). The heterogeneity among us was stimulating and exciting, because there was never a dull question or boring moment when we shared each of our perspectives. We (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018) as the primary investigators took the voices of our junior research assistants seriously, as their experiences and fieldnotes could give us a new perspective on cultural differences. For example, someone from a disciplinary background in ethnology would find the semi-structural interview method intrusive; someone from the field of sociology would take a more objective stance with the participant; some junior member of the team would relate his/her identity as a grandchild to the senior participants; someone from an atheist background would find the Bimo ritual overwhelming; someone who had built relationship with Yi people before would find the newbies irritating and as an outsider; someone who came from a counseling psychology background would forget her structure in interview and empathized too much with the Yi storytellers, and so on. All of these different “intuitions” from different disciplines would alert us to self-correct as a team during team meetings. Having members with different research skills and strengths in both qualitative and quantitative researches would definitely prevent the myopia of a single discipline.

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Field study and the participant observation method are useful and powerful in the study of indigenous religion as it helps to build relationship with the local participants, to ensure validity of our study, and to overcome the language barrier and impression management on the part of the survey takers. We spent half a year in cultural immersion before we conducted semi-structural interview because we wanted to ensure that there was trust directed toward us as the “outsider” of the local community. Especially since we were unfolding an emotionally laden topic (suffering narratives from our participants) we wanted to ensure they felt safe enough to talk about the topic without feeling intruded upon or out of control. After one and half years of interaction with the two locations, our research team finally gained credentials as a community “insider” with the Yi families we followed-up on. Our participants constantly invited us to visit them during special festivals and celebrations. This might not sound cost-effective to the modern psychological researchers who are accustomed to lab-controlled experimentation or questionnaire-based survey methods. However, if we take the identity of IP seriously, we would honor the voice of the indigenous people (Bhatia & Priya, 2018), while searching for the most cultural inclusive methodology and epistemology for research.

Reflexivity of the Researchers As researchers, we acknowledge the existence of a power differential and our own cultural myopia when studying indigenous religions with ethnic minority groups. As authors, we all came from an educated middleclass Han Chinese background—especially the first author who was formally trained in Western psychology. We also came from different religious backgrounds that were different from that of the ethnic groups we worked with. In this kind of social science research, the researchers’ self-reflection becomes a crucial instrument and the relationship with the local participants is regarded as a dialogue (Bernard, 1988). Just as the great ancient teacher Confucius said, “Learning without thinking is a waste; but thinking without learning something new will render our work a dangerous practice” (Analects, Book II chapter 15).

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For instance, when investigating the psychology of religion among Yi people, our research assistants were trained to take analytic and ethnographic notes throughout the study. They had to write in a diary every day in order to reflect on their encounters (both in person or by phone) with the participants, and each of them had to followed up with 5–6 of the participants throughout a given year. By the end of the study, each RA had to write 3 case reports based on the longitudinal (one-year) case notes using the individual case study method. These are the cases they deemed having an “impact” on them personally and were “representative” of the local cultures. In the case report, besides writing objective narratives about their assigned participants, we (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018) asked them to reflect on their personal relationship with the participants and the encounter, on any problems with the study, on any ethical dilemmas, and on future directions for the study. For example, when our research assistants encountered a village heavily impacted by HIV, their field memos that day were emotionally laden, and considerable parallel cognitive processes occurred between them and the participants. One RA said she felt dissociative when she entered the household of an AIDS Yi patient. She did not know what to ask in the interview though she was a well-trained Master student in social work in a prestigious university program. Basically, she embodied the cultural experience of the Yi group we interacted with, and personally experienced the “speechless moments” (mute) just like some of the participants. Another RA said they were all very hungry at the end of the day and consumed a larger portion of rice than usual as if they were trying to “fill up” the emptiness and hollow created by their suffering Yi participants. This kind of self-reflexivity actually created important data as we constructed a cultural theory with humility, and examined our own motives to avoid imposition of cultural superiority.

Conclusions According to the 2010 Chinese census, there are approximately 113 million ethnic minority members in China (8.5% of total population), which is more than one-third of the American population. However, it is

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certainly an understudied subject in the history of Chinese and Western psychology. Currently most of the religious studies on Chinese populations are of the Han tradition, which is mainly informed by Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist, traditions. Such an ethnocentric psychology could pose a threat to less dominant ethnic groups by the hegemonic control of definitions of self-construal, mental spaces, morality, intelligence, health, and agencies by the dominant Han group. In addition, there has been a history of inter-racial conflicts in China created by the force of unilateral assimilation (汉化) by Han people. Studying ethnic religion would be a remedy to balance Chinese psychology, and thereby create a diverse and reflexive IP. From a postmodern viewpoint, IP would be more “plural” rather than “singular” in its voices, and by attending to all of them rather than proclaiming an “universal truth,” it would contribute to the solidarity of humankind (Rorty, 1989). After the 1980s, most of the Han Chinese in mainland China have gone through the baptism of “Open Economic Policy,” which led to market privatization and industrialization. However, due to the geographic isolation and linguistic barriers, many ethnic minority groups are still deeply rooted in their ancient cultural practices, spirituality, and healing rituals. By listening to their life stories, we could contribute to the construction of an IP that is inclusive, conversational, and peaceable relative to tribal and aboriginal groups worldwide. While studying their indigenous religion, fostering voices among ethnic minority groups would be seen as important by IP scholars. If science is a form of truth seeking, we need to start with increasing the awareness of the hierarchy and implicit power differentials in our own field. Thus, we hope to use our research paradigm among Yi people as a humble attempt to elicit the local cultural narratives and to amplify the volume of the voiceless. Specifically, we suggest that mainstream psychology of religion could learn from IP study among certain ethnic minority groups, before interpreting cultural difference with an existing Western psychology lens and imposing its implications. To end this chapter, we share with you a narrative told by a Bimo priest in our focus group interview:

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In high antiquity, humans, gods, and ghosts all live together. No need for Bimo (priest). Later when humans, gods, and ghosts no longer live together, Asulaze became the ancestor of the Yi [the first Bimo priest]. In high antiquity, trees can talk; we can hear ghosts talk; and ghosts can also hear humans talk. At that time, trees and stones also perform rituals (mi xin). (cited in Ting & Sundararajan, 2018)

Notes 1. It is an indisputable fact that “folk religion” exists widely in Chinese society. Compared to institutionalized religion, “folk religions” display the following characteristics--no registered religious groups or social organizations, deity worship and incense sacrifice in local small scale temples; and have a wide range of participants. Their beliefs of deity draw from the mixture of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism traditions, and the believers are mostly non-blood related. Its worshipping practices are mainly bound to local participants in a certain region. 2. “Bottom level” is a concept often used by linguistic anthropology. It refers to “sinking” characteristics of the linguistic system where a language has undergone changes, but its basic semantic rules and syntax structures will always leave a deep impact in the “bottom level” of the language’s composition system, which will still be activated in certain situations to show the strong vitality of a language itself (See: Zhang, 2009, pp. 389–397). We borrow this concept to explain the characteristic of the indigenous religious practiced by many indigenous people.

References Chinese Publications Du, P. (2018). Views on the governance of folk beliefs in the new era. Retrieved from http://cssn.cn/mzx/201806/t20180620_4372801.shtml. Fei, X. T. (1999). The pluralistic integration of the Chinese nation. Beijing: Zhong yang min zu da xue chu ban she.

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Jin, Z. (2002). A preliminary study on the gathering and dispersing phenomena of folk beliefs. Xi Bei Min Zu Yan Jiu, 2, 146–157. Jin, Z. (2018). The form construction of contemporary Chinese folk belief. Min Su Yan Jiu, 4, 7–15. Li, J. F., & Cai, H. (2011). Traditional renaissance and cultural reconstruction: An anthropological analysis of the revival of the Tuzhu culture in Weishan. Hei Long Jiang Min Zu Cong Kan, 1, 147–151. Liu, S. H. (2015). Passage to manhood: Youth migration, heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China. Beijing: Zhong yang bian yi chu ban she. Ma, D. S., Qin, Z., Yang, Y. Q., Chen, R., & Zhang, Q. (2011). Study on the psychological adjustment function and psychological mechanism of Dai water-splashing Festival. Zhong Guo Jian Kang Xin Li Xue Za Zhi, 19 (10), 1240–1241. Ting, R. S.-K., Zhang, K. J., & Luo, Y. S. (2020). Constructing a peaceable psychology paradigm in the study of indigenous religion among China ethnic minorities. Accepted for publication in Zong Jiao Xin Li Xue, Vol 6. Wang, J. X. (2009). On methodology of ethnic religion research from the perspective of anthropology. Min Zu Yan Jiu, 03, 23–31. Wang, X. L., Ting, R. S.-K., Tian, H. L., & Zhang, Y. (2018). Resilience among religious ethnic minority in China–A qualitative study on coping strategies of Yunnan Luquan Christian. Psychology of Religion, 4, 316–344. Yang, L., Li, Y., & Zhang, J. J. (2013). Effect of religious belief on mental health and subjective well-being of minority college students. Dang Dai Jiao Yu Yu Wen Hua, 5, 55–59. Yuan, Y. Y. (1992). The society and family of the Yi nationality in Liangshan. Chengdu: Si Chuan Da Xue Chu Ban She. Zhang, K. J. (2015). The structure, characteristics and operation mechanism of ethnic religious identity (Doctoral dissertation). Beijing: Zhong yang min zu da xue. Zhang, Y. H. (2009). Investigation on Bimo belief and subjective well-being of Yi nationality in Liangshan. Xi Nan Min Zu Da Xue Xue Bao (Zhe Xue She Hui Ke Xue Ban), 30 (6), 61–64. Zhang, Z. G. (2016). The stone of other mountains of Chinese folk belief: A case study on Ou Da nian’s theory exploration. Shi Jie Zong Jiao Wen Hua, 5, 7–12.

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Katz, R. (2017). Indigenous healing psychology: Honoring the wisdom of the first peoples. Rochester: Healing Arts Press. Kirmayer, L. J., Dandeneau, S., Marshall, E., Phillips, M. K., & Williamson, K. J. (2011). Rethinking resilience from indigenous perspectives. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 56 (2), 84–91. Laufer, B. (1917). Origin of the word Shaman. American Anthropologist, 19, 361–371. Pargament, K. I., Koenig, H. G., & Perez, L. M. (2000). The many methods of religious coping: development and initial validation of the RCOPE. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 56 (4), 519–543. Parmentier, R. J. (1994). Signs in society/Studies in semiotic anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sundararajan, L. (2011). Spiritual transformation and emotion: A semiotic analysis. Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 13, 78–90. Sundararajan, L. (2015). Understanding emotion in Chinese culture: Thinking through psychology. New York, NY: Springer SBM. Swancutt, K. (2012). The captive guest: Spider webs of hospitality among the Nuosu of Southwest China. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18, S103–S116. Ting, S.-K. (2012). The worldviews of healing traditions in the East and West: Implications for psychology of religion. Pastoral Psychology: Special Issues, 61, 759–782. Ting, R. S.-K. (2016). Celebrating life and death: Resiliency among postearthquake Tibetans’ religious community. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 44 (2), 124–132. Ting, R. S.-K. & Sundararajan, L. (2018). Culture, cognition, and emotion in China’s religious ethnic minorities: Voices of suffering among the Yi. Palgrave studies in Indigenous Psychology series. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Ting, S.-K., Sundararajan, L. K. W., & Huang, Q. B. (2017). Narratives of suffering: A psycholinguistic analysis of two Yi religious communities in Southwest China. Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, 28, 232– 255. Ting, R. S.-K., Zhang, K. J., & Huang, Q. B. (2018). An inclusive indigenous psychology for all Chinese: Heeding the mind and spirit of ethnic minorities in China. In K. H. Yeh (Ed.), Asian indigenous psychologies in global context (pp. 249–276). Palgrave studies in indigenous psychology series. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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5 Psychology of Religion Instrumentation: Systematic Review with an International and Multiple Faith Focus Kenneth T. Wang and Esther C. Tan

Over the past several decades, there has been a rapidly increasing trend of research in the field of psychology of religion (Abu-Raiya & Hill, 2014), which appears to parallel the increased number of measurement tools that have been developed and made available for researchers. In the psychology of religion, as in other disciplines, major advances in research findings and productivity are usually proceeded by advancements in the measurement tools and methods (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003). However, relatively little has been done in instrumentation on how different cultures intersect with different psychological processes in different religions. Measurement is an important foundational tool for quantitative empirical research. Understanding which measurement tools K. T. Wang (B) · E. C. Tan Department of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] E. C. Tan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_5

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are available provides researchers with a better picture of what has been done and what areas deserve more focus.

Perspectives on Psychology of Religion Measures In 1999, Hill and Hood conducted a review of the measures used in Western psychology of religion (PR) literature. They identified 125 scales, which were included in the edited book Measures of Religiosity (Hill & Hood, 1999). They noted that the vast majority of the measures had been developed within a Judeo-Christian framework without much consideration toward cultural sensitivity. In 2013, Hill and Edwards conducted another review of the measurements on Western psychology’s religiousness and spirituality that was published in the APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality (Hill & Edwards, 2013). In this updated review, Hill and Edwards (2013) identified a few measures that were developed indigenously, outside of the Judeo-Christian traditions, including the Psychological Measure of Islamic Religiousness (Abu-Raiya, Pargament, Stein, & Mahoney, 2008), Measures of Hindu Pathway Scales (Tarakeshwar, Pargament, & Mahoney, 2003), and Religiosity of Islam Scale (Jana-Masri & Priester, 2007). However, they noted that Judeo-Christian scales remained disproportionally represented in this review. Since an overwhelming majority of the world’s population identifies with some form of religion, Dueck, Ansloos, Johnson, and Fort (2017) posited that it would be integral to consider the intersection of culture and religion as interwoven in most psychologies of people groups. Hence, definitions of cultures without incorporating consideration of religious traditions may again, reflect a more Western understanding of culture. Similarly, there has been a lack of a clear consensus on how to define religion, as it encompasses various domains and aspects. Moreover, scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1962) have raised the issue that the definition of religion, the terminologies, and analytical categories used in PR research in the West, have been derived from the

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Judeo-Christian tradition. They also argue that the modern concept of religion developed from Christianity has been inappropriately imposed onto non-Western cultures. In research, many of the PR measures used to compare or understand other religions were simply translated from existing Western scales developed in the context of Christianity, which paralleled the issues of Western colonization in the field of psychology in general. This type of influence on PR research has the effect of diminishing other religions and cultures outside of the Christian tradition and can lead to serious bias especially in comparative studies (Masuzawa, 2005).

Culture and Psychological Processes Cultural values play an important role in one’s psychological process. Cross-cultural psychologists have noted that emotions are closely connected to self-construal in different cultures (Kitayama & Markus, 1994). For example, in a more collectivist culture with Confucian influences like China, individuals would be expected to hold back emotions or to express emotions discretely, in contrast to a more direct expression in Western cultures. In Sundararajan’s (2015) book on culture and emotions, she subscribed to Roger Scruton’s (2007) definition of culture as “a repository of emotional knowledge” (p. 23) and a conceptual space which relates to style of thinking (Boden, 2009). Her culture-cognition scheme also demonstrated that our cognitive appraisals are dependent on perceptual (more concrete) versus conceptual (more abstract) modes of processing, which are also influenced by strong-tie or weak-tie cultural contexts. Culture, as well as the religion embedded within cultures, deeply interconnects with psychological processes in human development. Hence, studying different religions is, in other words, studying different indigenous cultures. Therefore, indigenous psychology principles which emphasize descriptive understanding of human functioning in particular cultural contexts (Dueck & Reimer, 2009), is crucial when developing measures for specific cultures or religions.

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Importance of Contextual Factors It is thus important to consider contextual factors (e.g., historical, cultural, societal, family, school, work, and political influences) when studying the psychology of religion due to the interaction between culture and psychological processes. There are psychological aspects of religiousness, such as beliefs, practices, and affect, that pertain to multiple religions and aspects that are particular to certain religions. For example, Abu-Raiya and colleagues (2008) worked through the process of developing scales that fit with the Islamic context by identifying domains of Islam that are relevant to physical and mental health, and those not specific to only Islam. These nonspecific religious domains included religious conversion, religious coping, religious struggle, religious internalization, and religious exclusivism. The authors also identified core Islamic-specific dimensions like Islamic beliefs, practices, and ethical behaviors, different from those of other religions. The example addresses the potentially problematic issue of applying Western Judeo-Christian frameworks onto those from other religious orientations. Most early measures of religiousness were mainly developed for a Judeo-Christian context and then translated for studying non-Christian cultures. The differences in religious and cultural frameworks were initially ignored to facilitate cross-cultural or cross-religious research. In other words, Western Judeo-Christian ways of operationalization were simply imposed as the default framework referenced in these comparative studies. This neglect can lead to biases and problems; cultural contexts are too critical to ignore, especially when religion and psychology intersect. Not only are some religions fundamentally different in their doctrines and beliefs, the implicit psychology and explicitly lived expression of religions also vary across societies. Societies’ historical and cultural heritage and how they are related to other cultural domains, such as state regimes, education policies, living conditions, can have a significant influence on one’s religious experiences and practices (Agilkaya, 2012). For example, in a country with a majority of Muslims, schedules, policies, and commercial businesses work around the tradition of fasting during the month of Ramadan. Another example is in how Buddhist

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views of incarnation influences how certain cultures conceptualize relationships based on the idea of fate. This was well stated by Hood, Hill, and Spilka (2009): The sociocultural context is the external foundation for religious beliefs, attitudes, values, behavior, and experience … the fact that people cannot really be separated from their personal and social histories, and that these exist in relation to group and institutional life. Families, schools, and work are part of the “big picture”, and we cannot abstract a person from these influences. (p. 4)

Hill and Edwards (2013) echoed this sentiment by pointing out that cultural bias has been a main problem in the international PR field. A key root of this issue starts with the foundational problem of measurement. In this chapter we will provide a review of the landscape of PR measures that have been developed for religious groups beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition, within which many subscales have embedded or are correlated with well-being indices such as Islamic well-being, physical health, depression, self-esteem, death anxiety. We will also illustrate through examples the potential pitfalls to avoid when developing PR measures, and offer suggestions on the best practices.

Systematic Review of the Psychology of Religion Scales Search Strategy and Process We conducted a systematic search in a set of databases to obtain a landscape of PR measures used in research for populations outside of the Western Judeo-Christian scope. Our search included the following set of databases: PsycINFO, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, PsycEXTRA, PsycARTICLES, PEP Archive, PsycBOOKS, MEDLINE, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, Health Source - Consumer Edition, and Academic Search Premier.

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To identify the measures that had been developed, modified, or used, we searched for studies that were focused on (a) non-Christian religions and (b) scale development or psychometric evaluation. The aim was to first find all measures used with non-Christian religious populations, and then review the scale construction process to examine whether they were developed indigenously. We used the following combination of search terms in article titles: [(musli*) OR (islam*) OR (taoi*) OR (daoi*) OR (hindu*) OR (buddhi*)] AND [(scale) OR (inventor*) OR (question*) OR (measure*)]. The first set of terms were used to identify articles that were focused on five different non-Christian religions, and the second set was used to identify articles that had a focus on measurement scales. The final search was conducted on August 27, 2018.

Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria To define the scope of our review study, we used the following inclusion/exclusion criteria: 1. Included journal articles of empirical studies; excluded other types of publications (e.g., literature reviews, doctoral dissertations, and master’s theses). 2. Included articles published in English; excluded non-English ones. 3. Included scales that focused on religion; excluded scales that focused on issues or settings unrelated to religion, such as superstition, philosophy, or on general spirituality not associated with any particular religion. 4. Included scales that did not specify religious terms but were developed based on doctrines associated with a specific religion (e.g., Buddhist patience, Buddhist non-attachment); excluded measures not based on religious doctrines (e.g., general mindfulness). 5. Included scales mainly designed for and used with a non-Christian religious population; excluded scales used with non-religious individuals, scales for studies focusing on the comparison of religious groups with Christian groups, and scales designed to assess religions universally without reference to any specific non-Christian religion.

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Screening and Selection Process The article search team included two members. A US faculty member in psychology originally from Taiwan and a second-year psychology doctoral student in the United States, originally from Singapore. The database search result yielded 155 English journal articles (see Fig. 5.1). The reviewers independently screened the title and abstract of each article to determine whether the article met the inclusion/exclusion criteria followed by consensus meetings. In the case of ambiguity or reviewer discrepancies, the full texts were then obtained and analyzed to decide whether they fit the inclusion/exclusion criteria. The full-text of 74 articles were obtained for further review. Articles that did not address an actual measure, were unrelated to religion/spirituality, or were not designed for a specific non-Christian religion, were excluded. The remaining 49 articles were further assessed for how the scale items were developed. The assessment was independently conducted by the two Results from search N=299

Articles excluded (non-English journal) N=144

Abstract Screening N=155

Articles excluded N=81

Full-text analysis N=74

Articles with Non-Christian Religious Scales (NCRS) N=49

Articles excluded (N=25): No actual scale Unrelated to religion/spirituality Not designed for specific non-Christian religion Articles excluded (N=25): Translation of Western/Christian scale Adaptation of Western/Christian scale No mentioning of item development process

Indigenously developed NCRS N=24

Fig. 5.1 Flowchart of search and selection process

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team members and their ratings examined to ensure accuracy. Among these articles, 24 were scales developed indigenously. A flowchart of the article search and selection process is presented in Fig. 5.1. A list of 24 articles that were developed indigenously based on the doctrine, practices, and experiences of the targeted religious population is presented in Table 5.1.

Landscape Based on Systematic Review Through this review of PR measures for non-Christian faiths, we found several interesting phenomena. First, the studies and scales were relatively small in number, but there was a rapid increase during recent years. Secondly, approximately half of the scales were developed based on the targeted religion, not merely adapted or translated from existing scales items originally created for a different culture or religion. This was the criterion that we used to determine indigenously developed scales. As suggested by Yang (1999), indigenous scales may better capture the unique characteristics of local culture. Among the 24 indigenous scales, the majority was published within the past ten years (n = 20). The four studies published prior to 2008 were published between 2003 and 2004. Most of these scales were developed based on Islam (n = 19), followed by Buddhism (n = 4) and Hinduism (n = 1). There is clearly a critical mass of Islamic measures, which we believe will establish the foundation for more empirical research with the Muslim population in the near future. These 24 indigenously developed scales covered a wide range of topics, including measures of general religiousness, religious beliefs, religious practices, attitudes, spirituality, and virtues. The domains of the scales were also reflective of the religions. For example, three out of the four Buddhist measures focused on virtues, such as patience, non-attachment, loving-kindness, and compassion. As our review provides a broad overview of the non-Christian religious measurement landscape, there are a few limitations to note. First, we only reviewed articles that were in English. Second, we did not exhaust the various methods (e.g., manual searches, indirect links) to compile a comprehensive list of all existing scales. Third, we selected the five

(3) Positive Belief, Negative Belief, Extinction (5) Ideological, Experimental, Ritual, Intellectual, Consequential (14) Intentional Morality, Meditation, Sangha Support, Active But Meaningful Karma, Dharma, Fatalistic Karma, Impermanence, Inter-Being, Not-Self, Right Understanding, Lovingkindness, Bad Buddhist, Mindfulness, It’s Not Easy Being Buddhist (3) Patience of the willing Endurance of Suffering (PES), Patience of not Retaliating Harm (PRH), Patience developed from the thorough Scrutiny of Phenomena (PSP) (4) Belief/Certainty, Justice, Jihad, Patience

Afterlife belief scale

Faith inventory

Buddhist Patience Questionnaire (BPQ)

Buddhist Coping (BCOPE)

Attitude scale

(#) of Subscales

Scale name

Table 5.1 Indigenously developed non-christian measures

Choheili, Pasha, Maktabi, & Moheb (2017)

Deng & Li (2016)

Phillips, Cheng, Oemig, Hietbrink, & Vonnegut (2012)

Tabassum, Chattha, & Khan (2017)

Ghayas & Batool (2017)

Authors & source

(continued)

Islam

Buddhism

Buddhism

Islam

Islam

Religion

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Hindu religious pathways

Knowledge-Practice Measure of Islamic Religiosity (KPMIR)

Islamic prayer-based Self-efficacy Scale (IpbSeS) Islamic Questionnaire of Spiritual Intelligence (IQSI)

(#) of Subscales (4) Devotion, Ethical Action, Knowledge, Physical Restraint/Yoga (3) Preparing, Transporting, Position/Movement (5) Approaching Consciousness, Moral Awareness, Spiritual Self-awareness, Critical Fundamental Thinking, Meaning-of-life Awareness (11) Islamic Knowledge Composite, Islamic Practice Composite, Knowledge of Creed, Knowledge of Worship, Knowledge of Appearance, Knowledge of Jurisprudence, Knowledge of Islamic History, Practice of Creed, Practice of Worship, Practice of Appearance, Practice of Jurisprudence

Scale name

Table 5.1 (continued)

Alghorani (2008)

Islam

Islam

Islam

Al-Obaidi, Wall, Mulekar, & Al-Mutairie (2012) Farahani, Sohrabi, & Azarbayejani (2016)

Religion Hinduism

Authors & source Tarakeshwar et al. (2003)

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(8) Intellectual (telic), Experimental (autic mastery), Affectional (autic sympathy), Coercive (conformist), Revivalist (paratelic), Negativist (opposing my family), Alloic Mastery (fighting on the poor’s side), Alloic Sympathy (sharing possessions) (7) Self-Discipline, Quest and Search for Divinity, Anger and Expansive Behavior, Self Aggrandizement, Feeling of Connectedness with Allah, Meanness-Generosity, Tolerance-Intolerance, and Islamic Practices

Motives for Converting to Islam

Multidimensional Measure of Islamic Spirituality (MMS)

(#) of Subscales

Scale name

Authors & source

Dasti & Sitwat (2014)

Lakhdar, Vinsonneau, Apter, & Mullet (2007)

(continued)

Islam

Islam

Religion

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Pakistani Religious Coping Practices Scale

Nonattachment Scale Ok-Religious Attitude Scale

Muslim Experiential Religiousness Scale Unidimensional (4) Cognition, Emotion, Behavior, Relation (God) Unidimensional

Multidimensional Religiosity Scale (MDRS)

Muslim Daily Religiosity Assessment Scale (MUDRAS)

(#) of Subscales (3) Individualistic Devotion, Tolerance toward Life Issues, Conviction, Subjective Righteousness, Social Orientation, Optimal Religious Functioning, Attitudes and Beliefs (3) Sinful Acts, Recommended Acts, Engaging in Bodily Worship Unidimensional

Scale name

Table 5.1 (continued) Authors & source

Khan & Watson (2006)

Islam

Ghorbani, Watson, Geranmayepour, & Chen (2013) Sahdra, Shaver, & Brown (2010) Ok (2016)

Islam

Buddhism Islam

Islam

Islam

Religion

Olufadi (2017)

Qasmi & Jahangir (2010)

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Sahin Index of Islamic Moral Values Scale of Muslims’ View of Allah (SMVA) Self-Other Four Immeasurables (SOFI) Short Muslim Practice and Belief Scale (S-MPBS) Spiritual Jihad Measure Endorse, Reject

(4) Positive-self, Positive-others, Negative-self, Negative-others (2) Practice, Belief

(2) Hope, Fear

Psychological Measure of Islamic Religiousness (PMIR)

Religiosity of Islam Scale (RoIS)

(#) of Subscales (7) Islamic Beliefs, Islamic Ethical Principles & Universality, Islamic Religious Duty, Obligation & Exclusivism, Islamic Religious Struggle, Islamic Positive Religious Coping & Identification, Punishing Allah Reappraisal, Islamic Religious Conversion (2) Islamic Beliefs, Islamic Behavioral Practices Unidimensional

Scale name

Authors & source

AlMarri, Oei, & Al-Adawi (2009) Saritoprak, Exline, & Stauner (2018)

Islam

Francis, Sahin, & Al-Failakawi (2008) Alshehri, Kauser, & Fotaki (2017) Kraus & Sears (2009)

Islam

Islam

Buddhism

Islam

Islam

Islam

Religion

Jana-Masri & Priester (2007)

Abu-Raiya et al. (2008)

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most common non-Judeo-Christian religions as a focus for our review. Finally, scales embedded within articles that were not identified through our search database or did not meet the search term criteria were not included. In sum, the purpose of this systematic review was to offer a sense of the overall landscape but may have missed certain qualifying measures due to the above reasons.

Potential Pitfalls of Translated or Adapted Measures Past studies have shown that PR instruments range from merely literal translations of Judeo-Christian religious scales into the context of another religion, to scales that were developed using an indigenous approach. For instance, critiques from reviews of religious scales have pointed out how some researchers have used Christian-based instruments without modifications to the original instruments when used with the Muslim population (Mahabeer & Bhana, 1984). We will discuss the potential pitfalls of translated and adapted scales with illustrations from our review.

Translation-Related Issues Scholars have highlighted several issues resulting from translation efforts of existing scales. First, a common pitfall of having word-for-word translated measures is the problem of finding an equivalent word or phrase in the religion of interest. A long-standing problem has been the issue of finding lexical equivalents. There are often subtle differences in the meaning of words that are hard to capture with direct translations (Stern, 2004). These differences could stem from cultural-specific nuances or religious-specific worldviews. A simple example is changing the word “church” to “mosque” in the items of a religious measure. The basic meaning of the word—place

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of worship—seems to be retained, as the item on the scale had been made clearer and more appropriate using language specific to the religious group (Berry, Bass, Forawi, Neuman, & Abdallah, 2011). However, translation efforts may become more complicated when some religious groups do not utilize a common gathering place of worship, such as religions in which altars were set up in private homes (e.g., ancestral worship altars). It becomes more difficult to capture the same meaning with a simple translated word like “mosque” or “temple.” A more complex example depicting the problem of appropriate translations is the example of the Muslim Religiosity-Personality Inventory (MRPI) scale with the Religious Personality subscale (Krauss, Hamzah, Juhari, & Hamid, 2005). The scale included items that assessed the extent to which one’s everyday behaviors reflected Islamic teachings and commands. The authors explained that when referring to “worship,” it was often translated as “ibadat,” which actually has a broader meaning than the English “worship.” Ibadat comes from the Arabic word abd , which has the connotation of “‘being owned’ by Him Whom he serves,” which is different from the Arabic word Khadim, which means simply being a “servant” (al-Attas, 2001). Hence, the use of the term “ibadat ” reflects the added dimension of one’s direct relationship with God, beyond the meaning of servant. In such cases where several words in the language that the scale is being adapted to have a similar meaning, the final word choice needs to be appropriate to reflect correct doctrinal meaning within the scale. In other instances, translating a simple word like “God” required much research into how God should be referred to and carefully regarded across religions. Berry et al. (2011) indicated that to many Jewish participants of his study, the inclusion of God in an assessment of spirituality was optional. However, for Muslim participants, not only was the reference to God essential, it was important to not in any way “infer that God and humans operated in a peer-like relationship” (Berry et al., 2011, p. 847).

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Doctrinal-Related Issues In some cases, there were no parallel concepts found across the religions being assessed on the same scales. For instance, a phrase like “leading a Christ-centered life” could be translated as “leading a God-centered life” for another religion, but the subtle theological and doctrinal differences would be lost. This problem arises simply because other religions do not have the equivalent concept of Christ, which is specific to Christianity, in their doctrine. In other cases where there were no parallel religious concepts, researchers may need to resort to removing items that were not relevant in the other religion of interest. For example, in certain denominations in Judaism, the concept of hell is “not regarded as being a [tenet] of orthodoxy”; therefore, questions referring to hell had to be removed (Berry et al., 2011, p. 846). In such cases, adaptations had to be made to these scales in addition to mere translation. Specifically, researchers need to be more cautious when using scales with doctrinal character, as the items must accurately reflect how the religion regards the concept expressed. Examples of such problematic measures are the adapted God-image scales (Agilkaya, 2012). The measures consisted of items like “God guides me like a good parent” (Lawrence, 1997) and “God is always there like a father and cares for me like a mother” (Streib & Gennerich, 2011). Though these items are relevant and suitable for use in Christian samples where the concept of a Trinitarian God is acceptable, the concept is unacceptable in the Islamic context. This example demonstrates that though religions may seemingly share some common elements, such as having a single god (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), there are major constructs embedded in one that are not found in another.

Cross-Religion Relevancy Issue On the other hand, some researchers choose instead to measure general constructs such as “religious commitment” or “religiosity” that are more general and thus presumably applicable to all religions. However, care is still needed at the item-level construction, as commitment in one religion

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is not defined the same way in another. For instance, researchers used to measure church religiosity by means of attendance. However, this indicator would not be suitable for Muslim samples because only men are required to attend collective worship at a specific place (mosque) in Islam (Agilkaya, 2012). These examples demonstrate the need for the scrutiny of scales at the item and subscale levels, to check for cross-religion applicability. Zeng, Wei, Oei, and Liu (2016) highlighted the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) as an example, to show that the concept of self-compassion found in this constructed measure is not aligned with self-compassion according to Buddhism. The key discrepancy lies in the concept of “oneness” of self and others in Buddhist philosophy where compassion encompasses both oneself and others; however, self-kindness in SCS describes serving mainly one’s own happiness (Zeng et al., 2016). When the broadest frames of reference differ at the fundamental levels, differences trickle down to the nuts and bolts of the religion. Concepts that are similar across religions to a lay person could actually be vastly different to the experienced eye.

Other Cross-Cultural Relevancy Issues One could also run into cultural relevancy issues when adapting measures across cultures. For instance, when items in the Sahin-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam (Sahin & Francis, 2002) were translated into Urdu in the Pakistani-Islamic context, the negatively phrased items from direct translation had to be adapted into positively phrased items. The use of negatively phrased items was deemed offensive in Pakistan as they could suggest blasphemy. Therefore, care must be taken for considerations of acceptable cultural norms, even within the same religion (Musharraf, Alan Lewis, & Sultan, 2014). Cultures differ through many dimensions, which deeply influence one’s values and worldviews. One common cultural description is the collectivist-individualist spectrum, where some cultures are deemed to have greater tendencies to view ‘the self ’ in the context of a community and in relation to others than viewing the self more independently (Hoftstede, Hoftstede, & Minov, 2010); other

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descriptions of cultural differences refer to small or large power distances with more hierarchical order differences (Hoftstede et al., 2010), while some communities could be defined as belonging to categories such as strong-ties or weak-ties communities (Granovetter, 1973). These dimensions are points of consideration when researchers design or translate items in instruments, including the choice of constructs that are relevant and meaningful to the respective culture. Appropriate consideration of culture includes also being cognizant of how religious terminology differs across different levels of religiosity. When religious terms are translated from one culture to another (e.g., Islamic scales are translated from Arabic to Turkish cultures), it is worth noting that some of the terms or language used may belong to religious jargon that only those highly educated in the religion could understand. For instance, the term tasallut is likely familiar to those who belong to the more religious groups but is not used by the average Turkish person (Agilkaya, 2012).

Best Practices for Developing PR Measurements With the development in the field, criteria for good scale development have also been discussed. Recently, Abu-Raiya and Hill (2014), in the context of Islamic measures, listed five criteria: (a) theoretical clarity, (b) sample representativeness, (c) reliability, (d) validity, and (e) generalizability. In another systematic review of Chinese PR measures, Wang, Zhang, and Cao (2017) shared guidelines on best practices for developing scales based on indigenous psychology principles. Combining these guidelines, Table 5.2 presents a summary of the proposed four key guiding principles and the corresponding steps, to develop PR scales that meet research standards, and which employ indigenous psychology principles.

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Table 5.2 Best practices principle and guidelines

Guiding principles: 1. Contents are based on theological underpinning and cultural validity

2. Sample represents a good spread amongst faith believers 3. Good data is collected through establishing trust

4. Adequate psychometric properties of reliability and validity

Steps in developing PR scales employing indigenous psychology principles • Construct religious or doctrinal framework for the particular faith • Form expert panel consisting religious, cultural and language experts • Conceptualize and operationalize constructs of interest • Develop items via experts or believers from the particular culture through focus groups, individual/group interviews or open-ended surveys. • Conduct field-testing and ongoing expert panel review of items • Include back-translation process and independent translators on items developed, when appropriate • Use multifaceted sampling approach (include secular and religious centers) • Establish credibility and trust through good protocols, instructions that encourage anonymity, confidentiality and shared vision • Reliability: Cronbach’s alpha > .70 • Validity: Establish factor structure, convergent and discriminant validity

Principle 1: Contents Are Based on Theological Underpinnings and Indigenous Cultures To measure content as sensitive and crucial as religious constructs, the accuracy of the doctrinal content takes the highest priority within the steps of measurement. All the contents within the scale must reflect what is particular to the religion of interest. To ensure alignment of contents with the theoretical bases within respective religions, we present the following recommended steps to ensure content validity.

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Construct a Religious or Doctrinal Framework for the Particular Faith First, researchers of religion and spirituality need to be equipped with more sophisticated theological literacy and be “spiritually and religiously informed” about the specific faith traditions (Agilkaya, 2012, p. 312). Therefore, it would be most valuable if a religious or doctrinal framework can first be drawn up for the specific faith. This best practice was found in a publication by Islamic religious researchers, in which the Islamic Worldview Map was developed (Krauss et al., 2005). The authors emphasized the important role of religious worldview as the underlying philosophical foundation for understanding religious concepts. In this case, a new conceptual map of the Islamic worldview was developed, which reflected areas such as the Tawhidic paradigm, the fundamental elements, the Islamic creed, pillars of Islam, and relationship with self and others (Krauss et al., 2005). Using this broad conceptual map as an overarching frame of reference facilitated the researchers’ process of identifying salient issues worthy of research and measurement. The theological conceptual frame aided in the construction of indigenous scales which were based on well-developed theoretical underpinning. Another example that demonstrated doctrinal fidelity is in the construction of The Measures of Hindu Pathways by Tarakeshwar and colleagues (2003). The research team not only ensured that the constructs of measurement were based on Hinduism doctrinal framework, but also accounted for the alignment of doctrinal ideology with the “lived” expression of religious experiences and the psychology of practitioners in the population or culture of interest. In this respect, religion is often practiced differently across geographical locations and cultures. The doctrinal framework developed could take into account the cultural contexts. An example of this consideration was evident in Agilkaya’s (2012) discussion, where he explained shrine visits as an example of alternative practices to official Islam but specific to Turkish Popular religion. As such, if measures contain items describing shrine-visiting as religious practices, they should be treated as cultural-specific scales for Turkish Islamic practitioners. These complexities of ensuring content and cultural validity coupled with intertwined

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theological-cultural differences attest to the need for good research practices, especially when dealing with measurements.

Formation of an Expert Panel It is vital to involve professionals such as religious experts and leaders (Jana-Masri & Priester, 2007). In fact, we recommend three types of experts to be included as an expert panel to help researchers understand the nuances of the contexts they are researching: (i) religious experts, (ii) cultural experts, and (iii) language experts. These are essential steps that will support the researchers to acquire deep knowledge about the religious culture. If the researchers are not from the particular faith, it will also be helpful for the team to be immersed, like an ethnographer, deeply in the religious culture. An example of the multidisciplinary expert panel is in the development of the Multidimensional Measure of Islamic Spirituality (MMIS), which involved evaluation of the questionnaire by 10 religious/spiritual scholars, one sociologist, and three psychologists, all of them with at least 10 years of religious practice, teaching or research experience (Dasti & Sitwat, 2014).

Conceptualize and Operationalize Constructs of Interest Translating the constructs into an operational definition involves defining the scope of the scale (what it will or will not measure) and the type of setting and population that the scale will be used to investigate (Wang et al., 2017). These conceptualization and operationalization processes refer to steps of identifying the content domains that fall within the constructs followed by steps of translating these sub-domains into concrete, measurable items. An example of good practice for this step is the design of the Buddhist Patience Questionnaire (BPQ), which started with three definitions of patience defined in Ksanti paramita in Buddhism from the authoritative Dictionary of Buddhist Doctrinal Terminology (Deng & Li, 2016). Using the review of authoritative Buddhism literature with data from

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qualitative interviews, the BPQ was constructed consisting of three subscales that covered the three dimensions: Patience of the willing Endurance of Suffering (PES), Patience of not Retaliating Harm (PRH), and Patience developed from the thorough Scrutiny of Phenomena (PSP).

Develop Items with Experts from the Particular Indigenous Culture When developing items, it is also important to involve persons of faith across different religious commitment levels, to gather thick descriptions that reflect a range of religiosity around the indigenous culture. This process constitutes co-construction, where researchers and experts of the localized faith culture work hand in hand to develop a scale that is meaningful to the religion. As established in the earlier section, many cross-cultural psychologists have demonstrated that emotions are closely connected to psychological processes. An exemplary practice can be observed from the development of the Psychological Measure of Islamic Religiousness (PMIR) scale, where the research team employed extensive anecdotal and literature reviews (AbuRaiya et al., 2008). They consulted Islamic documents, PR literature on the related constructs of interest, and also interview protocols used across various religious measurements, to prepare a well-constructed interview protocol that comprised of questions that targeted the constructs for measurement well. Another example was observed in the scale development of the Buddhist Patience Questionnaire (BPQ; Deng & Li, 2016). Researchers employed a method whereby scenarios about patience were first generated from real-life work situations. Researchers then used descriptive statements from the interview data to generate the item pool for each dimension of patience. This example demonstrates innovative ways of developing items through in-depth interviews and collecting contextualized scenarios within the culture of interest.

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Field-Testing and Expert Panel Review One recommended method of ensuring face validity is the Cognitive Interviews approach, utilizing think-aloud interviewing or verbal -probing techniques (Alshehre, Kauser & Fotaki, 2017) to interview pilot-test participants about their decision-making processes when responding to the questions and scales. These inform how the question items or response scales could be enhanced. Alshehre, et al. (2017) utilized this approach to develop the Scale of Muslim’s view of Allah. DeVellis (2016) also suggested useful pointers on item construction. A structured process can be established to solicit good feedback from using a criteria list of: (i) theological soundness, (ii) religious or cultural relevancy or appropriateness, (iii) clarity of items and response scales, (iv) language accessibility. The revised items and rating scales should be further refined by consulting the expert panel but also average practitioners of the religion, to ensure that items generated are accessible to a more general population.

Include Back-Translation Process and Independent Translators In cases where scales were universal across faith groups, there could be good items or subscales from existing measure adapted across cultures. Many such research teams have employed practices such as backtranslations and involvement of independent translators. For instance, in Saffari, Pakpour, Mortazavi, and Koenig (2016), two bilingual translators independently translated the Muslim Religiosity Scale (MRS) from English to Persian, and the final Persian version was back-translated by an English-speaking researcher who had no prior knowledge about the English scale. These steps were engaged with the purpose of ensuring that the items were constructed well, reflecting the meaning intended even after translation and localization efforts to the respective cultures.

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Principle 2: Sample Represents a Good Spread Among Religious Practitioners In each faith group, practitioners can range from low to high religious commitment levels. Earlier studies have relied on a convenient sampling approach by recruiting from temples, mosques, churches, the key places of religious gathering. However, believers who visit temples for instance, are usually practitioners who are more committed than the general believer population. As a result, the findings could be skewed toward reflecting the behaviors or attitudes of more committed practitioners. As such, to ensure that the sample consists of a good spread of people of different religious levels, a good practice is to employ multifaceted sampling by recruiting from secular places such as educational institutions or community centers, other than religious centers (JanaMasri & Priester, 2007). However, there are times when the purpose is to better understand how a religious community forms people spiritually at their best. In these cases, a subset of exemplars within a religion would be the targeted sample.

Principle 3: Good Data Is Collected Through Establishing Trust Especially in conducting research of sensitive nature such as religions, it is important to employ steps that build trust between researchers and participants. For instance, due to the sensitive sociopolitical climate from the negative occurrence from certain religious radicalism activities (e.g., September 11 incident), some research participants could become wary of researchers, as high levels of religiousness were at risk of being correlated with terrorist motives (Jana-Masri & Priester, 2007). Participants may not respond honestly and the quality of the data collected would be compromised. Trust is an important factor for “real” data to be collected. To encourage honest and valid responses, research administrators should involve local participants in scale construction and protocol development

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as well as establish trust during the testing procedures. In occasions where the researchers do not meet with participants, the protocol with instructions of the research study could be carefully phrased to affirm the anonymity and confidentiality of the research, such as providing assurance of changes in identity markers during reporting, or providing only aggregated data reports without individual data to stakeholders. Another helpful step is to present the purpose of the study that encourages a shared vision with participants, appealing to their help to achieve the meaningful outcomes intended.

Principle 4: Adequate Psychometric Properties of Reliability and Validity As with all measurements, reliability analyses should be conducted and scales with Cronbach’s alpha value of .70 and above were considered acceptable (DeVellis, 2016). Wang et al. (2017) highlighted the need to establish factor structure, convergent, and discriminant validity. We would recommend referring to statistical resources for detailed information on the steps of establishing adequate psychometric properties of the measures. More importantly, cultural validity cannot be overlooked. In other words, the psychometric evaluation would address the issue of cultural validity by accounting for factors such as nationality, ethnicity, indigenous cultures, religious subgroups, and historical time period.

Conclusion Through the systematic review of the PR measures of non-Christian religions, we found a recent trend of indigenous measures developed. Islamic scales represented the majority of such scales across non-Christian religions which could lay a solid foundation for future programmatic lines of Islam PR research. The increased attention to the religious and cultural contexts of recently developed measures provide optimism for the future of PR research in becoming truly global and across multiple faiths.

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Smith, W. C. (1991) [1962]. The meaning and end of religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Stern, L. (2004). Interpreting legal language at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: Overcoming the lack of lexical equivalents. Journal of Specialized Translation, 1. Streib, H., & Gennerich, C. (2011). Jugend und religion [youth and religion]. Munich: Juventa Verlag. Sundararajan, L. (2015). Understanding emotion in Chinese culture: Thinking through psychology. New York, NY: Springer SBM. Tabassum, P., Chattha, M., & Khan, M. (2017). Religiosity measurement: A case study of Christian missionary and Islamic schools in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. FWU Journal of Social Sciences, 11, 191–200. Tarakeshwar, N., Pargament, K. I., & Mahoney, A. (2003). Measures of Hindu pathways: Development and preliminary evidence of reliability and validity. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, 9 (4), 316–332. https://doi. org/10.1037/1099-9809.9.4.316. Wang, K. T., Zhang, L., & Cao, Y. (2017). Chinese psychology of religion measures: A systematic review and best practice guidelines. Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, 28, 133–162. Yang, K. S. (1999). Towards an indigenous Chinese psychology: A selective review of methodological, theoretical, and empirical accomplishments. Chinese Journal of Psychology, 41, 181–211. Zeng, X., Wei, J., Oei, T., & Liu, X. (2016). The self-compassion scale is not validated in a Buddhist sample. Journal of Religion and Health, 55 (6), 1996–2009. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-016-0205-z.

6 The “Wonder to Behold”: Reflections on Phenomenological Research of Alienic Spirituality Olga Louchakova-Schwartz

“Discovery is really a mixture of instinct and method,” says Husserl (1970, p. 40). Most of the time, psychological research is a discovery of the other: of other persons or groups of people. Two ways of thinking, natural scientific and phenomenological, approach otherness differently. Natural science treats the other as a material body with stimulus-response behavior and computer-like cognition. By contrast, the phenomenological approach makes her a subjectivity like the researcher’s own, sentient, aware, and evident to oneself. I, the researcher, know her subjectivity not because it is immediate (i.e., immanent) to me, but because she, the other, commands my attention. “The act of knowing is inextricably linked to, and hence, inseparable from, the object known,” says Fodor (2013, p. 508): via the immediacy of my own body, I comprehend the depth of her body; her form and movement express her Erlebnisse (lived experiences) and tease out my affect. What she tells me about herself O. Louchakova-Schwartz (B) University of California, Davis, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_6

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rings true in our shared participation in the world. But her spirituality is neither given to me, nor can I empathize with it via my usual means of constituting the other, e.g., by empathy, by bodily transfer, etc. Her metaphysics, her knowledge of herself, her self-transcendencies, her perceptions of the Absolute are hidden from me. And if she shares these, how do I understand her?1 What is “spirituality,” anyway?2 Her numenal is hers alone, always strange to me3 : an attempt at appropriating it (e.g., in New Age and transpersonal psychology) will give me nothing but yet another version of myself. The phenomenological approach recognizes a distinction between ordinary and religious experience.4 But religions are different things in different societies (Fitzgerald, 2000); and spiritualities are things different from religions; and the indigenous spiritualities are different from domestic European-American ones. How does one make way through this labyrinth of uncertainties? In my paper, I follow William James and Henri Bergson with the idea that spirituality is a personal, experiential dimension of religion, which one can examine cross-culturally in the light of Waldenfels’ “responsive interculturalism.”5 I also suggest phenomenology as a means of such examination, and claim that in the studies of indigenous psychologies of spirituality (which is the focus of the present volume), phenomenology not only delivers new information about spirituality, but broadens our understanding of consciousness. The numinous conscious states and their numenal objects incite unique reductions (cf. Dahl, 2010, 2019; Louchakova-Schwartz, 2019a)6 ; and reductions show the possibilities of consciousness which are normally hidden from the view. These processes become even more visible in crosscultural comparison.7 For example, getting out of rationalistic bias in the interpretations of Islamic philosophy uncovers a completely original perception of the mind-world unity8 ; and reading Zarathushtra’s Gathas not through the lenz of Western subjectivism shows intersubjective origins of the mind, etc. Consequently, if research shows no new findings, it means something went wrong with the method. By new findings, I mean not an invention, but aspects of the mind which show themselves after a leap beyond Western psychology’s versions of the truth.9 The new comes from epoché and wonder, and not from an illusion of “participation,” try as one may to become “them.”10

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As explained by Mickey (2019), phenomenology is uniquely suited for intercultural research. At the core of phenomenology is a mental procedure of phenomenological reduction—a suspension of one’s automatic ontic validations, and approaching things not as real physical objects but as presentations in consciousness.11 Since spiritual experience per se doesn’t involve a presence of physical objects, the mental isolation of the unity of such experience from other presentations can be tricky and go in many different directions. Also, as mentioned above, the spiritual experience itself is a result of particular reductions that interrupt the flow of ordinary experience.12 The method of phenomenology includes its own reductions: layering reduction of the method upon reductions already inherent to experience can be tricky: one should keep the phenomenon under study intact. A creative tailoring of reductions to match the subject matter of research is also a feature of phenomenology.13 I argue that in the research of indigenous psychologies of spirituality, the historical reduction is of central importance (and should precede all other reductions).14 Historical reduction was introduced by Edmund Husserl in The Crisis of the European Sciences (Allen, 1982; Husserl, 1970). By critical analysis of historical facts, this reduction uncovers the modes of subjectivity underlying the major paradigms of knowledge15 ; in the research of spirituality one tries to do the same, i.e., uncover the modes of subjectivity in culture-situated religious experiencing.16 This discloses the fundamental consciousness of spiritual phenomena. Distinctions in the modes of subjectivity are diachronic but can be assesed against the same formal phenomenological structure, of the intentionality of consciousness, of self-awareness, etc.—this is only with the help of such structure one can see the differences otherwise not reachable (e.g., by means of cross-cultural relativism).17 By phenomenology, I mean the original phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and their contemporaries and successors in the phenomenological movement, and not some trivial observations of experience which somehow pass under the name “phenomenology.”18 Phenomenology is a form of philosophy, but some of its methods are applicable to psychological research. Doing phenomenology means

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systematically examining and reflecting on the formal structure of experience that is concretized with regard to every partcular situation; one follows this evidence logically, if possible, with philosophical reasoning. In doing so, one aspires to understand the conditions of possibility for different forms of experience, describe how specifically the experience is given, what are the limits that distinguish one kind of experience from another kind, etc. Phenomenology has the formal analytic categories of its own,19 such as the transcendental ego, embodiment, empathy, various reductions, intersubjectivity, self-awareness, horizons, spheres, modes of existence, intentionality, and many other. If a research method leaves out these categories (as it often happens in psychology)20 —and I mean the determinations of sense these categories bring, not just their names—it will be true to say that it leaves out phenomenology itself.21 Edith Stein pointedly remarked that “[B]efore one can delineate the genesis of something, one must know what it is.”22 She meant not metaphysics of this something, but the description. Sogyal Rinpoche joked that when one teaches, it helps to know what it is, i.e., what is the topic. Spirituality is a commonly used term with unclear signification. As an experience-related term, it can be clarified only with the use of the authentic phenomenological formal categories that help to dinstinguish between experience and other things in the universe, and not by any other means.23 Phenomenology shows that spirituality (and mysticism, in the early literature) is not only culturally situated, but sedimented, i.e., belongs, within the historically constituted subjectivity.24 Since the numenal and numinous are always internal and internally transcendent to the self,25 an interpretive thematization of culture is not sufficient to understand spirituality. Historical reduction implies critique of subjectivity. Defining the critique (critical understanding) of subjectivity in historical contexts, Dood (2005, p. 3) noted: “…let us mean by “critique” that particular kind of reflection which, so to speak, gets to the “heart of the matter,” revealing something in its most basic sense. Critique, then, is a reflection in which something is given as what it genuinely, essentially “is,” where this givenness is understood from the beginning to be a determination of sense.” In light of this approach, I will begin with delimiting the scope of spirituality and working out the distinctive features of spiritual experiences.

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In section “Spirituality in the System of Experience” I show that experiences of a spiritual kind always have a metaphysical significance for their subjects.26 Spiritual experiences are windows in which subjectively experienced life discloses itself via different forms of intuition. In various ways but always, spiritual experiences highlight the direct, qualitative character of being alive, as opposed to indirect expressions of life in the animate objects. In light of this metaphysics of life, I present a limited cultural critique of Western postindustrial spirituality, in order to show that a particular form of spirituality depends on the configuration of the system of experience. To prove my point, I will compare two culturally different spiritualities, postindustrial spirituality and the mystical Illuminationist philosophy of medieval Islam, showing how historical reduction helps to access distinctions between their experiential metaphysics. Throughout, I emphasize that distinctions in question are not relativistic or interpretive, but refer to the foundational structure of the subjectivity, i.e., the self-expressions of life in history.27 In section “The Numenal and Numinous in the Empirical (Psychological) Horizon”28 I translate theoretical findings of section “Spirituality in the System of Experience” into the concrete situation of the indigenous psychology of spirituality. Toward this end, I explain the psychological horizon of spirituality, and discuss the personal character of spiritual experience. However, I also raise the question of whether spirituality is always personalistic29 : on the example of a revelatory dream of the ancient poet-priest Zarathushtra, I introduce the non-egological theory of mind and corresponding non-egological, experiential metaphysics. The question is not “Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally?” (cf. Shweder & Bourne, 1984, p. 113), but whether the concept of a person (and various cultural self-construals) is even relevant for the understanding of alienic spirituality, or whether we should consider spirituality as an inter-personal phenomenon, or even completely give up on the personalistic dimension. In research of spirituality, the methodology should account for extreme differences in the subjectivity and consciousness, including those which cannot be predicted by any domestic psychological theories.

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Using the findings of sections “Spirituality in the System of Experience” and “The Numenal and Numinous in the Empirical (Psychological) Horizon”, in section “Towards the Attitude of Discovery” I will return to the concept of responsive interculturalism and set forth a nonpredictive phenomenology of discovery. I will reiterate that relieving indigenous psychology of spirituality from the cloak of superimposed ideas requires analytic immersion in the concrete situation, cultivating wonder, and practicing historical reduction/epoché. I will conclude my argument by outlining six attitudinal principles of discovery, such as historical reduction, cultivating wonder, capturing “what it’s like,” active imagination, experimenting with reductions, and aiming for a discovery. The phenomenological method enables the discovery of alienic spirituality despite our culturally determined cognitive schemas and theories of mind.30

Spirituality in the System of Experience I begin by accepting the idea that all particular contents of consciousness, including that of spiritual experiences, are possible due to consciousness as such. But what is consciousness? John Searle famously stated: … [C]onsciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be reduced to anything that has third-person or objective ontology. If you try to reduce or eliminate one in favor of the other you leave something out … biological brains have a remarkable biological capacity to produce experiences, and these experiences only exist when they are felt by some human or animal agent. You can’t reduce these first-person subjective experiences to third-person phenomena for the same reason that you can’t reduce third-person phenomena to subjective experiences…31

As opposed to nature, the subjectivity (in Husserl) is the seat of Geist (German, “mind” or “spirit”) the ideality of reason Geist is also a spiritual principle: e.g., for Hegel, Geist-reason means the Absolute Idea, that is, God. For Husserl, subjectivity is not just a seat of pure meanings and

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ideal essences, but is alive: it has firstperson character, it lives through sensing and meaning-making. Sensing becomes Geist by giving rise to intentionality, and through it, to reason and knowledge. For Tymieniecka (1987), Geist is the logos of life, i.e., life’s measure and proportion as well as the essence of humanity.32 The phenomenological understanding of Geist is different from the Cartesian idea of a sharp distinction between the measurable natural objects and non-measurable subjectivity: “[o]rdinary lived experience between the lived body and environing world is presupposed by and forms a unity with both Nature and Geist ” (Konopka, 2009). In post-Galilean and post-Cartesian natural sciences, the subject–object distinctions became formalized; then, the ideality of subject–object opposition becomes absorbed in the worldview, appears obvious, and impacts the cultural system of experience.33 It is interesting that despite the obvious perspectival givenness of the world, the subject– object opposition does not define the indigenous frame of reference.34 This brings us to an important point of distinction between the systems of experience: in indigenous lifeworlds the subject–object, mind–body, spirit–matter oppositions may not be as clear cut as they appear in the scientifically minded, post-Galilean and post-Cartesian postindustrial lifeworlds. The unity of Geist and nature, and presupposes a likely shared point between the different systems of experience. Indeed, the subjectivity and the world are intertwined: what we see as obviously external and internal, the self and the non-self, is co-constituted by our own consciousness and the world. But, different from the world of objects, subjectivity has a lived, uniquely qualitative character35 : it is alive immediately and self-evidently in its givenness to itself. By illumining things, i.e., making them present, this very property of sentience creates a condition of possibility for Geist. Phenomenologists of life, such as Michel Henry or Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, maintain that life is on both sides of subject–object vector, but that it is given differently. In the subject, life is experienced in immediate intuition. In the objects, one can experience life only indirectly, as movement or communication—not by itself but through behaviors or properties we recognize as properties of the animate objects. “Life is a thing’s being evident to itself, and a living thing is percipient and active,” says Suhrawardi (1999, pp. 81, 121). Experiences

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which we perceive as “spiritual” disclose various aspects of metaphysical sense pertaining to this living subjectivity. In the early twentieth century, postindustrial Europe and America witnessed a rise of experience-centered spiritual groups and movements (Roof, 1999, 2000; Roof & Silk, 2005). This correlated with a tilt in the system of experience, i.e., in the “we-intentionality,” away from ideality of metaphysics and subjectivism and toward objectivism of the natural science. While the likes of Rolland, Berlin, and Shestov lamented the loss of the soul, a more proactive response from Freud, Husserl, James and other intellectuals balanced the tilt by development of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and radical empiricism. But among the laity, another form of counterbalancing took place: the rise of movements focused on spiritual experience. Otto in theology, Bergson in philosophy, and James in psychology, all about the same time and independently from one another, focused on the research of religious experience. The ideality of Geist, expressed itself—on unsystematic, spontaneous, but nevertheless sacred unveilings of the subjectivity. What we see here is a 360-degree correlation between the changes in different spheres of subjectivity: the shift of reason and the shift of empirical spirituality. Seeing this correlation, if not unity, between the rise of grassroot spirituality and paradigmatic shifts in knowledge, both related to dynamics of the expression of subjectivity, we can assume that empirically, metaphysics, and that such expressions can be very different in different cultural forms.36 In other words, the subjectivity is always the subjectivity, but its ideality, its metaphysics, its empirical spirituality is situated. If a western-born, western-trained researcher, with her own deeply rooted and culturally correlated metaphysics and forms of reasoning, attempts experiencing “enlightenment” a-la Buddhism, Yoga, or shamanism, the result will be the same domestic spirituality by means of Buddhism, Yoga, or shamanism, etc. When religious systems are transplanted from one culture to another, their alienic quality collapses. To give another example of correlation: across the board, in the East and in the West, Buddhism is known to proclaim one’s nature as pure awareness. Both scientific accounts and New Age reports maintain that pure awareness is a nonconceptual, self-luminous, open space of the mind (e.g., in Tibetan Buddhism, Rigpa) realized in the pure subjectivity. However,

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this doesn’t mean that pure awareness will have qualitatively the same expression across the board. When I reported my own impressions of such experiences to a Tibetan-born Lama, I emphasized the presence of non-conceptual, self-luminous aware space, which, according to the literature was pretty much of a “spiritual achievement”. But my interlocutor from Tibet said: “it’s Ok, as long as your Rigpa is alive.” For him nonconceptual, etc. were definitions, not descriptions of the lived non-conceptual “what it’s like” of the actual experience,37 —i.e., what that experience meant in his system of experience. The same holds for Vedanta: sat-chit-ananda, being/truth-consciousness/awareness-fullness are definitions only, not the actual experience; actual experiences can bring forth different qualitative aspects of consciousness all of which will fit with the definition but be emphatically not the same as one would think them to be, coming from a different culture. What aspect comes forth is determined by the cultural history of all the associated concepts and “intentional unity” of cultural consciousness, quite invisible as a sum but defining how people are accustomed to feel themselves and experience their subjectivity. Husserl used historical reduction to investigate how consciousness posits such unities in the course of history (Allen, 1982). Using his reduction, i.e., attempting to explicate the historically and culturally situated form of subjectivity, for our purposes means recognizing the first-person metaphysical meaning of experience. To do so, first one suspends customary Western ideas not just about spirituality, but about consciousness and the mind. Of course, one should know what they are in order to notice them. Second, one practices epoché on the totality of one’s own experience of consciousness, and from that standpoint rereads the description of indigenous experience in question. Third, one recognizes the tendencies in the indigenous system of experience (the so called unity of motivation)38 which could’ve brought up the experience in question. Fourth, one conducts critical reflection on most significant interconnections between the structure of particular experience and its system of experience. Because consciousness is indeed alive, in time this reduction and epoché open the researcher’s mind to alien metaphysics and alien spiritual experiences. The ethics of responsiveness presupposes this to be

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not just a set of analytic steps, but a respectful, careful, attentive, receptive, nonviolent, soft and slightly out of focus “gaze.” Seeing the alien is both freeing and awesome. Let me give an example. twelfth century Iranian Islam did not undergo Cartesian and Galilean influences, and its system of experience doesn’t feature a sharp subject–object, Geist –nature distinction. Hence, in Shihab-al Din Suhrawardi’s Philosophy of Illumination, subjectivity is sensed as a part of the world, along with other subjectivities. Thereby, the metaphysical unity of things is established not via subjectivity per se, but between visual light and self-awareness. This is a different form of union, not in monistic being of the pure subjectivity, but in the self-evidentiality of the universe, the unity-ofeverything-there-is-alive, and the awesomeness of human inclusion in it.39 In my own experience, recognizing this was quite remarkable: instead of the being locked in the “I am,” as it takes place in the formula of mystical union in Vedanta, some forms of Christian mysticism, etc., the Illuminationist “I” was given a universe. But it was not how Illuminationism was read for decades. Light was interpreted as a metaphor; a reference to self-awareness was taken out of the context of the real world and given an enhanced subjectivistic emphasis; and the whole of Suhrawardi’s Illuminationism was either Christianized (e.g., in Corbin, see Louchakova-Schwartz, 2015), or made into essentially postAristotelian philosophy (e.g., in Walbridge & Ziai, 1999, Introduction. Even though Suhrawardi was highly regarded in the tradition itself as a founder of original spiritual-philosophical lineage of knowledge, not only did the originality of his contribution become unclear, but it was not even clear if there was such a contribution…. In the absence of wonder, confusion reigns.

The Numenal and Numinous in the Empirical/Psychological Horizon40 Phenomenology clarifies experience by explicating pre-reflective intuitions of its sense. Initially, such intuitions may be quite vague. Upon a closer look, intuitions always have a structure—an organization of sense.

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Post-factum of spiritual experience, spiritual aspect of meaning in this structure is not available to reinterpretations: one cannot have an experience of a spiritual kind and then interpret it as a ordinary—the “original or personal religious” of James (Richardson, 2006, p. 392) is the one instantly given; an experience is immediately intuited as spiritual or ordinary. Hence, metaphysical intuitions come directly from the primary impressions.41 But what kind of psychology may be involved with such metaphysics, especially since psychology is not interested in metaphysical intuitions?42 Attempts to use Heidegger’s Dasein for the explication of Islamic or Tibetan metaphysics never exactly worked beyond a simple analogy43 : along with Merleau-Ponty’s “brute being,”44 Dasein is a markedly European concept. To paraphrase historical linguist Martin Schwartz, if a language doesn’t have a word “to be” (not all languages do), what kind of metaphysics will there be?45 If different histories delimit metaphysics, what good may come out of adding to it one more delimitation, by psychology? But in fact, approaching cross-cultural spirituality psychologically is what humanizes empirical metaphysics, tempers its overbearing, blinding excess. We just have to decide what kind of psychology is up for the job. As noted by Husserl (1970, 10, p. 60): “[The ancients] had investigations of the human and animal soul, but they could not have a psychology in the modern sense, a psychology which, because it had a universal nature and a science of nature before it [as a model], could strive for a corresponding universality, i.e., within a similarly selfenclosed field of its own.” In facing indigenous spirituality, we need to abandon such “externalistic” psychology and turn to the empirical, lived interiority of the self.46 In the concreteness of internal life, the psychological and metaphysical-spiritual senses are intertwined. Michael Barber (2017a, 2017b, 2019) distinguishes between two finite provinces of meaning, pragmatic/everyday and religious/spiritual. These provinces are separate yet can mutually interpenetrate. Metaphorically, they are like the open and clouded parts of the sky, in motion, overlapping yet clearly discernable. The sky always shows in a particular horizon, dependent on where one looks from—from a beach or from a downtown. Likewise, the space of consciousness always appears within a horizon defined by one’s mental “vista.” Out of all possibilities of consciousness,

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the psychological horizon selects a part of experience which is personal and internal to the self. This is subjectivity existing purely for itself (cf. Husserl, 1970, 10, p. 62) and immediate (i.e., immanent) to the constituting ego.47 The psychological-immanent sphere is different from the sphere of intersubjectivity, or the sphere of theoretical reflection, and yet, houses both provinces of meaning. Spiritual experience has a personal character as any psychological experience would; however, it also has a metaphysical internal transcendence which cannot be understood within the pragmatic province of meaning.48 Therefore, Jean-Luc Nancy assigned religious/spiritual experience its own sphere, of immanenttranscendence; others, e.g., Steinbock (2007), assigned it a property of verticality, as opposed to horizontality (of ordinary consciousness). However, such transcendent experiences remain within the self, and are paradoxically personal, despite of the transcendencies of the ordinary ego. We do not create such experiences but create a predisposition to them by inwardness, letting go, contemplating beauty, self-forgetfulness, or other contemplative methods that refocus consciousness away from its pragmatic relevances and tensions of the ego.49 In fact, this lived personal quality of transcendence disappears when approached within a pragmatic or theoretic sphere, i.e., when the experience in question is displaced: The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am myself, myself alone.50

An example: in the mid-1990s, the present author studied with an Indian guru specialized in “Kundalini” process. “Kundalini” process refers to an insufficiently researched form of adult development and individuation which takes place in accordance with the metaphysics of Indian Kundalini Yoga (cf. Jung, 1996). My scientifically-minded, British-educated Indian guru referred to me as a “Kundalini subject.”

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But for me, being a subject of the “Kundalini process” was nothing other than my immediate, innate life, which, “in addition to illuminating all things which fall into its scope, render[ed] itself visible as well.”51 This was punctuated by experiences which I could characterize only as numenal presences, including being dissolved (in God), being astounded (by God—or Goddess, didn’t matter, means the Absolute), being in communion (with God), or as God enjoying my existence without me— similar to Margaret Porete’s (1993, p. 191) “God is Who is, from whom all things are, and she [the soul] is not if she is not of Him from whom all things are.” Making all of it into a “Kundalini subject” took away this personal edge, thus disposing with the rest of the contents. But what makes such experiences personal, in a sense of being internal and meaningful for a particular individual? Contemporary analytic-continental philosophical debates regarding self-awareness and the personalistic accounts in psychology are linked, by their philosophical orientation, to the idea of the irreducibility of the formal structure of the ego-pole in the constitution of consciousness (Cf. the self-construal idea in cultural research).52 However, the egological constitutive engagement of consciousness may not be as irreducible as it seems. In the constitution of consciousness, the ego-pole takes on different roles, such as the psychological ego, or self-awareness, or as the transcendental ego, etc. Some spiritual exercises, e.g., Buddhist meditation, aim to reach beyond the psychological ego and remove the constitutive function of the ego-pole,53 but they remain nevertheless linked to the idea of individual consciousness having such an ego-pole. However, if we perform a historical reduction and epoché on this idea, other options in consciousness open up. I shall give an example. In the 3000-year-old corpus of orally composed Iranian religious poetry known as the Gathas, the ancient poet-priest Zarathushtra reports a revelatory dream. For a long time, the Gathas were interpreted as a dualistic ethical spin on being; but in fact, the monism of being is not Zarathusthra’s, but an Indian and Greek idea connected with the assumption that the ego-pole is empirical and irreducible. However, if a researcher suspends the latter, Zarathusthra’s dream reveals a totally different theory of mind. In the dream, the mind and the deity originate out of the presence of two spirit others, and out

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of the dichotomy of good and bad. There is no mention of some kind of ego-pole, or pure ego, or pure subjectivity, etc. Zarathusthra came up with his distinct theory of a non-ego centered mind a couple of millennia earlier than, let’s say, Levinas.54 His alien genius doesn’t take us into internal self-transcendencies, or inwardness, or into a psychology of spirituality “beyond the ego,” but in a completely different direction, into an origin of the mind in the other and in the ethics of relationships.

Toward the Attitude of Discovery In order to recognize an experience of the other (in second–person research), a phenomenologist has to lift the cloak of ideas and suspend the habitualities of sense around the experience-in-question in her own mind. Is this suspension enough for true reading of alienic spirituality, such as e.g., Suhrawardi’s or Zarathushtra’s? When the pragmatic province of meaning is permeated by the spiritual sense, the psychological horizon expands to include metaphysical abstractions. Such abstractions indicate the aspects of experience which make it spiritual. This implicit metaphysics is not only confronted with the Western maps of the mind, but is placed under the aegis of the governing ideas of European civilization, such as space-time, or the subjective nature of experience, or intentionality of consciousness, etc.55 These axiomatic concepts and propositions not only “mask” reality, but create an ideal space within which any conceivable form is possible as long as it conforms with the horizon of possibility opened by this ideal space (cf. Husserl, 1970, pp. 21–22). For example, if consciousness has an ego-pole, all possible conscious experiences should have such an ego-pole in order to transcend or modify it; if there is a pure subjectivity beyond space and time, all possible mystical unions must be realized in such a subjectivity, and so on. Such truths appear “obvious”; but their “obviousness” cannot be taken for granted.56 The “obviousness” in this case is just a convention, it always reflect something deeper, that is, the ontopoietic expressions of life within the historical subjectivity. These letter expressions are what we need to tap into in order to recognize a different form of life within the metaphysics of alienic spirituality.

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I am aware that bringing the subjectivitic ontology of life into psychology is confusing and may be argued against. However, such a reach resonates with James’ (2015) functional psychology. It also serves to highlight the fact that the psychology of spirituality is not just a study of the aspects of the mind, but of life per se that is expressed as the mind. Going back to Edith Stein’s maxim in the beginning of this paper, spirituality is “what it is” because of implicit, personalized metaphysical intuitions.57 Thereby, a distinction of alienic psychologies of spirituality is not in reasoning but in reason per se, not in sensing but in phenomenality per se, not in self-reflection but in the relationship of consciousness to itself, not in the meaning of emotion but in the selfaffectivity and continuity of emotion, i.e., in the primary impressions and the fundamentals of the given. Alienic spirituality brings with it not just modifications of the psychological sense, but a difference in lived metaphysical expressions of life—something one cannot preconceive. When anthropology turned to comparative metaphysics, this invoked an instant and bitter commentary on the limitations of relativism: “We have never been pluralist” (Candea, 2017). When it comes to the psychology of spirituality, without a phenomenological account of the metaphysical expressions of life relativism results in an acute and extreme upsurge of cultural blindness, i.e., a situation in which uniqueness of spiritual consciousness in principle cannot be noticed, not to say described. The paradox, to be understood, is that spiritual experiences are as diverse as are cultures; and that they are full of cultural expressions and contexts. And yet, they are not these expressions and contexts, but that what underlies and brings to visibility these very contexts, i.e., the lived, first-person, temporally extended expression of life itself. Does it mean that these alien configurations of spiritual consciousness, configurations which are in conflict with domestic laws of psychological gravity and nevertheless exist, are out of cognitive reach? That a researcher, one hundred percent circumscribed by her domestic cognitive schemas and ideas which de facto pertain to one only kind of history, can never break an enchanted circle of conditioned imagination, and can never really understand the alien? In fact, existence of the alien in itself is an evidence of the contrary. The recognition of possibilities of consciousness yet unknown exists via contrast, but not by a constraining contrast:

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juxtaposition must allot the “things” of spirituality enough freedom to be themselves. However, this doesn’t presuppose an absence of a method. But what do we mean by a method? All quantitative research methods, as well psychological adaptations of phenomenology, come from a worldview with scientific idealities: in confrontation with alien spirituality, their resolution is zero even if they were validated in a particular culture. There is no guarantee that they zoom into the phenomena they were designed to study, or that such phenomena even exist—the method goes “numb.” Further, qualitative research methods perform well enough when related to pragmatics. However, when it gets to spirituality, i.e., personal metaphysics and the problems of direct/immediate apperception of the Absolute,58 neither the qualitative hermeneutics nor participatory approaches are of much use. By contrast, via the change of attitude, the practice of phenomenology instantly sensitizes research both to metaphysical concerns and to considerations of alienness.59 In emic research, phenomenology serves to clarify experience and explicate its conditions of possibility, the structure of its givenness, and the limits which distinguish it from other experiences. In etic research, all of the latter becomes possible by virtue of phenomenological reduction which enables researcher to empathize with and understand experience not only as belonging to the other, but as essentially alien.60 To see both the figure and the background, one needs a beginner’s mind of radical epoché and wonder. Confronted with the vast, unpredictable, fascinating transcendence of the ordinary, the research practice of awe and wonder includes some or all of the following: 1. Historical reduction. This step consists in familiarizing oneself with the history of ideas in a particular culture, including theories of mind and understanding of subjectivity. This step requires considerable research; none of the popular sources will be of help here. The researcher needs to turn to specialized literature, talk to experts, and engage with the scholarly tradition. Then, critique of ideas serves as the epoché: researcher suspends the relevant factical histories, and attempts to see the constitution of consciousness, i.e., the life of subjectivity in the system of experience.

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2. Cultivating wonder. The insight of the other is magnificent and awesome! Wonder opens the mind to recognition of what one never saw before. 3. Revisiting steps (1) in wonder and empathy, to capture embodied, attentive, enfleshed, and affective unique “what it’s like” of experience, with freedom to examine emergent options. 4. Letting imagination run wild, thinking outside of the “scientific” truths, e.g., “what would physics be like in the absence of measurements,” or “what will happen if I reduce out the irreducible ego pole,” etc. 5. Experimenting with transcendental reduction, thematic reductions, and non-Husserlian reductions61 : since spiritual experience always involves a reduction (internal transcendence, interruptions, etc.) of ordinary consciousness, research reductions must not suppress, but on the contrary, highlight the unique character of experience in question.62 6. Aiming at a discovery. If you found nothing new (e.g., if your version of psychology of indigenous spirituality looks like a variation on the theme of Protestant anthropology, or if your version of shamanism reminds one of New Age self-help books, etc.), either your epoché went in a wrong direction, or your reduction is insufficient, or both. This paper is by no means a completed guide to the phenomenological research of the indigenous psychologies of spirituality. My hope is to raise the right questions: feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes.

Notes 1. Ratcliffe (2012) suggests that “radical empathy” of phenomenology enables understanding of very different ways of “finding oneself in the world,” e.g., in case of communication with a psychiatric patient. Evidently, a situation with spirituality is different. 2. “Spirituality” is a fluid term. See section “Spirituality in the System of Experience”, for clarifications of the uses of the term in the present paper.

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3. For more on the phenomenology of the alien, see Waldenfels and Steinbock (1990). I use the term “alienic” to categorize spirituality of the other in order to distinguish it, as a property belonging to the other, from the overall sense of the other as a stranger. For more on responsive interculturalism, Dallmayr (1989), Mickey (2019), Pai´c (2018), and Waldenfels (2012). 4. For more on the phenomenological analysis of religious experience in texts, see Louchakova-Schwartz (2015, 2016). For examples of empirical grounding in mystical philosophies, see Al-Attas (2014), Chittick (1998), Laude (2019), and Louchakova-Schwartz (2017, 2018, 2019a, b, c). For phenomenology in empirical aspects of worship, see Louchakova-Schwartz (2005) and Luhrmann, Nusbaum, and Thisted (2010). 5. See Dallmayr (1989) on the ethics of relationship to the other in postindustrial society. 6. Numen, from Latin numen, “that which is produced by nodding”, is a sign of a deity making itself present, by its will or directly. For the terms “numen” and “numinous,” see Otto (1950, pp. 10–11). For the commentary on these terms, see Dillard, 85–86. Thanks to Martin Schwartz for recommending the term “numen”. 7. Husserl uses the term “style” (1970, pp. 21, 31) to point to habituality in presentation of the surrounding world: “our empirically intuited surrounding world has an empirical over-all style. However we may change the world in imagination or represent to ourselves the future course of the world, unknown to us, in terms of its possibilities, ‘as it might be’, we necessarily represent it according to the style in which we have, and up to now, had, the world” (31). Hence, the task of comparative research is to interrupt the “style”. 8. Louchakova-Schwartz (2019b). 9. For more on alien as a stranger, as the guest, as stateless person, see Pai´c (2018). 10. My critique is directed at the so-called participatory approaches in research. 11. As an example of phenomenological reduction: let’s say, I am eating an apple. Normally, I behold the apple in naively realistic thinking according to which I am eating a real round red tasty nutritious fruit which I, as a biological, conscious and material body, acquired through an act of purchase at the market—which is a real space-time concrete structure in the physical continuum of my environment—implying this is a real process of me consuming a real apple and then digesting it so that it

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

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becomes a part of my real body and so on and so forth, in any variant of such implicit assumptions. In the phenomenological attitude, I simply apprehend an experience of eating an apple and the meanings it brings with it—that is, the consciousness of eating an apple. For reductions-interruptions, see Dahl (2010) and Barber (2017a). For more on Husserl’s reductions, see Husserl (1965) and Zahavi (2003). For an example of historical reduction in phenomenological analysis of spirituality, see Louchakova-Schwartz (2016). This includes intentionality of consciousness underlying ethical orientation of knowledge, the “locus” of the latter the system of experience (i.e., subjective, objective, or possibly other character), religious aspects of consciousness, and the connection with preceding and posterior forms of subjectivity, etc. Historical reduction can be compared with the archeology of consciousness. In contemporary philosophy, the forms of subjectivity are group ones, which is termed in contemporary debate “we-intentionality”. Historical reduction also includes analysis of the “unity of motivation” (Allen, 1982, p. 615) which brings about the shifts in the system of experience and paradigms of knowledge. For more on phenomenology of religious experiencing, see LouchakovaSchwartz (2019c). For the relativistic explorations of spirituality. See e.g. Katz, 1983. The central idea of cultural relativism is that the culture and the mind co-constitute each other (Shweder, 1984). Historical generativity of phenomenology doesn’t deny this fact, but adds to this surface observation a deeper analysis of cultural systems of experience which are motivated by sui generis processes involving an ethico-religious sphere of consciousness. For a discussion of the uses of phenomenology in psychology, with a subsequent critique of approaches which promote confusions concerning the nature of phenomenology, see Zahavi (2018b). For introduction to phenomenology, see K¨aufer and Chemero (2015), Moran (2000), Sokolowski (2000), and Zahavi (2003, 2017, 2019). For introduction to Western? phenomenology of religious/spiritual experience, see Louchakova-Schwartz (2019c). For criticism of distortions of the phenomenological method, see Zahavi (2018b). To the editor’s comments: the question whether these categories change from culture to culture is relatively unresearched, but one would expect that it may depend on the category. Stein (1964, p. 26).

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23. For a difference in the character of phenomenological and nonphenomenological analyses, cf. the phenomenological analysis of mysticism by Steinbock (2007) vs. various relativistic analyses in Gellman (2018), and specifically, Katz (1983). 24. For examples, see Flood (2013). 25. For more on inwardness and religious or spiritual experience, see Flood (2013); cf. St. Simeon the New Theologian’s (1995, p. 93) statement: “…search inside yourself with your intellect so as to find the place of the heart where all the powers of the soul reside.” 26. The word “count” refers to the ontic givenness of the phenomenon of spirituality: for their subjects, spiritual experiences count as real revelations, in a sense of gelten (German), “to counts (as such and such)(for me)” (for more, see Husserl, 1970, p. 23; ibid., Carr (trans.) ft. 2). 27. With regard to reflections on historicity of consciousness, Husserl (1970, p. 93) defines life as Das Sinnlichtkeit, sensibility/faculty of experience. This includes sensing and activities of reason, i.e., making and organizing meaning. 28. The terms “empirical” means available in experience, “in one’s internal life, i.e., psychological in general terms (also see ft. 48 below). 29. For the cultural difference in the concept of a person, see Shweder (1984). 30. For cultural features of cognitive schemas, see Cole (1996) and Taylor (1999). 31. Searle (1997, p. 12). 32. DeRoo (2018) points to the difficulty we incur attempting to discriminate between the spirituality-related and reason-related aspects of Geist in Husserl’s work. On one hand, Geist, or the spirit of humankind, refers to consciousness or the mind, i.e., what distinguishes human being from inert and inanimate material objects. On the other hand, some connotations of Geist are close to the way we use “spirit” in the context of explorations of spirituality, as a reference to God or the Absolute, worthy of worship and transcending the individual and finite human consciousness. 33. “Our apodictic thinking, proceeding stepwise to infinity through concepts, propositions, inferences, proofs, only “discovers” what is already there, what already exists in truth” (Husserl, 1970, 8, p. 22), i.e. what appears obvious is, in fact, preconditioned by theoretical idealities. 34. For the argument regarding intentionality in the ancient philosophy, see Caston (2018); for an opposing argument, see Louchakova-Schwartz (2019). 35. Henry (1973, 2016).

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36. Ontopoiesis of life is a term from the phenomenology of life of AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka (see in Louchakova, 2005). Ontopoiesis accounts for the shifts in paradigms of knowledge; in Husserl’s view, such shifts emerge through new intentionalities in ethic-religious sphere of the overall system of experience, for more, see Allen. 37. My interlocutor from Tibet, personal communication, Berkeley, 2015. 38. For more on unity of motivation, see Allen (1982 and Husserl (1970). 39. For more on the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, see Tymieniecka (1991). 40. Numen, from Latin numen, “that which is produced by nodding,” is a sign of a deity making itself present, by its will or directly. For the terms “numen” and “numinous,” see Otto (1950, pp. 10–11). For the commentary on these terms, see Dillard, 85–86. Thanks to Martin Schwartz for recommending the term “numen”. 41. For the discussion of qualitative character of religious experience, see Louchakova-Schwartz (2017). 42. Ibn al‘-‘Arab¯i (1978, p. 58). 43. For more on Dasein: in Islamic mysticism, see Corbin (1998); in Tibetan Buddhism, see Guenther (1992). 44. For more on “brute being,” see Bello (2009). For a concise explanation of Heidegger’s Dasein, the being of the human self in the world, see Brady (2017). 45. Martin Schwartz, personal communication, Berkeley, December 28, 2018: “If there is no word ‘to be’ in the language, can there be a philosophy?”, i.e., in what sense there would be a philosophy? 46. For the early Greek concept of the soul, see Bremmer 1983 (thanks to Martin Schwartz for recommending this reference). For the phenomenological intertwining of psychological and metaphysical aspects in the interiority of the self, see Tymieniecka (2012). The terms “empirical” and “lived” refer to different aspects of spiritual interiority: “empirical” (as above) means available in experience, “lived” means experienced subjectivistically as one’s internal life, that is, consciousness in first-person perspective. 47. The key notion in the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Taylor, 2011, 2013), trans-immanence characterizes the sphere of religious experience with regard to the condition of the psychological ego; transcendence is not meant here as a general property of consciousness. 48. This is an error often encountered by students of psychology in research of spiritual experiences: even though their subjects tell them that there

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50. 51. 52.

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is a special spiritual character of experience, this becomes reduced to pure semantics or interpretation, and experience remains unexplicated. Notably, these are not experiences of ESP, out-of-body experiences, experiences of altered perception or other psychic experiences, etc.—despite their difference from ordinary experience, they retain a pragmatic character and are not perceived as spiritual per se. Their subjects may interpret the latter experiences as spiritual due to identity politics in some New Age groups, but there is no innate spiritual quality to such experiences. For an example of transcendent experience invoked by contemplative practice, see Louchakova (2005) and Louchakova-Schwartz (2017). For the gradual development of such experience, see Porete (1993, pp. 190–192); cf. the statement of the Inchigiri-lineage Indian guru Sri Ranjit Maharaj “I am not, by He is, and in that, somehow, I am” (personal communication, Encinitas, California, 1997) who recommended self-forgetfulness of the ego as means to invoke such experience. Metin Bobaroglu, a Bektashi Sufi Sheikh, recommended for the same purpose contemplating beauty (personal communication, Istanbul, Turkey, 1998). William James (2007, p. 25). Slightly paraphrasing Frankfurt (1988, pp. 161–162. In the beginning of the Fifth Meditation, Edmund Husserl (1965, pp. 22, 122) states: “[T]ranscendental reduction restricts me to the stream of my pure conscious processes and the unities constituted by their potentialities and actualities and indeed it seems obvious that such unities are inseparable from my ego and therefore belong to its concreteness itself ”. The irreducibility of the ego-pole is further reaffirmed in The Crisis of European Sciences, etc. Ego-pole is meant to be a pivotal point in the intentional structure of the mind, a locus from which intentionality springs forth to become the “aboutness” of consciousness. For personalism in philosophy, see Williams and Bengtsson (2018). For contemporary debates on self-awareness, see Zahavi (2018a). For reconciliation of first-person givenness and anonymity, an important point for deeper inquire into personalness of religious/spiritual experiences, see Zahavi (2002). For self-construals, in psychology, see Cross, Hardin, and Swing (2011). For the constitutive analysis of meditations of loving kindness and mindfulness, see Louchakova-Schwartz (2019c). For more on cultural differences in theories of mind and their connection with faith, see Luhrmann (2018). For governing ideas of Western civilization, see Husserl (1970).

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56. For more on the “obvious” in experience, on ontic validity we attribute to the objects of the world, see Husserl (1970, p. 24), and Carr (trans.) ft. 2 on the same page. For the truth in the so-called apodictic knowledge, see Husserl (1970, p. 22). 57. The constitution of primary impressions was addressed by Husserl (1991, 2001). For more in primary impressions, see Henry (1975, 2008). For metaphysical significance of primary impressions, see LouchakovaSchwartz (2017). 58. Cf. Dahl (2010, p. 178) quoting Ricoeur “the most acute problem for phenomenology of religion is not intentionality and its alleged exclusion of what exceeds adequate comprehension, but the immediacy of religious phenomena, or rather, the recognition of impossibility of such immediacy.” By impossibility of immediacy, Dahl means the absences and interruptions which contribute to the constitution of religious experience—for more, see Louchakova-Schwartz (2019a). 59. For an example of a successful phenomenological approach to the crosscultural study of spirituality, see many works of Tanya Luhrmann. 60. For phenomenology in research of cultural otherness, see Mickey (2019). 61. For various reductions in phenomenology, see Dahl (2019). 62. For more on reductions-interruptions in religious experience, see Dahl (2010) and Louchakova-Schwartz (2019a).

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Part III Indigenous Psychologies of Religion

7 An Indigenous Appalachian Faith Tradition Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson

American psychologists have settled on a single term to identify the status of American psychology. Referring to social psychology, Elms (1975, p. 967) noted that, “whether they are experiencing an identity crisis, a paradigmatic crisis, or a crisis in confidence, most seem to agree that a crisis is at hand.” In psychology of religion, while others were applauding the call for a new multidisciplinary paradigm (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003), a distinguished scholar in the field rhetorically asked: “A field in crisis: Is it time to start over?” (Wulff, 2003). For those committed to understanding persons in their cultural context, the American commitment to naturalism and experimental methods is the root problem to be avoided (Hood, in press). An essential commitment of R. W. Hood (B) University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] W. P. Williamson Henderson State University, Arkadelphia, AR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_7

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indigenous psychology is to focus upon persons as freely acting agents within their historical and cultural context (Bandura, 1999). Elsewhere we have provided criticisms of what may be seen as an increasing narrowness of American psychology that privileges one method over all others (Hood, 2013), ignores cultural differences (Belzen & Hood, 2006), and restricts itself to methodological atheism (Hood, 2012). Psychologists concerned with cultural and indigenous psychology have been supported by those who have persuasively argued for methodological pluralism (Roth, 1987), which necessarily raises issues that Koch and Leary (1985, pp. 935–950) suggested is an emerging consensus in general psychology. Included in this consensus is the limited applicability of experimental methods and an increasing awareness of the philosophical presuppositions contained within research methods. This is especially the case when cultural differences are explored only from a methodological stance that may ignore genuine indigenous aspects of another culture or even when experimental findings fail to be explanatory of phenomena outside the laboratory context (Hood, 2011). In the most erudite, critical, intellectual history of psychology, Robinson (1995, p. 332) notes, “In a wide variety of settings, this [experimental] method has yielded fairly stable functional relationships between dependent and independent variables [that are] so unlike the domain of interest as to render generalizations jejune.” In this chapter, we will focus upon an indigenous religious tradition often ridiculed and maligned in a culture noted for its support of religious freedom. The tradition is largely situated within America’s Appalachian Mountain region and is arguably a unique expression integral to what McCauley (1995) terms Appalachia Mountain Religion. It is perhaps best summarized by an emphasis on intense physical and emotional behavior, highly valued as an unmediated experience of the Holy Spirit (McCauley, 1995, p. 15). As we shall note, this religious tradition continues to be inappropriately characterized as a religion rooted in poverty, deprivation, and cultural isolation when it is in fact an exemplar of indigenous religion sustained by an opposition to mainstream American religious traditions that have historically tried to transform them as at best a primitive expression of a distorted spirituality. For over 25 years we have engaged in-depth participant observation

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and study of this tradition. Much of our data—including videography of entire services, sermons, music, interviews, and other extensive documentation of believers in their homes, even in the process of dying from serpent bites—is archived and available for scholars to use.1 We continue to add to this archive with materials donated by believers in this tradition. In this chapter we will provide what can be only an introduction to an indigenous faith tradition, arguably one of America’s most unique religions in which a ritual that kills and cripples some remains as a common practice for those who believe. What and how they believe will be the focus of our chapter.

Historical Context The origin of serpent handling sects is disputed. Oral histories of handlers suggest that serpent handling always has occurred in Appalachia (Hood, 2005). However, a scholarly consensus is that the origin was heavily influenced by George Went Hensley who likely first handled in the first decade of the twentieth century (Burton, 1993; Hood & Williamson, 2008). His charismatic career was closely followed by various print media until his death by a serpent bite in 1955 while preaching a revival in Florida. Some scholars claim that serpent handling had independent origins in several Appalachian states in the first part of the twentieth century associated with the rise of Pentecostalism (Hood & Williamson, 2008). However, most contemporary serpent handlers have little knowledge nor interest in its specific scholarly history. Their concern is with the practice of serpent handling largely as handed down to them by their families and oral tradition (Brown & McDonald, 2000; Hood, 2005). The serpent handling tradition runs throughout the heart of the Appalachian Mountains whose isolation from the larger American culture has largely been due to the appropriation of its coal and the maiming of the land by the dominant culture. Ignored and isolated, the largely Scott-Irish immigrants who came to inhabit Appalachia brought a rich religious heritage that forms what is now an indigenous religious tradition that has historical echoes in the larger American mainstream

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tradition (Williamson, 2010). Protestant culture exists most strongly as part of what believers refer to simply as mountain religion. Here we note three tributaries that feed the great river of mountain religion that flows sometimes fierce and open but at other times silently underground—yet it is a river unlikely to ever run dry.

Holiness Holiness was a largely spontaneous and unstructured movement that emerged in Appalachia and the American South around the turn of the twentieth century (Synan, 1997). Finding roots among the poor and disenfranchised, it was (and still is) an ecstatic religion (Holt, 1940; Williamson, 2010). Holiness is seen by believers to be an outward manifestation of an inward spiritual transformation. Hence there is not distinction between belief and practice. Holiness is as holiness does. It can be seen in many visible forms, from mode of dress to style of hair. The particulars vary, but the intent is the same: to express holiness as a way of life. Sympathetic scholars have seen it as a successful buffer for the estranged and a manifest protest against modernist social and religious developments. As such it is an indigenous opposition to the more secularized religions of mainstream Protestant culture (Hood, 1998; Synan, 1997; Williamson, 2010).

Fundamentalism While fundamentalism is often dated after the emergence of Pentecostalism, Hood, Hill, and Williamson (2005) have identified intratextuality as the characteristic that allowed the larger cultural identification of fundamentalism as a religious movement in reaction against modernity, especially textual criticism (Bock, 2008). While non-fundamentalists seek guidance from several authoritative sources (intertextuality), their intertextual search for meaning lacks the clear boundaries found within a single authoritative text (intratextuality). Both Holiness and Pentecostals, influenced by what emerged as fundamentalism, adhere to an intratextual understanding of scripture in which the Holy Spirit is felt to be directly

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experienced and necessary for empowerment in a spiritually discerned world (Hood et al., 2005). What scholars came to identify as the defining characteristic of fundamentalism, a literal reading of the Bible is not the view of the indigenous faithful; intratextuality rather than literalism is the case. This means that the text itself guides interpretation, including what is to be taken literally and what is to be understood in other than literal terms. Serpent handling churches have always been fundamentalist churches under this view (Hood, 1995; Hood et al., 2005; Hood & Williamson, 2008).

Pentecostalism Emotionally spontaneous behaviors have always defined the Pentecostal movement. Within the rural South and the Appalachian Mountains, religious services can be disturbing from an outsider’s perspective as they observe individuals experience possession by the Holy Ghost. Here is how one psychiatrist described a Pentecostal church meeting: Their exaltation superficially resembles mania. At these times, they shout, scream, cry, sing, jerk, jump, twitch, hoot, gesture, sway, swoon, tremble, strut, goose-step, stamp, and incoherently “speak in new tongues. (Schwartz, 1999, p. 408)

Among the indigenous believers, another common description of their worship experiences is “joy unspeakable” (Hood & Williamson, 2008, pp. 189–190). As Pentecostalism spread and began to achieve success outside Appalachia, preachers began searching their bibles for criteria that would indicate legitimate Holy Ghost possession but be more acceptable as Pentecostals migrated into the larger American religious landscape. Charles Parham, a leading Pentecostal figure, demanded restraint in worship, excluding from the legitimate expressions of the Holy Ghost all phenomena such as “chattering and jabbering, windsucking, and holydancing-rollerism” (in Creech, 1996, p. 412). This effort to control and regulate emotion eventually led to the general acceptance of tonguesspeaking as the single evidence of Holy Ghost baptism among emerging

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Pentecostal groups. In the Appalachian Mountains, it remains as but one of many unscripted and spontaneous indictors of Holy Ghost possession among Holiness believers who handle serpents. But why handle serpents?

A Double-Edged Sword: Text & Context The demand for scriptural justification of indicators of Holy Ghost possession was a two-edged sword. Fundamentalism demanded that one accept all of scripture. Pentecostals found not only justification for tongues-speaking, but also for handling serpents. Mark 16:17-18 is the foundational text for serpent handlers. In the King James Bible (the only acceptable Bible to handlers), it reads: 17. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; 18. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Tongues-speaking is but one of five signs. Two additional signs, casting out demons and laying hands upon the sick were widely practiced and remain common in mainstream Pentecostal denominations and in serpent handling churches today. However, taking up serpents, once endorsed by the Church of God and its sister church, the Church of God of Prophecy, is today the outsider’s definitional criterion by which serpent handling churches are perceived to be unique. In both academic and popular media accounts of serpent handling churches, the handling of serpents is treated as a bizarre practice initiated by a deviant sectarian group within the Church of God and is abnormal enough of a practice to be in need of an explanation of why it persists in Appalachia. It also is claimed that serpent handling played only an insignificant role in the history of Pentecostalism and that the obituaries of the renegade handling churches scattered throughout Appalachia are soon assured. These specious claims ignore the long struggle within Pentecostalism over the issue of practices for which apparent textual justification is so troublesome to modernity (Fordsham, 1946).

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During this period, the most successful of both Holiness and Pentecostal churches dominated the attention of social scientists as the need to explore their less organized factions went largely unnoticed (Holt, 1940). Such investigations, said Holt, might reveal how religious experience among these groups serves to provide meaning and a sense of hope in their confrontation with hostile environments. Yet he noted the difficulty in studying these groups relative to more organized religious denominations: It should be recognized that not all Holiness and Pentecostal religion is organized. Of all formalized types of denominational religion, it is closest to the unorganized waves of summer revivals which sweep the South when crops are “laid by,” leaving no permanent traces because the poor are too poor to build a church or meeting house. Research concerning unorganized Pentecostal and Holiness religion should be done as soon as possible. (Holt, 1940, p. 740)

Despite early notice of this bias, Cobb (1965), some 25 years later, and even Hood (1998), almost five decades later, have observed that the neglect of social scientists to study fringe groups, such as serpent handling churches, persists as the current norm, thus leading to the notion of these groups in society as pathological (Labarre, 1962/1974) and to media reports that refer to their practices as a “bizarre” expression of faith (Birckhead, 1993, 1997). Histories of Pentecostalism largely ignore the unorganized Holiness and Pentecostal churches. Wacker (2003, p. 74), who justly praised the history of the early Pentecostal movement in America from 1900 to 1925, makes but one mention of serpent handling (and in one sentence). However, we have documented, using data from their own archives, how both the Church of God and the Church of God of Prophecy supported the handling of serpents, never as a test of faith, but as one of the signs to be followed by believers when moved to do so by the Holy Ghost (Williamson & Hood, 2004). What were to become two successful Pentecostal denominations, the Church of God and Church of God of Prophecy, came to embrace the charismatic signs of Pentecostalism in the first decade of the twentieth century— largely through the influence of its transformed leader, A. J. Tomlinson

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(see Williamson, 2000). Other Pentecostal denominations struggled as to the meaning of Mark 16:17-18. None would dispute the authenticity of the various longer endings of Mark but focused on the specific content of the text. As Bock (2008) has noted, most of what is in the longer ending of Mark is elsewhere in the New Testament with the possible exception of serpent handling (and drinking poison, which is not our concern here). Some Pentecostals found the story of Paul in Acts 28 relevant to the serpent handling mandated in Mark 16:8. Of course, Paul only accidentally “handles” a viper that fastened itself upon his hand and was shaken off into the fire while onlookers marvelled at his being unharmed. In one of the most curious comments in Charlesworth’s (2010) masterful study of serpent symbolism throughout Christian history, he asserts: “The narrator does not mention that the viper bit Paul. Perhaps the viper did not bite Paul, and that is likely in terms of ophiology, given the attempt of a viper to escape the fire and find safety in an arm” (p. 355). As with most scholars, he dismisses the reality of serpent handling by simply stating that Mark 16: 18 is taken literally by some fundamentalists and that the compiler was influenced by Dionysus of Greek mythology (p. 360). However, A. J. Tomlinson, an early defender of serpent handling (1918), writing in the Church of God Evangel , puts Paul’s incident at Melita in a perspective from the longer ending of Mark, as do indigenous believers who handle: Paul did not aim to take his serpent up. He did not know he was about him till he was fastened on his hand, and then he shook it off as quickly as possible. Applying the same analogy, we are not to lay our hands on the sick intentionally, and when we do get our hands on them accidentally we must shake them loose as quickly as possible, as if it is dangerous to keep them there. (Tomlinson, 1918, p. 1)

Pentecostal theologians such as Alexander (2006) have argued that the earliest years of the Pentecostal movement represent its “heart and soul” (p. 5). Many of the early Pentecostals were marginalized and disenfranchised, but by no means all (Wacker, 2003). However, they were linked to Wesleyan primitiveness in an effort to recapture the dynamics of the early church (Thomas & Alexander, 2003, p. 28). Alexander (2006,

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p. 106) notes that Mark 16:9-20 became the “litmus test” for primitive Pentecostals, and Thomas and Alexander (2003, p. 149) note that Mark 16:9-20 was unrivaled in both position and significance in early Pentecostal literature. As one comparative note, from 1910 to 1919 there were 26 references to Matthew 28:18-20, 16 to Acts 1:8, and 75 to Mark 16-20 among the extant issues of the Evangel (Alexander, 2006, p. 150). Furthermore, we have documented the growth of the Church of God and Church of God of Prophecy, linked to the increased frequency of positive reports of serpent handling in these emerging Pentecostal denominations (Williamson & Hood, 2004). While not all primitive Pentecostals endorsed serpent handling, those who failed to practice all the signs were chided by Tomlinson as “3/5th Christians” (cited in Thomas & Alexander, 2003, p. 104). So, among the Pentecostals who once endorsed handling, why did they abandon the practice?

After the Serpent Bites, Maims, and Kills While some Pentecostal groups endorsed the practice (especially the Church of God and the Church of God or Prophecy), other Pentecostal groups opposed it. Early beliefs that handlers could not be bit, or if bit, not harmed soon proved to be false. Until our extensive documentation, scientific evidence of serpent striking behavior especially under conditions of voluntary handling is sparse (Williamson, 2000). However, contrary to many expectations, we have proposed an elegantly simple (and empirically testable) proposition. The probability of being bit is low and, over time, is simply a function of the frequency of handling. Thus, the initial appeal of the wonders of handling serpents without being bit (evidence of the power of God to protect the handler) gradually gave way to the reality of more frequent bites, maiming, and deaths. Thus, the churches that once endorsed the practice came to oppose it, while maintaining the other less problematic signs (glossolalia, laying on hands, and casting out demons). However, all over Appalachia the fiercely independent renegade churches (many with some version of Church of God in their name) continued the practice, even to the present time (Williamson & Hood, 2004, 2015a).

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The ultimate inability to predict serpent-striking behavior assures a wide range of perspectives on explaining why someone is bitten. Furthermore, given the complexities of serpent-striking behavior, variations in serpent venom (copperheads vs. rattlesnakes, etc.), and variations in the amount of venom injected in any given strike, handlers have developed complex theologies to explain outcomes (Hood, 1998; Williamson, 2000; Williamson & Hood, 2015a). Of interest here is the simple fact that all handlers are aware of and most have been witness to severe bites to fellow believers that have maimed some and killed others. Many within their own families, wives have witnessed husbands killed, mothers their daughters (Brown & McDonald, 2000; Williamson & Hood, 2015a). Thus, early impressions of successful handling were misguided with scoffers and some researchers believing there was a “trick” involved. Claims were made that the serpents were defanged, frozen, or any number of explanations. Likewise, early believers felt that successful handling (which they identify as “victory”) was due to the protective power of the anointing of the Holy Ghost. However, as churches institutionalized the ritual of handling, bites became more frequent, sometimes with maiming and death as a result. It is likely that many early deaths went unreported as we continue to uncover reports of deaths from interviews with aged handlers and their recall of deaths (Hood, 2005; Hood & Williamson, 2008; Williamson & Hood, 2015a). However, in the early 1900s, newspapers began to report on deaths and we have documented these reports and continue to document previously unreported deaths (Hood & Williamson, 2008) by both serpents and the drinking of poison. As Pentecostals denominations were growing outside Appalachia, a ritual that maims and kills is unacceptable. In Appalachia, however, death is embraced as part of life. Our archives have both documentation of handlers describing what it is like to handle a serpent, what it is like to be near death from a serpent bite, and why handlers who witness this and know this continue the practice. Here we will let the handlers tell their own story. The context we will note here is the irony that handling serpents is the only instance of a textually mandated Christian practice outlawed in states with regions that border on Appalachia. The exception is the one state wholly in the Appalachian Mountains (West Virginia).

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Below we will discuss the remarkable women associated with the Church of the Lord Jesus in Jolo, West Virginia, who were largely responsible for keeping West Virginia from enacting a law against handling. The legal history of opposition to serpent handling is well documented (Burton, 1993; Hood & Williamson, 2008; Williamson & Hood, 2015a). Here we simply note that much of the popular understanding of handling is based upon sensationalist reports from outsiders that have little relationship to reality. The trial of one handler, accused of forcing his wife to be bitten by a serpent, led to the widely popular book on serpent handlers, Salvation on Sand Mountain (1995), in which the author, a gifted writer, summarizes and inserts himself into a tradition that he badly misrepresents (Hood, 1995). Burton (2004) has done a sympathetic study based upon interviews with most involved in the trial and allowed them all to tell their stories in their own words. Below we do the same for handlers.

Understanding Serpent Handling: In Their Own Words We will provide two methods that complement our extensive fieldwork with the serpent handling tradition. In one series of studies, we have used an approach that involves phenomenological interviews and hermeneutic techniques of interpretation (Hood & Williamson, 2008; Williamson, 2000). This method was used to allow believers themselves to describe their experiences and the meaning of serpent handling (Williamson, 2000), near-death bites (Hood & Williamson, 2006), the anointing (Williamson, Pollio, & Hood, 2000), and poison-drinking (Williamson & Hood, 2015b). Here we simply note that the complete interviews are all available in our archive, and interview summaries provided below are verified as accurate by a sample of the persons interviewed. Here we report data on what it is like to handle a serpent with victory and what it is like to be near death from a serpent bite. In a second series of studies, we used material from extended interviews with members of three separate families in which the interviews were read by those interviewed and portions were redacted when thought

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inappropriate or simply factually incorrect (Brown & McDonald, 2000). Rather than being a source of error, allowing participants to correct misunderstandings of researchers allows for a deeper understanding from the perspective of the indigenous culture (Hood, 2015; Williamson, 2000). While we will focus only on portions of interviews from two families, we note that, for all families, we have hundreds of hours of additional interviews, and digital documentation of their participation in church services, homecomings, testimonies, and sermons. For some we have digital records of their funerals, some of whom died from serpent bite, drinking of poison, and even from natural causes. Thus, we can triangulate data from several sources, all of which is an effort to allow an indigenous tradition to be better understood in what Brown and McDonald (2000) say, “in their own words.”

The Experience of Handling Serpents The following summary is based on an analysis of interviews with 17 handlers and 105 specific encounters with serpent handling. It is a summary of emergent themes that together form a patterned structure of meaning in the experience of handling a serpent (Hood & Williamson, 2008; Williamson, 2000). We note that central to the activity of handling serpents is the experience of God moving upon the person. Within the context of a service, many activities take place: praying for the sick, singing fervent songs, dancing to intense music, and preaching of personal convictions. In approaching the “serpent box”—in which lies the possibility of death—those who handle serpents talk about experiencing a unique kind of power that only true knowledge can give: knowledge of a personal significance made possible by God, enlightenment concerning hidden spiritual truth, and the good life to experience while on earth. A believer takes up a serpent only after he or she physically experiences a movement of God. This is referred to as the anointing. It is felt by some to be compelling. For others, the moving of God is not so commanding as to usurp personal will; indeed, for these individuals, it requires them to surrender to God’s will. When the anointing does move

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upon the handler, however, it relieves worry and fear about the immediate situation. As God is felt to move upon the body, the serpent handler loses personal concern for danger and feels fully prepared to obey God in fulfilling the biblical mandate to take up serpents. (For an extended exploration of anointing see Williamson et al., 2000). In preaching about serpent handling, the most compelling theme to emerge in their sermons is the awareness of life and death, and the subsequent feeling of vitality it provides. This is especially the case when the handler has victory over the serpent, meaning she or he was not bit. As we note below, some handlers have handled all their life without being bit. Others report to have been bitten hundreds of times. Within a context made sacred by scripture, serpent handlers are very much aware of the reality and potentiality of death. However, rather than deny the reality of death, serpent handlers confront it openly when they feel the moving of God to take up the poisonous serpent. It is through this very act that the threat of death is transcended and gives way to a vitality of spiritual life that is experienced as an ineffable kind of “joy unspeakable and full of glory” (Hood & Williamson, pp. 189–190). However, if the serpent bites, what then?

Near-Death Experience from Serpent Bites While our archive has digital records of persons who are dying and actually do die from serpent bites, we also have interviews with persons who believed themselves to have been near death from serpent bite, but survived. Using again our phenomenological and hermeneutic method, we summarize here a study based on interviews of handlers, near death from serpent bites (Hood & Williamson, 2006). The themes from the analyzes form a thematic structure that handlers who have survived bites accept as descriptive of the meaning of their individual experiences. This emergent structure forms a coherent narrative that handlers themselves accept as descriptively valid of their experience. This structure involves a feeling of being “hit” (rather than “bit”) by the serpent in such a way that the strike is experienced as extremely serious, likely to maim or kill. The experience of “fear” is encountered

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first by a sense of losing life in the face of doubt, and later is overcome with a sense of “victory” as confidence that whatever the outcome, it is God’s will. Soon after envenomation, intense “suffering” occurs in terms of pain, swelling, blurred or lost vision, breathing difficulties, and loss of consciousness in varying degrees. Anticipating death, the stricken believer “backtracks” over his life, contemplating both the reason for and the finality of his bite. Fear of the anticipation of death may be relieved by visions of luminous places in which the believer is contented to remain. Ultimate “victory” is experienced in the eventual acceptance of both the serpent bite and its outcome as God’s will for the obedient believer, whether it means full recovery, maiming, or even death. While these themes emerged across all participant interviews in the above study, we do not propose their summary either as a master narrative or as a full explication of understanding of NDEs from serpent bites in religious settings. One can explore our archives for extended discussions of those surviving and those actually dying from serpent bites. Our summary is, however, a useful heuristic that illuminates for the interested person the individual variations in the experience of being near-fatally bit within a subculture that has over the years created a religious frame within which to understand this phenomenon. Moreover, it illuminates how that maiming and death from handling in perceived obedience to God’s will interacts with obvious physiological conditions to create a meaningful experience that from perspectives outside this tradition might seem simply tragic or bizarre (Hood, 1998). Our research, like much of the NDE research, is heavily weighted toward the positive aftereffects of NDEs due to the problem of subject mortality. That is, by soliciting persons who had NDEs from serpent bites and remain within the tradition, those who left because of bites, or even entire churches that eliminated the ritual because of bites, are ignored (Williamson & Hood, 2004). Thus, not surprisingly, among the survivors of serpent bites we interviewed, all subscribe to a common structure of meaning that emerges from the survival of their experience. The structure is simple and coherent. The survivors are resolute in that, by being obedient to the “word,” they simply affirm that they are indeed signs following believers; their beliefs are followed by practice of the signs of Mark 16:17-18, which include the commandant to take up serpents.

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It is a simple act of obedience that defines a tradition where, as many have said, the imperative to take up serpents does not include assurance that one will not be bit. As one aged participant, claiming hundreds of bites with body maimed but faith unyielding, put it: If [a serpent] bites you and takes you away from here, why, that’s fine. I don’t care. That’s the way I want to go anyhow when I die. But I’m in no big hurry for it … I told them I wanted them to have church when they put me away, just like we have church … taking up serpents … that’s what I want. I want to be rolled in here … them have church over me, and handle serpents … What I really want is people to get in when I’m laying here. I want it just like we’re having church and I want it to be real spiritual. I want some of them to sing when they’re wheeling me out, “I Won’t Be Coming Back Anymore.” (Hood & Williamson, 2008, p. 271)

Such resolution as this bespeaks the power that some find in an indigenous tradition that reckons the potential for maiming and death is inherent in what ultimately is simply an act of obedience for the believer.

West Virginia’s Refusal to Outlaw Handling: The Remarkable Women of Jolo Bob Elkins was the pastor of the Church of the Lord Jesus in Jolo, West Virginia. The church became famous for allowing photographers. Most of the available films and internet footage are from this church. Many of the handlers have become legendary, most now dead (and from natural causes). However, often ignored are the women of Jolo. Barbara Elkins was the wife of Pastor Bob. She had handled serpents with George Hensley and was widely recognized as the matriarch of the Elkins family and the church. The women handlers of Jolo are all related and linked to a widely noted death—that of Columbia Chafin Hagerman. Barbara lived to an old age and died a natural death on February 5, 1999, at 83. She witnessed many bites, maiming, and deaths. Her funeral was held at the Jolo Church (available in our Archive). However, the crucial role that the Jolo church played occurred in 1961 when Columbia, Barbara’s daughter from a first marriage, was handling in the Jolo church and

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received a bite that proved fatal. Recalling this event, Barbara noted, “We had never worried about Columbia handling serpents. No. Never did. She lived four days after she was bitten. We was praying for her. Every one of the children was praying and stood right by us. She was sitting up in bed, talking in tongues with the Holy Ghost. I knew it was the Holy Ghost talking to her. I’m sure it was” (Brown & McDonald, 2000, p. 249). Lydia Elkins, the daughter of Columbia later adopted by Barbara and Bob Elkins, recalls her mother’s death matter-of-factly: “I knew my mother was serpent-bit, but that was nothing uncommon to me. It was just something I knew. We handle serpents. We get bit” (Brown & McDonald, 2000, p. 297). Lucille Chafin Church, Columbia’s sister, was only a few years younger than her sister when Columbia died. She gained national notoriety when the Saturday Evening Post published a picture of her handling a serpent in the late stages of her pregnancy. However, like most handlers she understands the depth of what it means to be called to handle serpents: This is our point. You could be harmed by driving too fast or drinking too much. But people say we bring it on ourselves. We go out, we catch the serpents, [and] we handle serpents. Others think we say, “Well, bite me and kill me,” but that’s not the intent. It’s the verse, “Thou shalt take up serpents.” That’s the intent. (Brown & McDonald, 2000, p. 333)

Lucille (now deceased from natural causes) was never bit, and like many handlers, she disliked being called a snake handler: “And don’t call me a snake handler. I’m a child of God. Serpent handling is a sign of the Lord’s Gospel, not a person. It is a small part of my religious belief, not who I am” (Brown & McDonald, 2000, p. 337). It is the Jolo Church and largely the women of the Elkins family who persuaded the West Virginia state legislature to support their right to handle serpents. They did so by presenting their understanding of God’s word and the long tradition of Holiness mountain religion in which one’s life must be lived as an outward manifestation of a spiritual transformation. West Virginia is the only state wholly within Appalachia and one in which serpent handlers have successfully asserted their right to religious freedom.

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Reverend Jamie Coots and Fleecing the Lord As we write this, Jamie Coots is among the most recent handlers to die from a fatal bite. He died on February 15, 2014, after receiving a bite at a service in the church he pastored, the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name, in Middlesboro, Kentucky. Given the possibility of death, the puzzle for outsiders is always, “Why this ritual?” While the simple fact of obedience to Mark 16:17-18 is not an explanation that satisfies outsiders, for indigenous believers it is all the explanation needed. Our archive has extensive footage of Jamie’s church and interviews with Jamie. The Coots family is one of four generations of handlers, all documented in our archive. After Jamie’s death, a series of unfortunate tragedies befell the Coots family, some of which are documented in our archive and elsewhere (Duin, 2017). Here we will illustrate in both Jamie’s and his wife Linda’s own words why it is they handle serpents knowing fully that the serpent can maim and kill. Holiness handlers are guided by signs or propositions made to the Lord that allow them to discern God’s guidance in specific situations (Williamson & Hood, 2015a, pp. 200–201). The biblical basis for fleecing is in Judges 6:1-40, where Gideon sought a sign from God for discerning how to proceed in defeating the Midianites, the oppressors of the Israelites. Many examples of fleecing among serpent handlers are in our archive. Here we simply note a simple structural form of any fleece: If X (a specific sign or event) occurs, then the believer knows it is God’s intent for him or her to act in a specific way. X is referred to as a fleece, and it permeates Holiness life with a continual awareness of the Lord’s presence and guidance. Jamie Coots often fleeced the Lord. It is what brought him and also his wife to handle serpents. Jamie handled his first serpent after fleecing the Lord: I had wanted to handle one for a long time. I went to church that night and prayed—prayed the whole night. And I fleeced the Lord for Bruce Helton [a serpent handling Pastor] to bring it to me. During the entire service no fleece. But after service, Bruce was switching out two big copperheads—I was standing there all this time meditating, [telling] the Lord I’d like to handle one … Well, it got all the way up to the end of

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the meeting, and I hadn’t got to handle one. So I was real discouraged…. Well, somebody had brought Bruce two big Southern copperheads, and after church, he was switching ‘em out. He reached and got the first one with a hook and got it out of the box and put it in the other one, and then he laid his hook down. I was standing alone all this time meditating [telling] the Lord I’d like to handle one. That is all I had on my mind. I wanted to handle one. Bruce reached down and got it out of the box and handled it. He just turned around and offered it to me. I handled it. (Brown & McDonald, 2000, pp. 162–163)

Our archive has extensive footage not only of Jamie preaching and handling, but also of Bruce Helton preaching and handling, and we have documented Bruce preaching at Jamie’s funeral. At the funeral, Bruce praised him for standing firm in his faith and for obeying the call for believers to take up serpents. Jamie had been bitten several times before his death, including one in which he lost a finger from a copperhead bite. Jamie had always affirmed, “Lord, if I ever go to the hospital, I’ll quit handling” (Brown & McDonald, 2000, p. 153). After his first bite, it took Jamie time to handle again. As he told it, at one service: Finally, the Lord moved on me real strong, and I reached and took it. Well, when I did and handled it, then the Lord let me know it was all right to get the one out that bit me. I had a copperhead in there with him. I got the one out that bit me and handled it. The Lord gave me real good victory. So from then on, I began to get over it, a little bit at a time. But I had to get over the fear of that one snake. He had me in such a shape, and the Lord let me know that I had to handle him first. I had to get over that. (Brown & McDonald, 2000, p. 155)

While Jamie was eventually to die from a lethal bite for which he refused medical care, his wife, Linda Coots, had to overcome her own fear of handling. She tells of a time when she fleeced the Lord to allow her to handle, but in a rare occurrence she did not accept the fleece. When she was pregnant with her son, Cody, she fleeced the Lord:

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I said, “Now Lord, if it’s You, and it’s all right for me to handle a serpent, You let Brother Sherman looked back here at me.” He went one further than that. Brother Sherman looked right at me and handed [emphasis original] it to me. And he prophesized. He said, “The Lord says, ‘Tonight I lock their jaws. There’ll be no harm.’” All kinds of people were going up there that night and taking serpents up, and when he looked at me, he said, “This is for you.” I dropped down on my knees. I didn’t have the courage to do it. And I said, “Lord if I go handle that serpent and me pregnant, it’d kill my baby if I was to get bit. I just can’t do it. I’m afraid to do it. I ain’t gonna do it.” So I didn’t do it. And needless to say, I desired it, but I was scared to do it. (Brown & McDonald, 2000, p. 183)

However, Linda did not lose her desire to handle. After the birth of Cody, she fleeced the Lord again at Jamie’s church: “Now, Lord, if this is You, let Jamie turn around and look at me.” … So he turned around, and he looked right at me. And then he mocked [motioned] it to me. And I was still scared. I was right there in front. And I stepped out. And when I took hold of it, I’ll never forget the first time I handled one. It was like silk. I expected it to be rough and real nasty feeling. It was like cold silk. All that could go through my mind was how smooth and silky it was. It was a rattlesnake, a big one. Anyways, I handled the serpent and handed it back to Jamie. (Brown & McDonald, 2000, p. 185)

Rattlesnake bites are the most frequent that prove fatal to handlers. So it was with Jamie. At the time of her interview with Brown and McDonald (2000), Jamie’s wife admitted to being terrified, thinking about her own children handling serpents. Our archive has documentation of her handling serpents with her children after the death of Jamie. She recalls how she overcame her own fear of Jamie handling after he had a near-death experience (NDE) from his first bite: I would go to bathroom or leave church when Jamie handled. One day as I was leaving church I said, “Lord God, I don’t know. I just don’t know

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if I can handle it, him handling snakes. They’re scaring me so bad.” And right at that minute, Jamie, in a strong, loud, authoritative voice, started prophesying, speaking in tongues, and that’s what made me turn around. He said, “Yes, my child, I say this is for you, and have no fear that I am in this.” And honey, I turned around and shouted all the way up to the front of the church and took the serpent. When he prophesized this to me, Lord, the anointing just fell all over me, and I went up to the front of the church, and I knew it was God. I knew [emphasis original] it was God. (Brown & McDonald, 2000, p. 196)

Conclusion We leave the discussion of the serpent open and without an explanation. Our goal was simply to introduce an indigenous tradition in which the serpent plays a central role. Elsewhere we have provided our own explanation of a clue that we think divides psychologists: from those who treat the serpent as a sign that elicits fear of death to those who see it as a symbol of not only death, but resurrection (Hood & Williamson, 2008, pp. 79–101). Wilson (1999) has made the attempt to link a reductionist view of fear of snakes to the cultural expression via dreams and fantasy of serpent symbolism. It is a masterful effort to create a single nomothetic science that frames much of American psychology. His term for uniting biology and culture in one explanatory scheme is consilience. It remains whether any such explanations can truly illuminate an indigenous tradition. Here, however, we simply let the serpent handlers tell their own stories of obedience. The Word says, “They shall take up serpents.” Believe and you will. Don’t and you won’t.

Note 1. The Hood-Williamson Research Archives for the Holiness Serpent Handling Sects of Appalachia is housed in the Lupton Library of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

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References Alexander, A. (2006). Pentecostal healing: Models in theology and practice. Dorset, UK: Deo Publishing. Bandura, A. (1999). Social cognitive theory: An agentive perspective. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 2, 21–32. Belzen, J. A., & Hood, R. W., Jr. (2006). Methodological issues in the psychology of religion: Toward another paradigm? The Journal of Psychology, 140, 1–28. Birckhead, J. (1993). “Bizarre snake handlers”: Popular media and a Southern stereotype. In K. G. Heider (Ed.), Images of the South: Constructing a regional culture on film and video (pp. 163–189). Athens: University of Georgia Press. Birckhead, J. (1997). Reading “snake handling”: Critical reflections. In S. D. G. Glazier (Ed.), Anthropology of religion (pp. 19–84). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bock, D. L. (2008). The ending of Mark: A response to the essays. In D. L. Bock (Ed.), The ending of Mark (pp. 121–141). Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman. Brown, F., & McDonald, J. (2000). The serpent handlers: Three families and their faith. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair. Burton, T. (1993). Serpent handling believers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Burton, T. (2004). The serpent and the spirit: Glenn Summerford’s story. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Charlesworth, J. H. (2010). The good and evil serpent: How a universal symbol became Christianized . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cobb, A. L. (1965). Sect religion and change in an isolated rural community of Southern Appalachia (Unpublished dissertation). Boston University. Covington, D. (1995). Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake handling and redemption in Southern Appalachia. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Creech, J. (1996). Visions of glory: The place of the Azusa Street revival in Pentecostal history. Church History, 65, 405–424. Duin, J. (2017). In the house of the handler: A story of the fall from grace in the age of social media. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Elms, A. C. (1975). The crisis of confidence in social psychology. American Psychologist, 30, 967–976. Emmons, R. A., & Paloutzian, R. F. (2003). The psychology of religion. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 377–402.

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Fordsham, S. H. (1946). With signs following (Rev ed.). Springfield, MO: Gospel. Holt, J. B. (1940). Holiness religion: Cultural shock and social reorganization. American Sociological Review, 4, 740–747. Hood, R. W., Jr. (1995). [Review of the book Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake handling and redemption in Southern Appalachia, by D. Covington]. Appalachian Heritage, 3, 54–56. Hood, R. W., Jr. (1998). When the spirit maims and kills: Social psychological considerations of the history of serpent handling and the narrative of handlers (Invited paper). The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 8(7), 1–96. Hood, R. W., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Handling Serpents: Pastor Jimmy Morrow’s narrative history of his Appalachian Jesus’ Name tradition. Mercer, Georgia: Mercer University Press. Hood, R. W., Jr. (2011). “Spirituality” as privatized experience-oriented religion: Empirical and conceptual perspectives. Journal of Implicit Religion, 14 (4), 433–453. Hood, R. W., Jr. (2012). Methodology in psychology. In A. Runehov & L. Oviedo (Eds.), Encyclopedia of sciences and religions (Chapter 695). https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4030-8265-8. Dordrecht: Springer+Business Media. Hood, R. W., Jr. (2013). Methodological diversity in the psychology of Religion. In K. I. Pargament (Editor-in-Chief ), Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality: Vol.1, Context, theory, & research (pp. 79–102). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Hood, R. W., Jr. (2015). “I have been anointed and I have fleeced the Lord”: The contemporary serpent handlers of Appalachia and their experience of being called by God. In D. B. Yaden, T. D. McCall, & J. H. Ellens (Eds.), Being called: Scientific, secular, and sacred perspectives (pp. 225–242). New York: Praeger. Hood, R. W., Jr. (in press). History and current status of research in the psychology of religion. In L. Miller (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of psychology and spirituality and consciousness (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Hood, R. W., Jr., Hill, P. C., & Williamson, W. P. (2005). The psychology of religious fundamentalism. New York: Guilford. Hood, R. W., Jr., & Williamson, W. P. (2006). Near death experience from serpent bites in religious settings: A Jamesian perspective. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 72, 139–159.

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Hood, R. W., Jr., & Williamson, W. P. (2008). Them that believe: The power and meaning of the Christian serpent handling tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hood, R. W., Jr., & Williamson, W. P. (2012). Ambiguity in the signs as an antidote to impediments to Godly love among primitive and progressive Pentecostals. In M. T. Lee & A. Yong (Eds.), Godly love: Impediments and possibilities (pp. 21–40). Lanham: Lexington Books. Hood, R. W., Jr., & Williamson, W. P. (2014). Case study of the intratextual model of fundamentalism: Serpent handlers and Mark 16:17-18. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 33, 58–69. Koch, S., & Leary, D. (Eds.). (1985). A century of psychology as science. New York: McGraw-Hill. Labarre. W. (1962/1974). They shall take up serpents: Psychology of the southern snake-handling cult. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. McCauley, D. V. (1995). Appalachian mountain religion: A history. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Robinson, D. N. (1995). An intellectual history of psychology (3rd ed.). Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Roth, P. A. (1987). Meaning and method in the social sciences: The case for methodological pluralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schwartz, S. W. (1999). Faith, serpents, and fire: Images of Kentucky holiness believers. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Synan, V. (1997). The Holiness-Pentecostal tradition: Charismatic movements in the twentieth century. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company. Thomas, J. C., & Alexander, K. E. (2003). And the signs are following: Mark 16. 9-20: A journey into Pentecostal hermeneutics. Journal of Pentecostal Theology, 11, 147–170. Tomlinson, A. J. (1918). Signs following believers: A good honest life must back up a testimony to make it count. The Church of God Evangel, 9 (26), 1. Wacker, G. (2003). Heaven below: Early Pentecostals and American culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williamson, W. P. (2000). The experience of religious serpent handling: A phenomenological study. Dissertation Abstracts International, 6 (2-B), 1136. Williamson, W. P. (2010). Appalachian mountain religion. In C. H. Lippy & P. W. Williams (Eds.), Encyclopedia of religion in America (pp. 135–142). Washington, DC: CQ Press (Sage).

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Williamson, W. P., & Hood, R. W., Jr. (2004). Differential maintenance and growth of religious organizations based upon high cost behaviors. Review of Religious Research, 46, 150–168. Williamson, W. P., & Hood, R. W., Jr. (2015a). Poison-drinking in obedience to the faith: A phenomenological study of the experience. Mental Health, Religion, and Culture, 18, 199–208. Williamson, W. P., & Hood, R. W., Jr. (2015b). Religious serpent handling and community relations. Journal on Prevention and Intervention in the Community, 43(Special issue), 186–198. Williamson, W. P., Pollio, H. R., & Hood, R. W., Jr. (2000). A phenomenological analysis of anointing among religious serpent handlers. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 10, 221–240. Wilson, E. O. (1999). Consilience: The unity of knowledge. New York: Vintage. Wulff, D. (2003). A field in crisis. Is it time to start over? In H. M. P. Roelofsma, J. M. T. Corveleyn, & J. W. van Saane (Eds.), One hundred years of psychology of religion (pp. 11–32). Amsterdam: VU University Press.

8 Indigenous Psychology as Religious: Slavic Understanding of Human Psycho-Sexual Development Andrzej Pankalla and Konrad Ko´snik

Introduction When describing the Slavic system of knowledge on the reality and particularly inner human processes, it needs to be specified what social groups and historical epochs are to be taken under consideration. It is crucial especially for an Anglo-Saxon reader for whom the “Slavic world” may appear as an exotic and incomprehensible sphere of humankind. The term, “early Slavs,” refers to folk inhabiting the vast majority of Central and Eastern Europe (including Balkans) from at least 6th–7th CE, sharing cultural customs, and using a common (Slavic/pre-Slavic) language (see Barford, 2001). The range of temporal understanding of this term ends around the 10th CE when subsequent Slavic countries became Christianised (in Roman or Greek tradition) entering the A. Pankalla Cardinal Stefan Wyszy´nski University in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland K. Ko´snik (B) Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna´n, Pozna´n, Poland © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_8

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Western political scene and initiating a new chapter in their internally differentiated history. Such a perspective does not include the problem of variety of Slavic tribes before Christianisation and conducting separate, “national” activities thus shaping separate identity. Due to a lack of sufficient number of historical sources, the Slavs need to be, however, treated holistically without being divided into smaller cultural groups (e.g., Western, Eastern, and Southern Slavs). The general vision of the early Slavs indicates their minimalism (simple ornamentation and architecture), devotion to nature (“naturalism”), reluctance to entertain the idea of a state (countries created later than the Germanic tribes), and fondness for the notion of freedom (democratic system of government). The medieval Slavs succeeded in expansion in the ethno-linguistic field becoming ancestors of most of modern Central-Eastern European nations (Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Croats, Serbs, etc.). This chapter is an attempt to further develop a previous research project aimed to reconstruct the Slavic perception of human psychological phenomena (Pankalla & Ko´snik, 2016, 2018a, 2018b; Pankalla, Ko´snik, & Kilian, 2019; Pankalla, Ko´snik, & Stasiorczyk, 2019). The purpose of the project is to uncover a coherent system of psychological knowledge based on indigenous Slavic cultural, especially religious, contents including a vision of human functioning—and to reshape these contents into a modern, academically admissible theory. On the other hand, the project allows us to reflect on the condition of contemporary psychology as an academic discipline mostly practised in a universalist manner without any consideration of humankind’s cultural variety and the need for creating indigenous systems of knowledge that are adequate and useful for specific social groups. In this essay the problem of “Slavic psychology” is narrowed to the topic of sexuality and psycho-sexual development of human beings. Such a choice was made due to the fact that the question of sexuality in Slavic religion is not even mentioned in “canonical” elaborations on the connection between different religious denominations (including other ancient/medieval religious traditions) and sexual life (even in local literature—see Wróbel, 1990). Slavic sexuality examined from the psychological perspective does not appear in the scholarly discourse at all.

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In the pre-Christian Slavdom the religious dimension is treated as an inseparable component of every aspect of human life, including sexuality, in accordance with the idea of the “disenchantment of the world” by Max Weber (1963/1920)—that is, in the early Slavic perspective the world was “still enchanted.” It is assumed as in Clifford Geertz’s (1977, 1983, 2001) symbolic and interpretative anthropology, that any reconstruction of indigenous system of meanings in non-Western traditional societies should be conducted with consideration of local expressions of transcendence in mind. Spirituality and religiosity are treated as a philosophical base of a holistic conception of a human being (see Grieves, 2008). Therefore, the focus is placed on the sexuality in the transcendental context as an integral part of the Slavic culture as demonstrated by the reproductive success followed by the dynamic expansion of Slavic culture in the early medieval times. Human sexuality is understood here as an inseparable element of Slavic metaphysics and their religiousspiritual system of knowledge and beliefs. Slavic sexuality is considered to be a fragment of primeval magical activities (cult of fertility) connected with an attempt to influence the reality with the purpose of obtaining a specific effect—e.g., efficient reproduction (Buchowski, 1986). The religious aspect of sexuality, especially psycho-sexual development is highlighted by the fact that according to the Slavs the proper object of development in a life cycle was the soul, i.e., non-material entity “imprisoned” in a biological organism, “enforced” to interact with a body until physical death, and then finally “freed” from earthly limitations to exist independently. This essay consists of two main categories of information on the Slavic vision of sexuality. The first one concerns Slavic customs of sexual life (e.g., attitude toward extramarital sexual acts) and beliefs about supernatural aspects of sexuality (e.g., demonology). This kind of data is based on descriptions contained in historical sources as well as in elaborations from the field of religious studies (Gieysztor, 2006; Łowmia´nski, 1986; Strzelczyk, 1998; Szyjewski, 2010; Voytovych, 2002) and ethnography (Moszy´nski, 2010/1934; Tomicka & Tomicki, 1985). Due to a problem of insufficient information on original, medieval Slavic religion (Sikorski, 2018), reconstruction on the basis of later folk culture is

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necessary. The second category includes a six-stage model of psychosexual development created in reference to Slavic rites of passage. In the methodological perspective, it is assumed that every initiation ritual is a beginning of each developmental stage and its psycho-cultural meaning is founded on local myth accompanying these rituals, as well as providing information about the purpose of each rite. Both of these sections are followed by a discussion on a holistic Slavic understanding of human sexuality and the importance of such research for contemporary psychology and modern Slavic societies.

Slavic Customs of Sexual Life Knowledge on medieval Slavic sexual customs is derived mainly from historical sources written by authors external to Slavdom. It creates the possibility that the greatest emphasis is placed on these aspects of local culture because they seemed to be “strange” and exotic for non-Slavic travellers, thus becomes the phenomenon that distinguishes Slavs from other cultural traditions the most. One of these specific aspects is a “flexible” attitude toward monogamy. Although ordinary Slavs tended to get into pairs, in the case of individuals placed high in social-economic hierarchy there was approval of polygamy (in a patriarchal sense). Even the first historical ruler of Poland—Mieszko I (10th c.)—had to expel his concubines before getting married with the Czech princess Dobrava and be baptized. The flexibility toward monogamy manifested itself also in viewing premarital sex as a highly desirable activity (since a person was recognized to be fully mature and approved to take part in the “Kupala Night” ritual). According to Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, a Jewish traveller from Muslim Cordoba (10th c.): “Their women after getting married do not commit adultery; but if a maiden loves a man she goes to him and meets her lust. When a husband marries a girl and finds her to be a virgin he says to her: If anything good had been in you other men would desire you and surely you would choose one to give him your virginity. Then he expels her and becomes free [authors’ translation from Polish]” (Kowalski, 1946, p. 53; see Lewicka-Rajewska, 2008). This quotation, although probably exaggerated, presents a lax approach of Slavs

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to marital fidelity understood in terms of contemporary monogamous customs. Although the later layer of Christian cultural customs modified sexual habits in Slavic countries, it is assumed here that the primary attitude toward sexuality was preserved in folk culture and evolved more slowly than a “high” social class. For example, Polish peasants (16th– 18th CE.) did not pay a great attention to the issue of virginity (Wi´slicz, 2004). Their beliefs on the problem of marital fidelity did not include restraining sexual desires before getting married contra the teaching of Catholic clergy. This case shows continuity of early Slavic sexual customs despite a few hundred years of Christianisation. Another sample of folk sexual liberty is the practice of nineteenth century Hutsuls.1 In Hutsul societies extramarital sex—viewed not as adultery—was not only permitted but also perceived as usual (Orłowicz, 2008/1919). Belleslettres from the epoch were possessed by an imagination of adventitious sexual contacts with a Hutsul while roaming through mountains. As a vision of having sex with a stranger stood strongly against prudish morality then, there are known cases of gentlewomen making a trip to mountains just to satisfy their curiosity of a Hutsul man. It is difficult to judge how exact is the connection between the later sexual customs and the early Slavic past, the generally liberal attitude toward sexuality, however, seems to make a link between them. Sexuality played a great role in the Slavic life due to the fact it was perceived as connected with nature—a Slavic sacral “object” of religious worship. Sexual activity became an aspect in a number of rituals like the “Kupala Night” rite of passage (described later in the section devoted to psycho-sexual development). The magical cult of fertility referred to the solar cycle and thus the mechanism of procreation was compared and associated with natural, non-human phenomena (Gieysztor, 2006; Szyjewski, 2010). One Slavic ritual involves performing a sexual act on a field that was to be sown with grain. The magical function of this tradition is to spread the “seed.” That this is a different type “seed” was irrelevant due to a mental connection between the two of them. As it seems here that human fertility and natural, vegetal fecundity was believed to be one. This belief could potentially explain the liberal attitude of Slavs toward extramarital sexual behaviors. If sexuality is natural

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and nature is sacred then sexual desires would not be restrained nor, most of all, understood as inappropriate by Slavs. Sacredness and naturalness of sexuality may be recognized as a principal rule of early Slavic cultural reality determining and clarifying the way of holistic experience of a social world being a part of environmental surroundings. Besides perceiving sexuality as natural, nature was also seen by Slavs as sexual, especially while thinking of “supernatural nature.” An example Slavic demonology (or bestiary) mainly consisted of miraculous entities inhabiting forests, mountains, and, what is the most crucial, lakes, rivers, and marshlands (water as a symbol of feminine sexuality in Slavic culture). A significant example of water demons is rusalkas (water nymphs) taking the form of young and very attractive women. These beings, while living in any body of water, aimed to lure men, especially young ones, not only with their appearance but also with beautiful singing. Attracted by potential sexual partners a man used to follow them to his loss since rusalkas appeared to be monsters that led to death. Successfully tempted young men would be drowned, forced to dance until exhaustion, or tickled to death by the demons. Although in a very dangerous way, nature in Slavic perspective reveals its sexual character— mostly as a metaphorical presentation of feminine sexuality “awaiting” to be discovered and engaged by a man. The legend of rusalkas may be interpreted as an expression of omnipresent and “expansive” lust of males seeking an opportunity to perform a sexual act while women’s desires stay hidden and seductive. At the same time, it is a warning for men that female sexuality so intense should not be ignored nor dominated by a patriarchal perspective. Feminine sexualization of nature also indicates the meaning of women for the connection between humans and natural environment (see Grieves, 2008).

Psycho-Sexual Development According to the Slavs Psycho-cultural analysis of early Slavic rites of passage and the myths attached to them allowed us to reconstruct a Slavic model of human development stages (see Table 8.1). In some cases, it was impossible to

Childhood • Remaining under mother’s protection • Not being perceived as a fully fledged • Lack of socially useful tasks Age of family participation • Becoming a fully fledged family member • Remaining under father’s protection • Learning man’s duties from the father (e.g., craftsmanship)

“Bribing the Midwives” ritual (birth)

Age of warrior/maturity • Full biological maturity and readiness for sexual initiation • Becoming a warrior Age of parenthood • Getting into pair with a wife • Procreation • Protecting the whole family as a warrior • Transferring man’s skills to sons

“Werewolves”/“Kupala Night” ritual (12–15 y. o.)

“Swacba” ritual (15–18 y. o.)

“Cutting It Short” ritual (7 y. o.)

Males

The stage beginning point

Table 8.1 Slavic model of psycho-sexual development

(continued)

• Getting into pair with a husband • Procreation • Protecting young children (till 7 y. o.) • Transferring woman’s skills to daughters

• Becoming a fully fledged family member • Remaining under mother’s protection • Learning woman’s duties from the mother (e.g., householding) Age of maturity • Full biological maturity and readiness for sexual initiation • Readiness for becoming a housewife

family member

Females

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Source By the authors on the basis of: Pankalla and Ko´snik (2016, 2018a, 2018b), Pankalla, Ko´snik, and Kilian (2019), and Pankalla, Ko´snik, and Stasiorczyk (2019)

“Dziady” ritual (departure of the soul from the earthly world)

Life after death • Absence of physical presence • Existence as a guardian spirit • Supporting living relatives Existence beyond the living world • Absence of spiritual presence • Departure to the land of the dead • Lack of any further interactions with the living world

Funeral ritual (biological death)

Females

Males

The stage beginning point

Table 8.1 (continued)

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indicate an exact age of initiation thus estimated intervals needed to be designated. According to the Slavs, the psycho-sexual development commenced with a child’s birth. The childhood stage began with the ritual of “bribing” the Midwives (in Polish Rodzanice)—female demons of fate (Strzelczyk, 1998; Szyjewski, 2010). To provide prosperity for their children, Slavic mothers used to “bribe” the demons with food (a wealthy feast) left for them in the night three days after the birth. The Midwives were expected then to protect a child who was given a temporary, commonly pejorative name (e.g. Niemoj —“Not-mine,” Nielub—“Not-loved”). This custom was supposed to make evil demons “uninterested” in a child but may be also explained by a high death rate of children in the medieval epoch and an attempt to lower negative affect after a potential loss of the child. It is crucial that there were female demons who had to take care of a helpless child who was fully dependent on the mother (regardless of the child’s sex) and was unable to perform any socially useful tasks. Thus, the child was perceived by a local society as a not fully fledged family member. In this developmental stage being a boy or a girl was irrelevant due to a Slavic belief that sexual development and its diversity do not occur until the next initiation ritual. At 7 years-of-age a child took part in a “Cutting It Short” rite of passage (postrzy˙zyny) when a father or another important male family member cut a lock of the child’s hair and threw it to fire or water as an offering for Midwives (Gieysztor, 2006; Strzelczyk, 1998; Szyjewski, 2010). Such an offering was thought to be a thanksgiving for the demons’ protection (magical meaning of hair in Slavic mythology). A child was given a proper name containing a wish of luck for the future (positive sense of names) and at the same time description of one’s individuality (personality traits; e.g., Bolesław—“Desiring-fame”: bolej — “more”, sława—“glory”). With the proper name a child was given, the child became a full fledged family member (and a human being) and began the age of family participation. Most crucial for this stage is that from the moment of the ritual every child became the responsibility of their the-same-sex parent, i.e., girls remained under their mothers’ protection while boys were “transferred” to be cared for by their fathers. The parents’ task was to teach their children their own sex-distinguished skills thus the age of family participation included a goal to prepare

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children for becoming mature men and women and fulfilling parents’ responsibilities in the future. It can be assumed that during this developmental period sexual identity of children and understanding of each sex’s specifics had been shaped in accordance to one’s parent model representing early Slavic cultural norms. The next stage is specific due to containing two separate rites of passage (one for both sexes, another one only for males). The “unisex” rite is the “Kupala Night” (“night of the bath”)—a cyclic, annual (summer solstice) ritual connected with the cult of Sun and fertility (Gieysztor, 2006; Strzelczyk, 1998; Szyjewski, 2010). Being allowed to take part in the ceremony indicated being perceived as a fully mature individual from a biological perspective and ready for sexual initiation. During festive dance around bonfires and while taking a bath in the lakes, filled with sexual symbols, early Slavs were encouraged to “awaken” their sexuality and let their desires emerge. It was allowed that participants in the ritual got into pairs and headed to forest for the purpose of “searching for the fern’s flower” which was a euphemism of performing premarital sexual acts. The rite of passage reserved only for males was the “Werewolves” ritual (Gieysztor, 2006). Young men once in their lifetime met together to take part in a mystery of becoming a warrior-wolf. For that purpose they wore wolves’ skins to symbolically “be a wolf ”—an animal that is both strong and gregarious. As teenagers (probably 12– 15-year olds), males not only entered the age of maturity (analogous to females) but also the age of the warrior. The meaning of the stage initiated with the “Kupala Night” and the “Werewolves” rituals reveals in two aspects of readiness for establishing one’s own family. The first one refers to bodily maturity and readiness for sexual interactions (according to a local society’s decision) while the later one indicates a possibility of becoming a housewife (bearing children, customary house-holding skills) or a husband-warrior (military protection of family, customary craftsman skills). In this stage early Slavs were able to “try out” sexual activities with different partners and then decide which one they will marry (unless it was decided by their families). Once two early Slavic people paired up and were ready to establish a new family, the wedding ritual called “Swacba” (“matchmaking”) commenced (Voytovych, 2002). After a joyous ceremonial procession

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and entering the age of parenthood, the spouses began a new chapter in their life with the main purpose of procreation. In this developmental stage Slavs (especially women) were not allowed to take part in the “Kupala Night” ritual as they were to focus on the task of beginning a new developmental cycle including not only procreation but also the caring needed for the continuity of the new life. A person in the age of parenthood aimed to have offspring (sometimes believed to be brought by a stork—one of Slavic symbols even today), conduct their everyday duties (e.g., householding, craftsmanship, agriculture, military tasks if necessary) to protect children, and accompany them in their own development—since they are born till these children’s own marriage. The support for children also contained the role of a teacher similar to the nurture they received from their parents when they were younger themselves. It is crucial that the age of parenthood is the last one before biological death (lack of any further rites for the living). It means that a Slav had to be fully active till the end of their earthly life without any “retirement” in contrast to other indigenous development conceptions, e.g., Hindu psychology (the final stage of meditation and contemplation after renouncing worldly ties—Chakkarath, 2005). Elderly people, although esteemed by a society for their wisdom, were perceived as a burden thus sometimes given “help” in passing away by being seated na wycugu (“in draft”) to get cold (pneumonia) and die (“subtle euthanasia”). After death (natural or “supported” by a society) the development cycle in the Slavic beliefs still continued contrary to the modern perspective, including two more rites of passage. The “retirement” stage started after the end of biological life in terms of life after death. A funeral ritual (holocaust fire catalyzing separation of soul from a body) began a period of non-material existence in the earthly world amongst one’s relatives (Gieysztor, 2006; Strzelczyk, 1998; Szyjewski, 2010). A person began a guardian spirit acting a role of a “grandparent” taking care of their “grandchildren.” Their task was to support living members of a family while still maintaining a bond with their offspring. The period of interactions between the dead and the living ended after a departure of a soul from the earthly world to the land of the dead during the ritual of “Dziady” (literal meaning: “grandparents”). This cyclic ceremony aimed to

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honor ancestors, contained a custom of leaving bonfires, food and mead in cemeteries to help the dead in their last journey to the domain of the god of the dead. A successful departure ended all the interactions with still living descendants while not only physical but also spiritual presence of an individual was ended. Although the last two stages of human development were perceived as important in early Slavic beliefs, their meaning for sexuality is significantly smaller than previous periods while a soul probably preserved their sexual identity without possibility of performing any actions connected with their sex. To conclude the reflection on the Slavic vision of psycho-sexual development, it may be assumed that according to the early Slavs there are three main aspects of human sexuality. The first one refers to sexual identity compatible with local cultural norms, which was being shaped since the “Cutting It Short” ritual and remained “forever,” though was “useful” only till the biological death. The second one is sexual activity allowed from the “Kupala Night” ceremony (as premarital sex) and continued after “Swacba” till biological death (as marital sex). The last one concerns an issue of family life with which a person was connected since being born to the departure from the earthly world. The third aspect as the least obvious part of the sphere of human sexuality refers the most to the developmental model. As the family was one of the greatest values in the Slavic metaphysical system, it can be understood as a frame of human sexuality. An individual was born in a family, was supported in learning how to become a man or a woman, then they established one’s own family, and finally supported their children and other descendants. From the Slavic perspective the “eternal cycle of life” was “powered” by every single existence which, however, could not function properly without the family. The vision of human sexuality is therefore strongly associated both with nature and culture which for the Slavs were not distinguished.

Slavic Vision of Human Sexuality In the Slavic system of metaphysics, sexuality was an inseparable element of cultural-religious vision of reality. Presence of sexual contents in the Slavic religion in the form of a cult of fertility and the lack of a sacredprofane dichotomy indicates a belief that sexual acts are sacred—like

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every other aspect of human life. Intimate contacts with another person that provide positive affects and create a new human being were recognized in Slavic perception as fully natural and sacred at the same time (“supernatural”). Humankind and their sexual behaviors were believed to be just another fragment of the environment—not better nor worse than the animal or vegetal sphere and most of all not significantly nor qualitatively differing from them. This connection between humans and nature was so obvious that it did not require any divine “law” to be established (see Grieves, 2008). That is why amongst the early Slavs modesty connected with nudity was much less experienced and expressed than in contemporary Western societies (e.g., taking a group bath with a whole family was a normal and usual practice, Ostasz, 2017). This naturalistic/biocentric approach to human life also appears in another aspect of Slavic beliefs; they believed that reproduction is the main developmental task during the lifetime for it allows a new life cycle to begin so the whole humanity (or at least the Slavs) may survive. Any other developmental tasks stay subordinate to the reproductive purpose and the aim to prepare, support, and protect the process of creating new entity—natural and sacred at the same time. Naturalness of sexuality also explains the liberal attitude of Slavs toward premarital (or even potentially extramarital) sexual contacts due to an assumption that erotic desires are inborn, come from the nature, and are compatible with gods’ will—thus they cannot be suppressed. Differences in sexuality between men and women find their expression and clarification in symbols of Slavic mythology. Before focusing on that topic there needed a digression—a description of the world’s creation in Slavic beliefs (Tomicka & Tomicki, 1985). According to this legend in the beginning of time the God and the Devil were floating in a boat in the middle of an endless ocean. As only a Christianised version of this tale is known, researchers can only imagine that primarily these characters were Perun (god of thunder) or Swaróg (god of fire and sun) as the God and Weles (god of the dead) as the Devil. The two individuals were trying to create reality but failed due to their antagonism. They could not succeed until they began a cooperation that resulted with emergence of the world. There are two crucial aspects of this myth referring to an issue of men and women: existence of two antagonistic powers in the act

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of creation and a special meaning of water (and fire if Swaróg was an original character of the legend). The same elements—water and fire— are seen in the “Kupala Night” ritual that definitely had a sexual form. This universal metaphysical dualism of these elements appears also in the perception of males and females for the early Slavs associated men with fire and women with water. Both sexes were thus understood as antagonistic and, at the same time, complementary elements and were supposed to cooperate in the purpose of creation—in this case a new life. A manfire was seen as energy (force, power) that interacted with a woman-water perceived as a universal matter of forming any objects and both of these components were thought to be significantly alike. This complementarity may be understood as analogical to the Chinese yin-yang conception and the harmony (balance) of nature (Sundararajan, 2013). The distinction between sexes connected with universal antagonistic elements reveals in a strict division of tasks in particular developmental stages. A woman was expected to learn from her mother exclusively feminine activities, then find a husband, bear children, take care of her offspring till the “Cutting It Short” ritual. And finally, she would teach her daughters “how to be a woman.” That the meaning of women was crucial in Slavic metaphysics of sexuality is expressed by their high position in social structures as well as paying much respect to them by men perceiving women as essentially momentous entities due to their life-giving social (and natural/sacred) role. On the other hand, a man was supposed to follow his father teachings, find a wife, reproduce, and transmit his knowledge to his sons, which is analogical (and antagonistic) to most of women’s cultural duties. The main difference is that while a female was strongly engaged in the bearing and nurturing issue which absorbed a significant part of her time and energy resources, a male had to protect the whole family—in a military as well as economic way. What is more, early Slavic men adopted a symbol of wolves (rejecting bears that were placed higher in the food chain of Central-Eastern Europe) because of their social nature and the fact that wolves use their strength not individually but in cooperation in the purpose of protecting the whole pack. And this kind of behavior was an exemplar for early Slavic men whose main aim in their life was to ensure that their generations exist seamlessly and are able to continue the eternal cycle of life and development.

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A comparison of Slavic model of psycho-sexual development with academic conceptions indicates a few basic similarities and differences (Pankalla et al., 2019). First of all, the medieval Slavs like modern scholars distinguished developmental borders of 7 and 12–15 years old. The moment of performing “Cutting It Short” ritual that can be understood as the psychological/social “birth” (see Chakkarath, 2005) is interpreted nowadays as a time point when children increase variety of their social behaviors, try to achieve and maintain their group status, and differentiate their roles according to their sex. Analogically, the age of maturity/age of warrior is described in contemporary elaborations as a period of one’s identity shaping, trying out social roles, and being able to make autonomous decisions without the need of their parents’ acceptance. Resemblance of both of these visions is not surprising when paying attention to Slavic biocentrism. It may be assumed that the early Slavs and contemporary researchers discovered the same patterns of biological development expressed in social functioning, but described them differently in accordance with their cultural context and available previous knowledge, as the Slavs included their observations into the holistic religious system of beliefs and social standards. Amongst the basic differences between Slavic and academic perception of human psycho-sexual development, there can be distinguished a lack of an additional border and developmental period between getting into pairs and one’s death—as was mentioned earlier on the absence of the “age of retirement.” Furthermore, in the Slavic model there are seen two post-mortal developmental stages impossible to be considered in modern secular science. In the Slavic religious perspective it was obvious that biological death was not the end of existence and thus a soul had to undergo further transformations. Finally, the most significant difference between the Slavs and the modern science refers to the proper object of development that in Slavic vision is the soul—a metaphysical existence defining the essential entity of a human being merging within itself bodily and spiritual aspects of life, the natural with the sacred, which were not separable. This holistic approach determined the impossibility of reducing a human to simple factors, ensuring their subjectivity and thus inalienable humanity.

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Conclusion The ideas presented above need to be treated as a “possible model” of Slavic human sexuality and psycho-sexual development due to a number of difficulties with the reconstruction by medieval, pre-Christian beliefs. According to scarcity of historical sources providing data on the early Slavs, the diversity of space and time of Slavic tribes needs to be “ignored” for the purpose of expressing any consistent theory of Slavic psychological knowledge, especially knowledge of human sexual functioning. As pieces of information referring to all the medieval Slavs are combined, this cognitive system should be understood in terms of a generalization and approximation while details of beliefs about sexuality could differ in each Slavic society and evolve in time taking various forms within a single social group in changing historical epochs. The other problem with the reconstruction is the fact that a significant part of data is derived from later (partially) Christianised folk culture. While relying on religious contents to recreate an indigenous psychological vision, it is crucial to “cleanse” the analysed myths, legends, and rituals, and eliminate the later and not locally Slavic cultural elements that could be a great source of information on the Slavic society after Christianisation but not on the early Slavs. Conclusions of this analysis can be treated as a project aiming to reconstruct and understand the complex Slavic indigenous psychology— Slavic subjective perception and psychological knowledge built in local cultural and religious context. It can be used to discover the mechanisms of early Slavic psychological functioning, as well as to build indigenous conceptions of contemporary Slavs, based on local culture’s roots. The significance of the Slavic indigenous psychology for modern times is connected with preservation of an early Slavic mentality or at least its elements in cultural cognitive systems of contemporary Slavic nations and especially by Slavic languages—understood as “carriers” of cultural meanings and values. What is more, amongst contemporary Slavic societies there may be observed a tendency of increasing interest of the Slavic

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origins of Central-Eastern Europe and pre-Christian culture and religion (Pankalla & Ko´snik, 2018a), as well as local (past) social practice (similarly to the spread of Yoga in the West—see Dalal & Misra, 2010). This bottom-up phenomenon includes an attempt to search for information about a national group’s early Slavic ancestors and to “become alike” (intentional transmission of ritual customs or values system). Potential progress of this process will lead to a situation in which research on contemporary Slavs requires wide knowledge of historical Slavs and a Slavic psychological theory as indigenous is connected to identity processes and identity politics (Uddin, Gerharz, & Chakkarath, 2017). In the face of ethnocentrism of the Western psychology that in its positivist limitations failed to deal with theoretical and social problems of non-Western people, the need for indigenous psychologies is constantly growing (Dalal & Misra, 2010; Sundararajan, 2013). Local psychological conceptions frequently consist of revelations discovered independently from the Western psychology and may be used to formulate hypothesis tested empirically to stimulate development of psychology in the West (Chakkarath, 2005). Further, beside the potential contribution to the global science, research on Slavic indigenous psychology should focus on deepening findings and differentiating data by taking into account the modern division of Slavdom into nations and countries, thus conducting progressive indigenization of national psychologies (Dalal, 2011). Such an intellectual activity of constructing the “new” indigenous psychologies on the basis of the “old” cultural contents will probably require a cooperation of psychologists with historians and ethnographers whose knowledge and experience would be extremely useful in these highly desirable research projects.

Note 1. Highlanders from Ukrainian/Romanian Carpathian area.

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Orłowicz, M. (2008/1919). Ilustrowany przewodnik po Galicyi, Bukowinie, ´ asku Cieszy´nskim [Illustrated guide to Galicia, Bukovina, Spiszu, Orawie i Sl˛ Spiš, Orava, and Cieszyn Silesia]. Krosno: Ruthenus. Ostasz, L. (2017). Filozofia prasłowia´nska. Próba rekonstrukcji i uzupełnienia [Pre-Slavic philosophy: An attempt of reconstruction and supplement]. Olsztyn: Stowarzyszenie Filozofia – Duchowo´sc´ – Sztuka. Pankalla, A., & Ko´snik, K. (2016). Slavic indigenous psychology as a science about the Slavic soul. Psychology and Personality, 2(10), (Part 1), 21–31. Pankalla, A., & Ko´snik, K. (2018a). Indygeniczna psychologia Słowian. Wprowadzenie do realnej nauki o duszy [Indigenous psychology of Slavs: Introduction to the real science of soul]. Kraków: Universitas. Pankalla, A., & Ko´snik, K. (2018b). Religion as an invaluable source of psychological knowledge: Indigenous Slavic psychology of religion. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 38(3), 154–164. Pankalla, A., Ko´snik, K., & Kilian, A. (2019). Reauthorisation of psychology in the Slavic context. Manuscript submitted for publication. Pankalla, A., Ko´snik, K., & Stasiorczyk, J. (2019). Psychological anthropology of the early Slavs. Re-construction of the Slavic (indigenous) conception of human development. Manuscript submitted for publication. Sikorski, D. A. (2018). Religie dawnych Słowian. Przewodnik dla zdezorientowanych [Religions of early Slavs: A guidebook for the confused]. Pozna´n: Wydawnictwo Pozna´nskie. Strzelczyk, J. (1998). Mity, podania i wierzenia dawnych Słowian [Myths, legends and beliefs of early Slavs]. Pozna´n: Dom Wydawniczy REBIS. Sundararajan, L. (2013). The Chinese notions of harmony, with special focus on implications for cross-cultural and global psychology. The Humanistic Psychologist, 41(1), 25–34. Szyjewski, A. (2010). Religia Słowian [Religion of Slavs]. Kraków: WAM. Tomicka, J., & Tomicki, R. (1985). Drzewo z˙ycia. Ludowa wizja ´swiata i człowieka [The tree of life: Folk vision of the world and human]. Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza. Uddin, N., Gerharz, E., & Chakkarath, P. (2017). Exploring indigeneity: Introductory remarks on a contested concept. In E. Gerharz, N. Uddin, & P. Chakkarath (Eds.), Indigeneity on the move: Varying manifestations of a contested concept (pp. 1–25). New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Voytovych, V. (2002). Ukrayinska mifolohiya [Ukrainian mythology]. Kyiv: Lybid. Weber, M. (1963/1920). The sociology of religion. Boston: Beacon Press.

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9 Toward Understanding the Psychology of Emotion, Indigenous Spirituality and Christianity in Korea Jenny H. Pak

Within a century, Christianity went from being practiced by almost less than 1% of Korea’s population to 29% (Pew Research Center, 2012), to become one of the nation’s most popular religions—fostering 23 of the 50 largest churches in the world today, including five of the top ten largest churches (Lee, 2006). Christianity has been associated with the progressive reform movement, which introduced new values such as freedom, equality, and democracy in late Confucian Korea (1884– 1905) and for supporting activists rallying for independence during the Japanese colonial period (1905–1945) (Baker, 2008; Kim & Kim, 2015; Park, 2003). Christianity’s explosive growth in Korea has been also partly attributed to the country’s rapid modernization and urbanization during the 1960s to the 1980s (Kim, 2000; Lee, 2006; Min, 2010). Since the devastation of the Japanese occupation (1910–1945) and the Korean War (1950–1953), the nation transformed from being poor and rural to J. H. Pak (B) Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, Pasadena, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_9

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being a wealthy and urban society in a relatively short period of time. Between 1945 and 1985, the urban population grew from 14.5% to 65.4%, with four out of five Koreans residing in urban areas to become the fifth largest economy in Asia (World Population Review, 2018; in the pages that follow, “Korea” refers to South Korea unless specified otherwise). Apart from the dramatic social change especially in the last fifty years, Korea is an interesting site to study religion for its diversity of spiritual beliefs and practices in one of the most homogenous societies in the world—99% of residents are ethnically Korean (World Population Review, 2018). Furthermore, Korea is unique among industrialized countries not only for having an actively practiced folk religion, but also because there is no single dominant religion. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2012 estimate, while 46% of Koreans reported no religious affiliation, the numbers of Christians (29%) and Buddhists (23%) are close to being evenly balanced. In tandem with rapid economic development, Pentecostalism especially grew since the 1970s and 1980s. As of 2000, nine of the fifteen largest megachurches in the country were charismatic or neo-Pentecostal, resulting in approximately one-inten urban residents identifying with the denomination (Pew Forum, 2006). Lee (2006) estimates that in the early 1980s, over 90% of Korean Protestants were Evangelical, and by the end of the 1990s, there were more than 30,000 Evangelical churches in Korea—one of which was the largest church in the world. In short, Korean Protestantism during the 1990s was largely Evangelical (thus “Evangelical” and “Protestant” is used interchangeably).

Lessons from Korean Context of Infusing Indigenous and Imported Religions Many have wondered why evangelism has been so incredibly successful in Korea compared to other Asian countries (e.g., India, Japan, and China). Because the wide range of beliefs and spiritual practices indigenous to Korea have existed long before Christianity was introduced, it is essential to examine the various strands which have been woven into the fabric

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of contemporary society. Korean evangelical faith tradition represents a specific development of Protestantism which must be understood in the context of a complex historical and cultural process.

Korean Indigenous Beliefs Native mythology. For almost two thousand years starting from the prehistoric period, Koreans have believed in spirits, which have always been at the core of Korean culture and society (Baker, 2008; Oh, 2008). Since primitive times, Koreans revered Hananim, the supreme “god in heaven” or “sky-god” who was the all-powerful, all-knowing ruler of the universe. He was thought to be a force of justice who rewarded the good and punished the evil (Baker, 2008; Chung, 2001; Oh, 2008). This pre-existing, native concept of god is considered to have played an instrumental role in enabling Korean people to understand and accept the Christian God. Lee (2006) suggests the new Christian God invoked a familiar image and thus contributed to the rapid spread of Protestantism in Korea. According to the mythology, Tan-gun, the descendant of the highest deity Hananim (also referred to as Hanumin or Hwan-in), was believed to have founded the ancient kingdom of Korea as early as the twentyfourth century B.C.E. (Cho, 1999; Chung, 2001). The legend goes: Hwan-in sent Hwan-ung, son of a concubine, down to the earth because he was desirous of the human world; Ungnyo, “bear-turned-woman” prayed everyday she would get married and Hwan-ung answered her prayer by transforming himself into a man and marrying her; they had a son, Tan-gun, who ruled the country until he retired and became a mountain god (Oh, 2008; Cho, 1999). From even the prehistoric era, politics and religion had a symbiotic relationship where religious practice followed the state. According to Kim and Kim (2015), the popular Korean Tan-gun myth was used in 1280 to legitimize the creation of Joseon and overthrow Mongolian authorities. Ever since then, the state has maintained a religious affiliation that changed accordingly with those currently in power. Through such institutionalized religion, Koreans came to practice Shamanism, Buddhism,

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and Confucianism before Christianity was introduced (Grayson, 2006; Kim & Kim, 2015; Min, 2010). Despite attempts to suppress previous religions that did not serve the state’s agenda, the various religions and their influence were not so easily forgotten by the Korean people. Korea is unique not only for its religious heterogeneity, but also for how these different religions began to interact with each other in a complementary fashion. Shamanism. From ancestral rituals to shamans who could communicate with the spirit world that trace back centuries to the prehistoric period, there has existed a deep human awareness and appreciation of the spirit world embedded with tradition. Animism, based on a spiritual essence in both living and non-living objects, and Shamanism were the dominant folk religions (Baker, 2008; Cho, 1999). Cho explains from ancient times the Tan-gun myth was captured in shamanistic rituals, songs and dances and Ungyno, “bear-turned-woman,” symbolized as a shaman; in this way just as a descendent from heaven transformed and became a man, humans through suffering and sinbyong known as “possession sickness” became shamans who have some connections with gods; thus, as in myth, through rituals a person can experience oneness or union with god. Oh (2008) calls a Korean Shamanistic ritual, kut, as “the mother of all Korean oral myths” in passing down beliefs generationally in such a way the underlying ethos or worldview of the Korean people is still largely Shamanistic. Chakkarath (2005) explains indigenous concepts or worldviews are embedded in religions which primarily function as “a code of conduct” and implicitly combine ideological and psychological. In Korea, since the ancient times, the concept of Hananim and the creation myth laid the foundation for the collective spirituality and formed the Korean people’s mindset which deeply valued wholeness and harmonious relatedness with god and others (Cho, 1999; Oh, 2008). As it focused on connecting to the spirits and was already indigenous to the Korean culture, Shamanism remained popular among the common people even when it was severely oppressed and marginalized at various times in Korean history (Chung, 2001; Oh, 2008). Shamanism advocated the appeasement of spirits through mudangs, or shamans,

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who were thought to hold magical power to conduct exorcisms of evil spirits, cure diseases, and read fortunes. The majority of the shamans were women, and Shamanism came to be identified as a religion of the poor minjung and women. Housewives were thought to be able to communicate directly with household gods and were thus given the responsibility to ensure household stability, success, and happiness by maintaining good relationships with them (Kendall, 1985). In this way, a woman’s household duties informally came to include spiritual duties as a representative for her collective family unit. Even in the modern era, Korean women are more likely to attend and finance temples or churches than men (Baker, 2008). While Shamanism remained the core ethos of Korean culture, it interacted with other religions resulting in a pluralistic religious society. Among the imported religions, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity have had the most lasting impact on Korean society (Grayson, 2006). Religions with deities became more attractive than the folk religion based on appeasing the spirits. Often, when calamity struck, suffering was seen as the fault of the individual with the only intermediary being a shaman. With the imported religions, one had godly intermediaries that gave wisdom, security, and a source for reprieve rather than needing to pay for a shaman to atone for personal shortcomings (Baker, 2008).

Premodern Imported Religions Korean religious indigeneity, originating from the cultural astuteness toward spirits, created an enabling environment of spiritual openness that allowed imported religions to merge with existing Korean values. With the growing power of China during the fourth and fifth century, religious practices such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism became more popular (Chung, 2001; Kim & Kim, 2015) and each brought an implicit psychology. Taoism. Taoism was introduced to Korea before Buddhism, but it never became a dominant organized religion. Nevertheless, it had a significant influence on philosophical and religious practices in Korea as it

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played a critical role in syncretizing the imported religions from China and spurred the “Three Religions Are One” principle (Chung, 2001). According to Chung, as early as the ninth century, this concept of harmonizing three religions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism— into one coherent system had already taken root in Korean soil. Though very few Taoist temples remain, it has been deeply etched into contemporary Korean people’s psyche with popular beliefs and practices. The basic tenets of Taoism (e.g., nature, harmony, flow of energy, acceptance, compassion) have survived for thousands of years because its timeless practical emphasis on living a simple virtuous life had psychological appeal and benefits (Hagen, 2002; Hoff, 1982; Watts, 1975). Buddhism. Introduced in the fourth century, Buddhism in Korea was the official religion during the Goryeo period (918–1392) with an enduring impact on Korean culture for the next thousand years before Confucianism’s domination and subsequent persecution of Buddhism (Baker, 2008; Min, 2010). However, even after its displacement by Confucianism as the national religion, Buddhism was still popular among the people. This was because Confucianism was mainly seen as the religion of the yangban elites, excluding the rest of the population (Kim & Kim, 2015). Though Confucianism with its emphasis on hierarchy and filial piety provided the general societal architecture, other religions filled the gaps beneath. The majority, thus, fell into practicing the more accessible Buddhism and Shamanism. Most interestingly, Kim and Kim point out that Buddhism practiced by common folk resembled the previously observed Shamanistic rituals. Unlike the few elites who followed Buddhism’s tenet to empty oneself, the popular practice of the people was to solicit the buddhas for prosperity and good fortune, similar to how people used to placate the spirits in order to guarantee happiness (Baker, 2008). Notably, Mahayana Buddhism, which was particularly popular in Korea, has parallels with Nestorian Christianity brought from China; it contained both elements of Buddhism and Christianity which Confucians condemned (Chung, 2001; Min, 2005). However, Chung notes the similarities between the two religions, such as the understanding of a Heaven and a Hell, ultimately enabled Christianity’s later rapid growth in Korea.

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Confucianism. With Christianity taking root in a Confucian Korean society in the seventeenth century, it is important to first understand how Confucianism shaped the socio-political landscape and made it possible for Christianity to develop. In 1392, alongside the transition of power from Goryeo to Joseon, a period that lasted 500 years, neo-Confucianism provided a strict code of morality that became foundational to Korean society with its focus on community benefit and survival over the individual (Kim & Kim, 2015; Lee, 2009; Min, 2010). With Korean neo-Confucianism hinging on rationality and discipline, the reformists aggressively rejected Buddhism and Shamanism as lowclass and disruptive; Confucianism was almost solely practiced by the aristocrats, excluding women and the everyday working class (Chung, 2001; Kim & Kim, 2015). However, according to Deuchler (1977), Korea’s “Confucianization” was a very intentional, top-down process propagated by the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) both legally and through religious rites (e.g., ancestor worship as a means to preserve family lineage and a sense of continuity), resulting in a dominating Confucian morality in all spheres of public life that prioritized the collective over the individual. Confucian moral and ethical values also governed family relations and dictated the attitude and behavior of family members. Obedience to one’s parents, filial piety, and the subordination of wife to husband formed the fundamental relational models of social life for ordinary people which through repeated cultural practice and language become internalized and deeply etched in the mind (Hwang & Huang, 2012). While Confucian traditional teachings and religious rituals reflected shared normative ideals of social, political, and familial hierarchy, they played a powerful role in people’s lives implicitly providing a context to process emotion and cope with various challenges in life (Jung, 2019; Kim, 2018; Seok, 2018; Sundararajan, 2015).

Modern Imported Religion As each imported religion took deep root in Korea, they contributed not only to core ideals, but also implicitly met psychological needs that became interwoven and essential to everyday life. Previously folk religion

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people only had a Shaman to appease the spirits, but with these imported religions from China syncretized, individuals had godly intermediaries that gave wisdom, security, and retreat from the hash world which became more attractive (Baker, 2008). After almost 2000 years of this fluid coexistence, it was in this environment that Christianity came to Korea as the country encountered forces of modernity in the nineteenth century. There were other occasions Korea came in contact with Christianity previously: Catholic missionaries in Mongolia during the thirteenth century, Jesuits in Japan during the sixteenth century, and the reintroduction of Catholicism from China to Korea through Confucian scholars during the seventeenth century. However, it was not until 1885 when a Methodist missionary, Henry Appenzeller, and a Presbyterian missionary, Horace Underwood, were first officially appointed to Korea, that Protestant Christianity was introduced and started to take root (Baker, 2008; Clark, 1971, 1986). Protestant Christianity. In the beginning, these missionaries experienced similar challenges faced by Catholics earlier (Grayon, 2006), but Korean Protestantism indigenized and grew rapidly as the country underwent its modernization process (Kim, 2008). Some Christian missionaries used Confucianism to propel the gospel by dubbing in Christian values when describing the best form of Confucianism. By doing so, the missionaries aimed to create almost an interchangeability between Christianity and Confucianism in order to generate greater receptivity for conversion. For example, the missionaries highlighted how in both practices man can achieve favor from God by living as an upright individual in society; however, Confucianists did not take lightly to the missionaries’ practice of finding “common ground” and subverting their doctrine to suit Christian evangelism (Chung, 2001). Because Confucianism was a religion for the ruling class when Christianity was introduced, it took on the characteristics of being more conservative, exclusive, and legalistic, focusing on traditions and forms. The American missionaries’ Protestant orthodox theological background combined with Korean traditional Confucian reverence for classic texts resulted in a unique fundamental emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible, justification through faith alone, uniformity of faith, extreme pietism,

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and eschatological faith (Baker, 2008; Kim, 2006; Lee, 2009). According to Hwang (2008), the unstable social situation and lack of political freedom before and after the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 led to preoccupation with the Bible, revivalism, and millennialism, which all contributed to the development of fundamentalism in Korea. Interestingly, Hwang points out that the idea of millennialism and promise of a future messiah who will come to deliver the nation was a big part of the traditional Korean folk religion which represented collective hope for a better life. Because characteristics of Korean evangelicals have been attributed to the piety of the first Protestant missionaries to Korea (Lee, 2006), the Puritan background of these missionaries will be discussed next before examining Korea’s Evangelical movement more closely. Evangelical legacy of Great Awakening. According to Sweeney (2005), modern evangelicals are the heirs to the Great Awakening, a movement that was born less than three hundred years ago with the vision of renewing Europe’s Protestant state churches. Unhappy with the progress of the Reformation in England, Puritans came to the American shore hoping to purify the Church by stressing genuine conversion and biblical teaching. This was the “New World” Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) inherited, and the context in which his life-long pursuits of intellectual excellence and ministry unfolded. Edwards is not only known as the “most important founder of the evangelical movement” (Sweeney, 2009, p. 17), but also considered influential in modern Protestant missions. Edwards’s leading example as a missionary to Indians at the home front as well as his writings in Europe and America became instrumental in awakening the intercultural evangelism and world missions among Protestants. Inspired Edwardians and other likeminded evangelicals led the way for the global missions and cross-cultural ministry. Even if it was not their anticipated outcome, two-thirds of Christians in the world reside outside of North America and Europe today (Sweeney, 2005). In this sense, as Sweeney points out, evangelicals are a diverse group, but also share a common legacy across culture—a movement of orthodox Protestants or descendants of the Protestant Reformation with a commitment to right doctrine and worship.

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In the cultural context of eighteenth-century Puritan New England, Edwards as a minister tried to help his congregation make sense of the Great Awakening, a powerful revival that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. Although the Awakening was considered a great success with thousands of lives saved, it was also divisive and controversial. By the time revivals subsided, New England was split in opposing factions, and Edwards took a moderate position, straddling between the excesses of the new radical group and the old religious establishment advocating a rational, temperate pietism (Sweeney, 2005). It is in the midst of such confusion and conflict that Edwards wrote Religious Affections (1746a), which is considered his most important work that put significance on studying religious “passions” or emotions unlike other thinkers of his time (McDermott, 1995; Storms, 2007, Sweeney, 2009). As a hallmark of Evangelical faith, the first Protestant missionaries brought with them Puritan zeal and tried to replicate their revivalist traditions in Korea (Lee, 2006). Great Revival of 1907 in Korea. In 1903 the revival movement in Korea began at Wonsan and reached its peak at Pyongyang, better known as the Great Revival of 1907 (Baker, 2008; Lee, 2009). Because of its own origin, Lee interestingly notes this revival movement is considered to have developed independent from the Pentecostal movement in America, which started at Topeka, Kansas in 1900–1901 and spread around the globe after the Azusa Street revival in 1906 (Sweeney, 2005). The Great Revival came as Korea was rapidly Westernizing. While people were under the Japanese occupation, they felt the old religions of Korea (i.e., Shamanism, Buddhism, Confucianism) had failed the nation and were looking to Christianity to bring new hope (Owens, 1977). It began as a repentance movement, with a public confession of sins, weeping and praying, and people experiencing an outpouring of the Spirit. This subsequently resulted in the dramatic changes of lives and zeal for evangelism. Through the outbreak of this movement, Korean Protestantism encountered the powerful experience of the Holy Spirit for the first time, and it energized and brought about explosive church growth. The movement

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was open to all social class and all age groups, as the revival even spread to children and youth (Lee, 2009). The Korean Pentecostal/Spirit movement. While the revival renewed and purified the church, it also led to some unexpected negative outcomes. Under the Japanese occupation, the missionaries attempted to de-politicize the Korean church by limiting activities to matters of faith and away from political and social affairs; consequently, many churches became passive emphasizing personal salvation and turned away from social concerns. Kim and Kim (2015) explain that unlike the previous state-endorsed religions, Protestantism was introduced at a time when Korea began to adopt the contemporary movement to separate church and state. This tendency to remove the politicization of Christianity has been passed on to the Korean church today, and it continues to generate criticism from those outside the church (Min, 2005). Although the Great Revival began as a repentance movement, some also went in a mystical direction and many Korean syncretistic religious sects emerged (e.g., the Unification Church, the Olive Tree Church, etc.) (Lee, 2009). In opposition to such sects, Korean Christian leaders in the traditional denominations did not recognize any spiritual experiences. However, by repressing the work of the Spirit and legalistically stressing reverence, Lee points out that it actually fueled the development of the Holy Spirit movement in Korea. The spirit-oriented movement arose among people who were dissatisfied, helping the Pentecostal and charismatic movement to spread throughout all the Christian denominations in Korea today in some shape or form. Prime examples of such influences can be seen in revival meetings that are held in almost every Korean church annually and contemporary worship service being transformed to incorporate celebratory praises. Unlike in America, most individuals exposed to the Holy Spirit or Pentecostal Movement in Korea remained in their mainline denominational churches while incorporating charismatic elements in their spiritual practice (Yun, 2010). Interestingly, reflecting Taoistic yin-yang philosophy, Ryu Tong-Shik’s (2000) seminal work, The Mineral Veins of Korean Theology, explains that there are two different types of revival or Holy Spirit movements in the Korean church: the Confucian religious expression considered to

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be paternal or masculine (yang) and the Shamanistic maternal or feminine (yin) (cited in Kim, 2006). Yoido Full Gospel Church, for example, which is viewed as the central expression of Korean Pentecostalism, has been associated with the Shamanistic or “maternal” tradition and has come under heavy scrutiny for their doctrine of prosperity and healing ministry (Lee, 2009; Yun, 2010). While this world’s largest church has been criticized for infusing pre-Christian religious elements and heretical tendencies, the worship service is thought to provide a corporate experience of warmth, community, and spiritual power to dispossessed people in desperate times (Kim, 2006). Indigenous minjung theology and affective conversion. Another “localization” or indigenizing influence of Christianity in Korea is the development of minjung theology known as “theology of the people” which, similar to Latin American Liberation Theology, gave hope to the poor and the oppressed (Grayson, 2006; Kim, 2018). In the 1970s, the Korean working class was severely exploited and oppressed. Despite lengthy workdays, they still struggled to pay for necessities like rent and food. Although intense feelings of anger and frustration continued to deepen, the struggles of the working class were not formally acknowledged under the President Park Jung Hee’s dictatorship and instead silenced by a political system that alienated them as second-class citizens (Yun, 2010). These conditions of the working class created a great frustration which people vented and released negative feelings through spiritual practices such as tong-sung-ki-do or loud prayer in many Pentecostal churches. As a result, one of the unique features of Korean spiritual practice is its strong emphasis on prayer life, including loud prayer and prayer at night and at dawn, as a sign of being filled with the Holy Spirit. Lee (2006), however, points out that emphasis on loud prayer is more like an incantation reminiscent of the Korean Shamanistic practice, stressing fervent prayer to gain this-worldly blessings, health, and material prosperity. Of the various types of conversion experiences, Yun (2010) explains the Pentecostal minjung largely focused on the affective conversion, addressing God’s work on overcoming han. According to Park (1993), han is a term used to describe the depths of human suffering in

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Asia. Kim (1999) adds further clarification, unlike the Chinese word “hen” or Japanese “kon” which incorporates the idea of taking revenge, a distinctive feature of Korean han is “a feeling of inward frustration” or resignation similar to “an acquiescent spirit” which is typically resolved by unraveling or releasing through religious rituals or artistic expressions (e.g., traditional folk music) (p. 126). For this reason, Kim suggests that ordinary people’s han was traditionally healed by Shamanism as the country’s oldest folk religion through rituals; more recently this emotional function of releasing han has been shared by Pentecostal churches which has arguably contributed to Pentecostalism’s rapid growth in Korea. While increasingly focused on material success, the Pentecostal movement in Korea awakened the spiritual world including healing and mystical experiences. In 1989 Gallup Poll, 88.8% of Korean Protestants reported believing in miracles and this can be attributed to the Korean Protestant portrayal of God as “the magical ruler” apportioning graces at his will (Lee, 2006). Many Korean Protestants believed God would intervene with miracles during times of need. In fact, the appeal of biblical miracles, faith in the possibility of modern-day miracles, and their promise of a better life brought millions to convert to Christianity. Although the term Hananim was adapted to the Christian context, it still held the Shamanistic focus of fulfilling material needs. Thus, Koreans— especially the socially, politically, and economically oppressed—placed their hope in the Christian God, who they believed would grant them material happiness, liberation from suffering, and a better alternative to their current reality (Yun, 2010).

Lessons from Jonathan Edwards and Psychological Science on Emotion and Religious Experience As Jonathan Edwards (1746a‚ b) had conceived nearly three centuries ago, scholars in this area today agree that religious experience has an emotional component (e.g., McClymond, 2007; Martin, 1987; Norris,

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2005; Roberts 2007a). As Azari and Birnbacherm (2004) explain, the historical over-simplification of emotion has dominated research on the role of emotion in religious experience due to two major theories in Western psychology: (1) the noncognitive/somatic view (e.g., James– Lange, 1884/1885) that believed emotion consists of a pure, automatic, pre-wired, bodily state of arousal known as a feeling that comes before and apart from any thoughts and belief; and (2) the cognitive/appraisal approach (e.g., Schachter & Singer, 1962) that argued even if bodily arousal is involved, the specificity of emotion is given by some kind of cognitive appraisal. Empirical evidence has challenged both reductive models of emotion and demonstrated that emotion is not a pure bodily arousal nor a pure cognitive process, but engages both (Eich 2000; Rolls, 1999). Current studies suggest there may be basic emotions at the bodily level but most emotions are cognitively shaped and mediated by the social and cultural context in such a way that it is not practical to conceive them separately; in other words, emotion dynamically involves both cognitive and noncognitive processes (Eich, 2000; Hwang & Huang, 2012; Sundararajan, 2015; Yong, 2005). If recent research and theory on emotion (e.g., Eich, 2000; Goleman, 2011; Greenspan, 1997; Lazarus, 1982; Russell, 2003) is to be taken seriously, an accurate account of religious experience calls for a deeper understanding and integration of embodied thinking and feeling (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999; Sundararajan, 2015; Yong, 2005).

Psychological Science on Emotion and Religious Experience The simple conceptualization of emotion as a pure bodily arousal (feeling) or a pure cognitive construction (thinking) has not been supported by research (Azari & Birnbacher, 2004; d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999; Eich, 2000; Greenspan, 1997). Instead, a much more complex picture of emotion has emerged suggesting emotion is tightly bound up with cognition (Eich, 2000; Goleman, 2011; Lazarus, 1982; Russell, 2003) and culture (Joshanloo, 2019; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Sundararajan, 2015). Current neuroscientific findings indicate

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dynamic interactions between the cognitive, affective, motivational, bodily arousal, and transformational components (LeDoux, 1996; Rolls, 1999; Siegel, 2006). Thus, Edwards’ (1746a) emphasis on “both-and” understanding of feelings and belief is supported by contemporary studies in this area (Azari & Birnbachler, 2004; Norris, 2005; Roberts, 2007a). Recent psychological research on emotion shows the complex interdependence of cognition regulating emotion and emotion regulating cognition (Clore, 2011; Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2004). One study (Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, Paz, & Peterson, 2006) illustrates emotion organizes action by stimulating conscious thought and permitting a revision of beliefs and intentions. For example, the emotions from a drama or movie seem to help regulate thought by drawing our attention to the important aspects of situations and facilitate learning by feeling vicarious emotions, rather than the venting of emotion as previously thought. Thus, it appears emotion is what actually helps people to think much more than they would without it. Gross’ (2001) research, on the other hand, demonstrates the role of cognition is to shape emotion as it develops rather than to suppress it later. He found people could more easily change or dampen emotion by reinterpreting events than suppressing feelings which was harder and reduced people’s ability to remember. Therefore, current findings suggest that cognition exerts control over emotion, not by conflict nor suppression as Freud (1905) initially thought, but by shaping, situating, contextualizing, and changing its meaning (Clore, 2011). One implication Clore points out is that the power of affect depends on how cognition constrains its meaning; more specifically, cognition appears to shape low-level, affective reactions into more precise emotions (e.g., sadness, fear, anger, shame). Other findings, however, indicate that primary emotion at the subcortical level exerts stronger control on the higher cognitive function, which explains why deep emotional experience is not always in full awareness to be consciously or explicitly regulated through cognition (Panksepp, 1998). Some indicate recent evidence from neuroscience support not only belief in supernatural beings or spirit world involves an innate human mind, but it also implicates higher psychological process to organize and make

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sense of emotional experience through religious and culturally mediated meaning system (Azari & Birnbachler, 2004; Hewitt, 2012; LewisWilliams, 2010; Panksepp, 1998). Hewitt describes, for example, altered states of consciousness or trance experienced by shamans since ancient times contributed to the development of religion all over the world as people sought ways to harmoniously exist in connection with nature and the cosmos.

Integration of Emotion and Religious Experience Just as emotional experience is a complex matter involving thinking and feeling (Damasio, 1999), religious experience cannot be reduced to pure feeling or thought (Azari & Birnbachler, 2004; Norris, 2005; Roberts, 2007a). Insights drawn from brain imaging studies show that religious and mystical experiences are mediated by complex patterns of neural activity; they involve the autonomic nervous system, the limbic system, and neocortical areas and cannot “locate” religious experience to any specific brain region according to d’Aquili and Newberg (1999). However, they argue religion has not disappeared since ancient period because the basic elements of religion are hardwired in the brain and help human survival and adaptability through self-maintenance and selftranscendence which are integrated in most cultures to gain control over the unpredictable world. Winkelman (2004) similarly explains that Shamanism and Animism involve innate emotional preverbal brain structures that utilize integrative altered states of consciousness to facilitate a sense of connection and oneness to self, other, and the world which promotes social adaptation, community integration, personal development, and healing. Winkelman believes Shamanistic and Animistic principles embodied in spirits are used to manipulate unconscious aspect of self and help unite conscious mind mediated by language and cultural system to give order and situate the person in the world. In this way, religious traditions provide emotionally charged cultural symbols through rituals to integrate the psychological, spiritual, and somatic spheres and healing in the community.

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Brahinsky (2018), however, points out that currently both neuroscience and cultural studies are divided by two different views on emotion and affect: (1) separating emotion thought to be mediated by reason/language from pre-linguistic affect charged with energy, and (2) not dividing affect and emotion into different physiological region because they are both pervasive dimensions of brain activity and deeply entangled with the external context. This means that it is not practically possible to tease apart linguistically controlled emotion from unconstrained affect and what appears to be conscious thought is controlled by unconscious or implicit affective processes. Interestingly, Brahinsky describes what is commonly observed in Pentecostal spiritual practice (e.g., explosive emotional rupture, trance states, praying in tongues) may be perceived as irrational and impulsive; however, he argues these spiritual practices initially involve conscious learning and cultivating complex skills which repeated over time become automatic and spontaneous. Considering the Korean context, Shamanism is thought to be the enduring core religious worldview underlying Korean’s mindset and cultural practices (Baker, 2008; Kendall, 1985). For this reason, among diverse imported religions in Korea, Christianity particularly struggled with assimilation of Shamanistic elements such as emphasis on material blessings and healing ministry (Kim, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2008). Historically, this resulted in the division of Korean Protestant Christianity into two major camps: (1) the “paternal/Confucianistic” mainline traditions fundamentally stressing accuracy of doctrine and Scripture, and (2) the “maternal/Shamanistic” Pentecostal and minjung emphasizing healing and blessing for the poor and oppressed (Kim, 2006; Ryu, 2000). Putting aside theological issues which is outside of the scope of this paper, most recent findings from neuroscience not only suggest emotion (conscious/explicit) and affect (unconscious/implicit) are inseparable, but also both are needed to function properly. Since ancient times, religion (e.g., mythology, Shamanism, Animism) was utilized to control the unconscious and integrate with the conscious mind at an individual and collective level (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999; Winkelman, 2004).

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Conclusion Religion is one of the most effective ways to cope with the various challenges of life. With a long history of invasions and oppressions, the Korean people suffered from han, which was traditionally healed by Shamanism as the oldest folk religion in Korea; more recently, a rapid growth of Pentecostal churches appear to be fulfilling this function in Korea (Kim, 1999). One example is a unique form of Korean spiritual practice involving tong-sung-ki-do, which is praying in unison or crying out loud together corporately. This style of prayer is not only considered an important part of the spirit-filled prayer life among Korean Pentecostal Christians as a fervent and earnest way of crying out to God, but it is also thought to have a strong connection with releasing Korean people’s han—unresolved resentment, bitterness, emotional pain, or suffering (Kim, 1999). In this way, rather than clashing, culture and religion are often intertwined and can be mutually reinforcing. It is difficult and almost impossible to separate religious conversion from the indigenous understanding of spirituality. To an extent, indigenization is also arguably a necessary precursor when it comes to enabling a receptive environment. For many scholars, the “Koreanization” of Christianity is the reason why the faith was so well-received in comparison to other countries (e.g., Chung, 2001; Grayson, 2006; Lee, 2006). Christianity, in the case of Korea, was able to take root and transition fluidly as Protestantism incorporated Korean tradition into its practice. Christianity spread in Korea because it was able to coexist in harmony with Korea’s indigenous religious beliefs. Recent advances in cognitive sciences (e.g., Damasio, 1999; LeDoux, 1996; Rolls, 1999; Russell, 2003) as well as scholarly contributions from diverse cultural and religious perspectives (e.g., Hwang & Huang, 2012; Sundararajan, 2015; Yong, 2005) have both highlighted the complexity and deepened the understanding of religious experience. Inarguably, the example of Korea shows that religious experience cannot be reduced to any overly simplistic accounts of emotion or cognition, just as emotional experience emerged as a complex matter of both thinking and feeling.

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Given such complexity, a more rigorous engagement across various disciplines such as theology, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience may prove to be fruitful in acquiring deeper insights into the religious experience. This is particularly the case as we broaden our understanding of how emotions and religious experiences are shaped by concepts and narratives across different culture and time.

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10 How India Almost Lost Its Soul: The Detrimental Effects of Ethnocentrism and Colonialism on the Psychology of Spirituality Pradeep Chakkarath

Spirituality and Religion: Two Blurry, but Enduring Concepts Like so many other terms that shape today’s mainstream science, including mainstream psychology, the terms “spirituality” and “religion” have their etymological origins in ancient Europe, more precisely in Latin. Both terms have a broad range of meanings, which give rise to our continuing difficulty to derive consistent and unambiguous definitions of “spirituality” and “religion.” In the following, I will take a brief look at some linguistic aspects of these two influential terms to illustrate the problem and introduce the range of issues to be dealt with afterwards. Etymologically, the term “spirituality” stems from the Latin noun “spiritus.” In Latin texts, the term is used in a broad semantic environment where it can have such different meanings as animating principle, P. Chakkarath (B) Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_10

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breath, wind , soul , life, vitality, vigor, dynamics, or even courage. Even though the Latin verb “spirare” has a more clearly defined meaning and can usually be translated as “to breathe,” its wider range of meanings becomes evident in derived words that are still in use in many of today’s modern languages like English: to inspire, expire, transpire, respire, or even conspire. In the context discussed here, apart from spirituality, it is probably the related term “spirit” that has had the strongest impact on occidental metaphysics, theology, philosophy, and psychology. The spectrum of its meaning overlaps with many of the understandings already mentioned, but most commonly the term has been used for various characterizations of an assumed invisible and intangible vital force in all living things. In the history of philosophy as well as in the philosophy of history, for example in Hegel’s theory of the “world spirit” (Weltgeist ), the term serves to describe an idealistic principle that drives the development of life, the world, and societies. In its broader use, “spirit” has also been understood as a purely immaterial manifestation, detached from everything physical, and sometimes attributed exclusively to divine beings, sometimes also to ghosts, demons, or fairies. In the same vein and with substantial impact on the development of psychological theories, “spirit” was often used to refer to the non-corporeal soul, the psyche, state of minds, or moods—phenomena which were also called “anima” in Latin. The intellectual influence of this terminology is particularly due to its systematic use in Aristotle’s Peri psych¯es, which was translated into Latin as De anima and is considered a founding document in the history of psychology and biology. Some of Aristotle’s fundamental assumptions made it into Descartes’ dualism and were also taken up in the beginnings of modern medicine, for example, in the anatomical and physiological works of William Harvey. Especially, the last example shows that the scientific distancing of the natural sciences from concepts associated with spiritus, anima, soul , mind , etc., is rather recent (for a more detailed historiography, see Joseph, 2018; McCarroll, O’Connor, & Meakes, 2005). The origins of the modern meaning of the term “religion” are no less easily reconstructed. Without discussing the ongoing philological debates in detail, it can be stated that the Latin noun “religio” has its roots in two

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different verbs, i.e., in “religare” (to tie, to bind ) and “relegere” (to repeatedly return to certain practices). Not surprisingly, the noun also has many different meanings, depending on its use by different authors in different contexts, ranging from compliance with certain rules and rituals, doubts, concerns, and scruples to conscientiousness, belief , religiosity, fear of divine beings, piety, worship, sanctity, and superstition. The close connection between the two semantic fields of “spirituality” and “religion” becomes clear when one considers how we talk about religious content and say, for example, that God is the highest spirit, that belief in other spirits is nothing but superstition, that spirituality is the search for sanctity, that religiosity is a certain state of mind, etc. The main reason for the inconsistencies and ambiguities described above is the long history of these terms as well as the various sociocultural and discursive contexts (e.g., belief systems and academic disciplines) and the various uses therein. We can get a feeling for the related problems by thinking about the early beginnings of academic internationalization when Roman scholars aimed to translate key terms and theories from the Greek pioneers of poetry, philosophy, medicine, physics, and other sciences into Latin. The Greek term for which the Roman scholars used “spiritus,” sometimes “anima,” is “pneuma”—a word that usually means breath, air, wind , or swirl , but was also used as a synonym for vital spirit or soul, and played an important role in medical theories about physiological and psychological disorders (Ahonen, 2014). The term was also used to denote the Christian theological discipline of pneumatology, i.e., the study of the Holy Spirit. Pneumatology, however, was also a field in Spiritism that was concerned with the study of spirits and their conjuration. These kinds of pragma-semantic differences can already be found in ancient Greek: While the Epicureans considered pneuma to be a cold substance or energy and put as least as much emphasis on the role of atoms and physical mechanisms in explanations of life-related phenomena, in pantheistic Stoic philosophy and physics, pneuma meant a mixture of air and fire, an all-pervading inspiring energy, the rationality in cosmic order, even a kind of fate (Osler, 1991). Moreover, the Stoics did not view the dividing line between the terms “matter” and “spirit” as being clear-cut. Thus, the spectra of meanings of terms in one language or school of thought were rarely congruent with

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those in other languages or other teachings—an issue we still have to deal with in our current academic discourses. Since several styles of Greek—known as Koine or Biblical Greek styles—and especially Latin were the intellectual languages used by eminent Christian thinkers with different native tongues, the problem of terminological equivalence has been a source of academic debate and controversy for millennia. Thus, the question of how to agree on an appropriate translation or whether, for example, a literary translation is preferable to more flexible linguistic adaptation remains significant. The development of hermeneutics and translation studies owes a great deal to the theologians’ efforts to achieve an adequate interpretation and translation of fundamental religious texts, especially those considered sacred. Religious texts have always made use of numerous myths, analogies, metaphors, and allegories that required interpretation and have been continuously reinterpreted by different scholars at different times and for different purposes. The openness of religious texts to reinterpretation is one of the reasons why religions as well as some of their key concepts were able to adapt to social change and thereby remain meaningful for thousands of years. Of course, written and oral religious texts are not the only ones that require plausible interpretations, but religious views and the powerful institutions that helped spread them have been playing an extensive role in many areas of individual, social, and political life. In the following, I will propose an understanding of cultural psychology that I consider helpful in that it represents an approach that allows us to deal with at least some of the problems mentioned above and that may help us put our ensuing considerations into perspective.

The Indigeneity of Concepts and Belief Systems: A Cultural Psychological View Modern Western psychology was established in the nineteenth century as an experimental natural science. Accordingly, its subdiscipline psychology of religion, also established in the nineteenth century, mainly focused on the clinical psychological study of individual religious experience and its physiological foundations (Chakkarath, 2007). Although

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early American psychologists of religion (e.g., G. S. Hall, J. H. Leuba, E. D. Starbuck) provided important impulses for developmental psychological perspectives and survey methods (Sharpe, 2005), for decades the investigations implemented an individual-centric paradigm, focusing on visions, the effects of prayer, experiences of salvation, ecstasy, absence seizures, trance states, glossolalia, stigmatization, experiences of conversion, supposed reincarnations, levitations, and possessions. There was great interest in the psychopathological aspects of religion such as excessive awareness of sin and guilt and disorders resulting therefrom, for example, regarding self-esteem. A classic document of the initial orientation of international religious psychological research is William James’ lecture series on the Varieties of religious experience (James, 1902/1985). Sigmund Freud’s later characterization of religion as an illusion with neurotic features (Freud, 1927/1989) contributed considerably—at least in Europe—to a focus on the psychopathological aspects of religion and to an equating of religiosity with irrationality. Even before James’ and Freud’s elaborations on their psychologies of religion, Wilhelm Wundt, the so-called father of modern experimental psychology, proposed a “dual psychology” (Wundt, 1912/1916)—the idea that some areas of high psychological relevance were not accessible to experimental psychological but only to observational research. Thus, in order to understand the development of thought and ideas, artistic imagination, morals, myth, and religion, he borrowed from social scientific field methods and from hermeneutics. The leading protagonists of the nascent field of mainstream psychology did not appreciate his efforts to design an interdisciplinary and methodologically integrative psychology. Nonetheless, he provided important impulses for the emergence of twentieth century cultural psychology. Some cultural psychologists (see Chakkarath, 2017; Markus & Kitayama, 2010; Straub, 2006) consider culture and psyche to be mutually related. Accordingly, they propose that all psychological phenomena—including belief, religiosity, and spirituality—as well as the structures, processes, and functions thereof, are intrinsically dependent on cultural life forms, language games, practices, and discourses (for a more detailed account of the following sketch of cultural psychology, see

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Chakkarath & Straub, 2020). Cultural psychology is thus not a subdiscipline, but rather a discipline that offers a general and interdisciplinary perspective on all possible objects of psychological research as well as the scientific and non-scientific discourses and manifestations in which they are embedded. In addition, cultural psychologists understand cultures as practical systems of knowledge, concepts, signs, and symbols that are inherent in human action and thus allow people to give meaning to their world, their self, and their existence. Drawing upon a definition by Boesch (1991), cultures can be conceived of as specific action fields “whose contents range from objects made and used by human beings to institutions, ideas and myths. Being an action field, culture offers possibilities of, but by the same token stipulates conditions for, action; it circumscribes goals which can be reached by certain means, but establishes limits, too, for correct, possible and also deviant action” (p. 29). Throughout their lives, people think, feel, evaluate, communicate, and act in a web of cultural meanings, which they are able to—at least partially—modify, but never shake off completely. Cultures fulfill orientation functions for bodily subjects capable of thinking, speaking, feeling, and acting. Especially in complex, culturally differentiated societies, people can and generally do have multiple cultural affiliations to various groups in which there is potential for cooperation, but also for conflict. It follows from the above that cultural psychology is an interpretative science for which the hermeneutic problem of the understanding and construction of meaning is at the center of methodological reflection. Accordingly, the methodological repertoire of cultural psychology consists—not exclusively but primarily—of qualitative, reconstructive, or interpretative methods that facilitate a more adequate understanding of the insiders’ perspectives and the intrinsic cultural distinctions that are meaningful to them. It also follows from the above that concepts like “religion” and “spirituality,” their history and genesis as well as the various belief systems and discursive webs in which they have been interwoven with each other and with other concepts—often over millennia—are characteristic constituents of certain cultures or action fields in which human development unfolds (Chakkarath, 2013b; Super & Harkness, 1997). Although

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many mainstream psychologists believe in the universal usefulness and validity of their theories and terminological tools, from a cultural psychological perspective, any concept and theory is socio-culturally impregnated and therefore bears features that we can call “indigenous.” In the last few decades, it has been especially “indigenous psychology” that has called for less ethnocentricity and greater intercultural competence in psychology, including in cultural psychological research. At the same time, indigenous psychology demands greater openness to non-Western indigenous conceptions of science, traditions of thought, and research practices. All this is not least a question of language skills, translation competence, and a viable familiarity with the investigated fields—which are at least as important aspects of “psychological literacy” as familiarity with quantitative research methods (Cranney & Dunn, 2011). As far as the acquisition and teaching of corresponding competencies and the dismantling of ethnocentrically-based barriers and knowledge deficits are concerned, cultural psychology must be measured by the seriousness of its own claims. In other words, cultural psychology as outlined above must necessarily be extended by perspectives from indigenous psychology (Chakkarath, 2012). To be clear, this does not mean that theories and concepts whose meanings were shaped in less familiar discourses and fields of action cannot, in principle, be translated and understood. It is interesting that we can easily find many terms, theories, metaphors, myths, allegories, etc., in various cultures that undoubtedly bear a certain familial resemblance to concepts used in our own knowledge systems. For example, the terms ruh (Arab), roho (Swahili), ruach (Hebrew), qi (Chinese), ki (Japanese), odem (German), orenda (Iroquoian), mana (Polynesian), prana (Sanskrit), and many others, have a spectrum of meaning which partly overlaps with that of pneuma as well as that of spiritus. C. G. Jung was one of the most prominent figures in the history of psychology who studied these similarities. He viewed them as evidence supporting his theory of universal thought patterns, so-called archetypes, which also help us structure our religious experiences (Jung, 1926/1960). It is always intriguing to find commonalities between people from different regions and ethnicities of the world and from societies with very different historical developments. Moreover, these common features repeatedly remind

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us that we belong to the same fascinating species. Especially in times of far-reaching and often violent conflict, it is important to remind ourselves what binds us together. From a psychological and any other scientific view, however, it is equally important to avoid assuming that certain characteristics are universal or certain laws are universally applicable on the basis of hastily made observations. The fact that people in many cultures have a term for a supreme spiritual being does not mean that this being has the same meaning in all cultures. It does not even mean that the word means the same to everyone within a specific culture. The fact that some people associate words from different languages that all translate to “life” with a divine gift, others primarily with suffering, makes us aware of the importance of paying attention not only to the mere existence of seemingly similar concepts across cultures, but above all to what people do with them. I will now turn to a very specific and significant example which may clarify what I described above: that we do something not only with our own concepts, but often also with others’ concepts; that we give meaning not only to terms and phenomena with which we are familiar, but also to those with which we are not familiar. To show how dramatic the psychological scope and the political dimension of such processes can be, I will turn my attention to a historical phenomenon known as colonialism. However, in so doing, I will not focus on the colonization of other countries’ territories, but on the colonization of others’ minds.

How to Do Things with Words of Others: India’s Encounter with the Spirit of Colonialism When Christian Europe started “discovering” the rest of the world in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, they also discovered systems of thought and orientations that differed from their own. To determine whether the newly discovered belief systems could also be regarded as “true religions” like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they created an ethnocentric measure of religion. They thereby determined that certain belief

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systems, among them Buddhism and Hinduism, could not be considered religions, but were better described as a pre-scientific collection of superstitious assumptions. Moreover, since scholars of the European Enlightenment were instrumental in differentiating between “religion” and “science,” their ethnocentric perspective led them to overlook or disqualify non-European scientific contributions that they deemed to be too intertwined with religious-like thought systems. Approximately three hundred years later, similar problems arose in regard to the Eurocentricity of the terms “science” and “psychology”, for example, with regard to the Eurocentric devaluation of psychological contributions from nonEuropean intellectual traditions (Chakkarath, 2010a). In the following, using the example of British colonial rule in India, I will focus on features of the colonialist degradation of the colonized subjects’ culture and their cultural achievements. Although other countries have had their own colonial experiences, many of the following references will reflect typical features of colonial attitudes that go beyond the Indian example (cf. Dueck & Marossy, 2019). The European interest in India can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman writings from the sixth century BCE (Chakkarath, 2010b). At that time, few Europeans had ever traveled to India, so most Europeans’ notion of India was largely a product of ancient Greek and Roman authors’ imaginations. Thus, early on, it became the land of miracles, wonders, and horrors—a mystification that continued long into the twentieth century, thanks to reports from modern-day travelers, artists, filmmakers as well as Indian self-portrayals in books written by spiritual leaders and movies produced in Bollywood. Over the millennia and centuries, Europeans’ fascination with India oscillated between curiosity, romanticized reverence, exoticism, and disdainful contempt (cf. Sen, 2005). Since the devaluation of a country’s achievements and the resulting image of its people’s backwardness were more suitable as justifications for colonialism, in the following, I will focus on the negative assessments of India and its culture in the colonial discourse about the colonized. Negative images of India that were no longer rooted in mere imagination, but also in personal experiences, became clearly visible with the early modern missionary efforts of Christian clergymen. Although

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the Christian missionary work with foreign populations far away from Europe was sometimes based on culturally sensitive reflections and methods (Blackburn, 2000; Chakkarath 2013a; Frykenberg, 2013), India in particular was regarded by many missionaries as difficult terrain. In the sixteenth century, Alessandro Valignano, the Jesuit Order’s Visitor of Missions reported to his church that the shifty character of Indians, their irrational conceptions of the human soul, and their casual attitude toward responsibility made successful missionary work in India almost impossible. He thus recommended that missionary efforts be shifted to Japan and China. His advice was based on stereotypical and prejudiced psychological assumptions about national character as well as his inability or unwillingness to make sense of Indian religious and philosophical theories about spiritual phenomena like the soul. His assessment reflected an influential line of discourse in the construction of a European image of India. In his lectures on the philosophy of history, G. W. F. Hegel, one of the most influential figures in the European history of thought, viewed the Indian theories about the universe, life, the soul, and society as proof of the “dreamily staggering imagination of the Indian mind.” This, he believed, also explained the chaos of the “unbridled Indian society” (1837/1995). According to Hegel, the basic character of the Indian was characterized by cunningness and craftiness, cheating, stealing, robbing, and murdering. In the content and style of the Mahabharatha and the Ramayana, two of the world’s most famous epics, Hegel identifies the Indians as “spiritual but plant-like beings” (Hegel, 1838/1974, p. 1095), concluding that a culture incapable of developing the idea of a solid and stable individual self or an autonomous person should not be left to govern itself. Thus, he justified the British rule over India, considering it the “fatal destiny” of India and all of Asia to submit to Europe and the European spirit. Here and there, Hegel’s assessment of India’s intellectual achievements was slightly more differentiated than it appears in this brief account (Rathore & Mohapatra, 2017). However, his disqualification of Indian thought as a chaotic and unscientific hodgepodge of abstruse assumptions has remained significant to the present day. For India, this typical view through the eyes of colonialists had important consequences, as can be seen in the “Minute on Indian Education” by historian and parliamentarian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was

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entrusted with education policy in the Council of India. In addressing the question concerning whether Indian schools should offer education in “useful” Western vs. classical native subjects, with English vs. classical Sanskrit/Arabic as the language of instruction, Macaulay took a clear position that led the way for clearing the colonized subjects’ clouded minds with the enlightened spirit of their colonial masters: When we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. (Macaulay, 1835/1972, p. 241)

More confident than Valignano, however, Macauley saw an opportunity to free the Indians from their supposedly miserable situation and bring them into the service of the higher British cause: We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. (Macaulay, 1835/1972, p. 241)

As adumbrated above, we can make a few interesting observations: For thousands of years, Europeans have endeavored to put down acquired knowledge in writing by borrowing from Greek and Latin nomenclature. Because Greek and Roman concepts were declared an essential part of the general European cultural heritage, they were not considered foreign, but Europe’s own. Here, translation meant preserving and refining one’s own identity through inclusion and integration. To do so effectively, they had to overlook or trivialize important aspects of their chosen model cultures: the fact that the Greeks and Romans did not have the “true religion,”

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but believed in countless gods, demigods, and powerful mythical creatures; that animal sacrifices, fortune telling, and all sorts of superstition were part of their religiosity; that Plato—an epitome of Western rationality—advocated a theory of reincarnation and propagated the idea that art corrupts the mind; that Greeks and Romans alike considered slavery natural; and that their eroticism and sexuality bore little correspondence with the puritanical attitudes of modern Europe. Europeans preferred to see the “other” not in their own past, but in the “East,” that is, east of Rome and Athens, a place they called “the Orient.” Our exemplary look at Europe’s “othering” of India has shown some of the crucial features of “Orientalism” (Said, 1978). For colonial purposes, the orientalist perspective entailed the imagination of a non-Western and therefore backward, non-rational, non-secularized, superstitious, chaotic, instable, erratic, and dangerous part of the world that needed to be controlled, educated, and civilized. In this process of “othering,” Europeans were still refining their own identity, this time, however, through exclusion: Placing them in juxtaposition, Europeans viewed Indian knowledge as worthless and an obstacle to societal development and Western knowledge as highly advanced, and even “immeasurably superior” as Macaulay put it. When drawing inspiration from their “forefathers,” Europeans were under psychological pressure to turn a blind eye to the similarities between Greco-Roman conceptions of spirituality, religion, and philosophy and, for example, Indian conceptions thereof or even to demonize divergent and even similar Indian notions as aberrations of the human mind. To do so effectively, they emphasized the features of Indian ideologies that they ignored when dealing with Greek and Roman accounts. By extolling the intellectual usefulness of Greek and Latin concepts related to spirituality and religiosity, and rejecting the value of Sanskrit concepts, Europeans enhanced their sense of their own identity and superiority, while simultaneously devaluing the Indians’ understanding of the world, the meaning of life, and themselves (Nandy, 1983). Metaphorically speaking: They endeavored to replace the Indian soul with a European spirit. Adopting a cultural psychological perspective on culture entails viewing culture as a practical system of knowledge, concepts, and

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symbols that are inherent in human action and that allow people to give meaning to their world, their self, and their existence. In the aforementioned, I have attempted to show that ethnocentric views combined with colonialist interests run counter to a cultural psychological approach. Even undoubtedly clever minds like Hegel’s were primarily concerned with theoretical reasoning. If Hegel was interested in the practical and societal relevance of Indian theories at all, he was guided by the question concerning whether they could ever achieve a form of society he was familiar with and that he considered the “final result” of the “world spirit.” Unable to identify a systematic framework in which the theoretical reflections on spiritual aspects of life were embedded in India, he concluded that there was more chaos than order in Indian thinking. Thus, we see that even philosophers are only human: Like most people who encounter orders and frameworks they are unfamiliar with, they too tend to see nothing but disorder. This cognitive inflexibility makes it difficult to understand that conceptions of spirituality, religiosity, and even science are intrinsically dependent on cultural life forms, language games, practices, and discourses. In the following concluding section, I will encourage especially psychologists to take off their “thinking caps” and reservations. This would be an important first step in transforming psychology, including the psychology of spirituality, from an excluding to an inclusive and integrative science.

Not as Chaotic as Assumed: Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology of Religion in Indian Thought While most Western psychologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showed little interest in non-Western traditions of psychological thought and research, this was different among Western experts of Indian culture (e.g., Mueller, 1883; Rhys Davids, 1936) and still remains different today (e.g., Frazier, 2017; Kuznetsova, Ganeri, & Ram-Prasad,

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2012). Friedrich Max Mueller, one of the most prominent philologists and indologists of his time, had the following to say about Indian contributions to the history of ideas: If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant - I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans […] may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, […] again I should point to India. (Mueller, 1883, p. 24)

I will take this assessment, which I share, as a welcome justification for my illustrations of the connection between spirituality, religion, psychology, and science in reference to one of the central themes of classical Indian thought: human development as the gradual unfolding of the spiritual self (atman). I will not delve into the different and complex discussions within and between the Indian schools of thought that revolve around the nature of the material and the spiritual (for those kinds of discussions, see e.g. Sharma, 2000, 2006). I will also not go into detail about etymological aspects of the spiritual and the religious in India. However, I will state that in India, too, the earliest attempts to understand the relationship between the spiritual and the physical were made using terms (e.g., prana, vayu, and jiva) that are semantically similar to the Greek pneuma and the Latin spiritus. In addition, just as they did in European antiquity, these terms played an important role in biological, medical, and psychological theories of health and illness (Ahonen, 2014; Reat, 1990; Zysk, 1991). In Indian theories, however, much more emphasis is put on the introspective observation of breathing in diverse forms of breathing techniques (pranayama) and meditation (for reasons explained below). Thus, although I will limit myself to more general indications of how the practical dimension of spirituality and its relationship to religiosity can be seen, I think that the other aspects

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just mentioned provide an important basis for this, i.e., are important elements of the same larger context. As indicated above, some leading European intellectuals’ and many colonialists’ ethnocentric assumptions about the range of classical Indian thought were that India has never had the wealth of ideas and wellfounded theories that have shaped European intellectual history since its ancient beginnings in Greece. The different schools of Indian thought were said to be so largely theologically, metaphysically, and spiritually oriented that their redundancies and similarities were more fundamental than their differences. It is also said that because of the theological and metaphysical orientation of Indian theories, it is difficult to discover clearly formulated claims to scientificity. Apart from the fact that agreement among various theories is not a convincing reason to question their intellectual and scientific quality, the assumption that the classical Indian schools of thought held largely similar positions is wrong. The range of classical schools of Indian philosophy corresponds more or less to that of classical schools of European philosophy and includes, among others, idealistic, materialistic, realistic, anti-realistic, hedonistic, nihilistic, atheistic, agnostic, dualistic, and monistic positions with partly similar, partly divergent, and also opposing epistemological views (Sharma, 2000). It is also incorrect to assume that classical Indian thought did not apply strict standards to the scientificity of theories and argumentation. Corresponding standards and demands—often referred to as pramana (means of knowledge)—were developed in all of the schools mentioned and include the following (for a detailed account, see Tuske, 2017): – yatharthya (correspondence of theories and judgments with the facts) – abadhitatva (logical consistency and coherence of statements and judgments) – anumana (derivations based only on logical inferences) – pravritisamarthya (workability or practical utility of concepts) – upamana (identification of similarities and dissimilarities by comparison) – anupalabdhi (identification of what is not and can never be the case) – nutanatva (creation of new or increased knowledge).

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It is important to understand that, in the classical schools of Indian thought, scientificity is primarily determined by whether the insights are achieved in line with these pramanas. This means that the study of material, mental, and spiritual phenomena can be equally scientific (cf. Brooke & Numbers, 2011). This includes, for example, the question concerning whether God exists or whether there are any higher spiritual beings. The investigation of these kinds of questions would have to be in accordance with all of the pramanas—with a specific focus on the rules of anupalabdhi. I think that for a large part of India’s significant contributions to the world’s philosophy, linguistics, psychology, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, etc. (see, e.g., Kolachana, Mahesh & Ramasubramanian, 2019), it can be said that they have emerged from an underlying conviction that notable religious as well as scientific insights are rooted in the adherence to certain rules and a cognitive attitude that can be called “spiritual.” Psychologically relevant contributions from classical (i.e., mainly Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain) traditions of thought are mostly embedded in teachings about suffering (dukkha), cycles of rebirths (samsara), and salvation (moksha, mukti, or nirvana). They emphasize that all existence primarily means the susceptibility to misfortune, ailment, austerity, and other forms of suffering. This assessment is rooted in an understanding of life that differs in many respects from the comparatively positive and lifeaffirming humanistic view of man that is more prevalent, for example, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, all classical schools of Indian thought share the conviction that humans suffer from certain cognitive weaknesses, but also have the cognitive and spiritual abilities to overcome suffering. Suffering arises from the natural and universal human tendency to develop a strong sense of ego and self that sets oneself apart from others and everything else. When this natural process is left to itself, it will eventually result in psychologically unhealthy selfishness, which is a precondition for becoming disappointed, frustrated, angry, and unhappy. This in turn results in selfish actions that are sanctioned with negative karma, i.e., an assessment of the moral weight of actions that is conceived of as natural law (similar to how, according to the law of gravity, the motion of any particle of matter in the universe becomes calculable with respect to its mass). Since this is a natural and inborn

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process, controlling, containing, and overcoming it requires targeted effort, orderly living, strict discipline, and regular practice of body and mind. This lays the foundation for sincere self-observation and selfmonitoring and only this kind of seriousness can foster the attainment of indifference and serenity—a state of mind considered ideal for draining the psychological sources of suffering. In many texts, this problem is also described as a cognitive and motivational psychological problem of adherence or “eager attachment” (upadana) to the phenomena of the world. The Sanskrit term upadana translates to “material cause” or “fuel” and refers to the physiological and biological factors driving ego development. The ideal of “non-attachment” (anasakti) characterizes the spiritual relationship between a free human being and his/her environment. As an ideal of spiritually guided human action orientation, anasakti is also of great importance in the teachings of the Bhagavadgita (Bhawuk, 2011), one of the most widespread and well-known texts in Indian literature (for an English translation, see Easwaran, 2007). There it says, for example, that he who is without affect has a desirable personality, is not pleased when he experiences good things, and does not hate when he experiences bad things (Bhagavadgita 2:57). Excellent is the one who displays the same attitude toward well-meaning people, friends, enemies, impartial, despised, good, and evil people (Bhagavadgita 6:9). Even today, rituals (samskaras) that are still common in Hindu families and that can be scheduled with a certain degree of flexibility in terms of a child’s age, serve to structure childhood and adolescence. At the same time, they illustrate how one is supported from early on in developing the ideal personality. Among the manifold rituals marking self-development are the following (Chakkarath, 2005, 2013b): nishakarana (approx. 1st–4th month): The child is introduced to the outside world; the child is shown the moon and stars as symbols of the child’s embeddedness in the universe and in cosmic processes. annaprasana (approx. 4th–9th month): The child is given the first solid food; the gradual weaning of the child follows. In some versions, different objects such as toys, books, or fruit are spread out in front of the child, whereby the first object the child touches is believed to indicate the child’s future interests.

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chudakarana (approx. 9th month–3rd year): As a symbol of sacrifice, death, and rebirth, the child’s head is shaved bald and the child newly clothed. The new clothing is a sign of rebirth and marks the “psychological birth” of the child, who from now on is able to learn the discipline demanded for ideal self-development and for the future fulfillment of social duties. upanayana (approx. 7th–12th year): After the child’s biological and psychological birth, this ritual marks the child’s social birth. In the case of sons, they have their last dinner together with their mother and spend the night alone, for the first time without their mother and in a dark room. The next morning they leave the room and take their last meal together with the mother. Afterwards the boy is handed over to male relatives. From now on, the boy will eat with the men of the family and be served by his mother. A child is not considered an autonomous person until his/her “social birth” at the age of approx. 7 years. Until then, the child is believed to be a being primarily produced and determined by causal processes that result from the moral quality of the child’s deeds (karma) in his/her previous lives. Thus, before one’s social birth, one is not considered a full and responsible member of one’s caste, and not expected to adequately understand and fulfill the duties of one’s caste. After one’s social birth, one becomes an identifiable person, assessable by the degree to which one fulfills one’s duties. The samskaras thus highlight and integrate two important aspects of the close connection of spirituality and “religion”—in the narrow etymological meaning of the word (see above): The samskaras convey an awareness that one is part of a larger cosmic context, but also a larger social context. At the same time, they tie one to rules, oblige one to study religious texts, and awaken a readiness for discipline, sacrifice, and a marked sense of duty. Over the life span, one’s duties include further demands for detachment, which must then, however, be dealt with independently: The Hindu stage model of human development, the ashrama dharma (cf. Chakkarath, 2005; Kakar, 1978/2012), which was originally intended to give men from the higher castes an orientation for structuring their lives

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(Doniger, 2009). It prescribes that after school and education (Stage 1), marriage (Stage 2), becoming a father and witnessing the independence of one’s children (Stage 3), men should break free from family obligations and devote themselves to the study of the Holy Scriptures in order to then develop the spiritual abilities needed to step out of the cycle of rebirths (samsara), i.e., to overcome suffering and to reach salvation (Stage 4). At Stage 4, the model gives time and room for the intensive study and practice of the physical, cognitive, and spiritual skills that are taught, for example, in the classical Hindu system of yoga and the Buddhist tradition of satipat..thana, both of which focus on meditation and mindfulness as a means of spiritual perfection. However, men are not the only ones who have to detach themselves from individual desires and preferences. Since most marriages in India are still arranged by the families, the opportunity to select one’s own dream partner is quite limited. Immediately after their marriage, the bride must leave her parental home and move in with her new husband’s family. The symbolic handing over of sons to the men in the upanayana ritual also requires a willingness to make sacrifices on the part of the mothers. Even if the manifold caste duties help promote the social orientation desired by the community, the readiness for social subordination has its basis primarily in the development of indifference and non-attachment, i.e., a spiritual attitude that is considered an important personality trait and marks the most important developmental task in most Indian theories of ideal human development. The childhood rituals of detachment, sacrifice, and unfolding of a spiritual consciousness, aim to promote at an early age those psychological capacities that make detachment more bearable in adulthood. Thus, they are a prerequisite for freeing oneself from cognitively induced entanglements that result in a stressful conception of the self. It is characteristic of many Indian conceptions that spirituality is both a mental attitude and a particular practice. As a practice, spirituality arises from the right mental attitude, but above all spirituality serves the perfection of an ethos. In the framework presented above, what is commonly understood as religion appears as a canon of rules, both as rules of correct social behavior and as instructions for the gradual release from social fetters. Accordingly, spirituality can be understood as the

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spirit necessary to grasp religion and its rules in such a way that it leads to liberation from suffering. Even if the Indian, especially the Hindu, world of gods is lavishly occupied and the worship of deities plays a considerable role in the everyday life of the believers, it is nevertheless not at the center of Indian conceptions of spirituality. Many Indian texts from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions indicate that the gods also thirst for salvation from samsara. Worshipping, as long as it does not result in obstructive attachment, is thus only one of the many means that can lead to religious commitment, self-discipline, and finally to spiritual selfliberation. The goal of salvation, however, should always be preceded by the systematic study of the self (svadhyaya), as it has been developed and refined over thousands of years in the most sophisticated introspective techniques of self-observation. Here, too, the indissoluble interplay of religious rules and spirituality becomes apparent. It should also become apparent that these Indian accounts about religion, the self, spirituality, psychological methods of self-control, and self-observation, which serve scientific as well as therapeutic purposes, can quite easily be appreciated as an Indian contribution to the psychology of religion.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to show the benefits of a culturally sensitive and culturally informed psychological perspective on spirituality, religion, and related issues. To this end, I have outlined how European colonialism, with the support of European scholars, has successfully sought to devalue non-Western contributions of high psychological and general scientific interest in order to assert and maintain the dominance of Western theories and concepts. These efforts can certainly be interpreted psychologically, namely, as ethnocentric and therefore as a more or less unreflected process of othering in order to enhance one’s own intellectual and cultural identity. By using the European interpretation of Indian intellectual contributions as an example, I suggested that this was not simply an unconscious ethnocentric attitude, but a targeted political strategy. This can be seen, for example, in the juxtaposition of ancient European and ancient Indian achievements, in which time

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and again double standards in the recognition of significance become apparent. It can also be seen in the psychological evaluation of the Indian mind and soul, which were portrayed as irrational, superstitious, chaotic, and instable and which could therefore not serve as a solid basis for an ordered and stable society. Giving an alternative portrayal from a cultural psychological perspective and with a focus on how the concepts and theories under discussion function in certain culture specific discourses, contexts, and action fields, I hope to have successfully shown that the Indian theories, devalued in the Europeans’ discourse, can hardly serve as evidence of a backward and chaotic mind. Rather they serve as a stimulating example of a systematized and methodically controlled form of spirituality that differs from religion in interesting ways, but is also fruitfully connected to it. I have not gone further into the psychological damage that colonialism and its intellectual accomplices inflicted on colonized subjects, although we may assume from several studies that it was considerable and that the consequences are palpable to this day (see Ward, 2013). The detrimental effects of ethnocentrism, colonialism, and culture-related hubris on psychology, the psychology of religion, and science in general, seem evident. There is much to see, much to experience, and much to learn outside of the West and outside of the Western mind. As any other science, the psychology of religion will never know how much it has to lose if it falls victim to the colonial spirit of the past.

References Ahonen, M. (2014). Mental disorders in ancient philosophy. London, UK: Springer. Bhawuk, D. (2011). Spirituality and Indian psychology: Lessons from the Bhagavad-Gita. New York, NY: Springer. Blackburn, C. (2000). Harvest of souls: The Jesuit missions and colonialism in North America 1632–1650. Montreal, QC, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Boesch, E. E. (1991). Symbolic action theory and cultural psychology. Berlin, Germany: Springer.

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11 Savoring in Bereavement: The Javanese Journey Through Death Risa Permanadeli and Louise Sundararajan

The indigenous notions of death and bereavement in Indonesia are a mixture of Hindu-Buddhist and Islamic beliefs. There is no exact date of the introduction of Islam to the archipelago of Indonesia. According to the official version, the sixteenth century marks the arrival of Islam to Indonesia, although the Javanese perhaps had an earlier encounter with this religion. The fall of the last Javanese empire, Majapahit, was associated with Islamic conquest in the fourteenth century. During the Dutch colonial period, the seventeenth-twentieth century, the influence of Islam was noted only when the local rulers—Javanese kingdoms in Central Java such as Diponegoro in Yogyakarta, or Kasunanan Surakarta,

R. Permanadeli (B) Pusat Kajian Representasi Sosial Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia e-mail: [email protected] L. Sundararajan Rochester, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_11

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and Mangkunegaran—used this religion as an instrument to fight against the Dutch. The insertion of Islam into the daily lives of people was not until after the 1965 coup d’Etat by the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) with a loss of approximately one million lives. In the cold war context, the State has associated communism with atheism, and since 1966 in order to curb the spread of communism, all Indonesian citizens were required to profess a religion. Among the five religions recognized by the State, Islam was easily embraced by the majority of the population, since it is the most “relaxed” (non-institutionalized as is Christianity), and it went well with Abangan—the local Javanese beliefs influenced strongly by the ancient Hindu and Buddhist traditions, as well documented by Geertz (1976). This chapter examines the indigenous notions of death and bereavement in popular Javanese practices amalgamated with Islam post-1965. In the following analysis, we cast the Javanese experiences of bereavement against the backdrop of the Western approach to grief, in particular “complicated grief ” (Shear, Frank, Houck, & Reynolds, 2005), which refers to prolonged, unabated grief with serious consequences, such as mental and physical morbidity, if not treated. We do not intend to compare cross-cultural grief experiences per se, so much as cultural assumptions about grief and bereavement. Cultural assumptions of the “norm” is particularly pronounced in constructs of the abnormal/pathological. Thus, we use the clinical notion of “complicated grief ” to highlight the Western assumptions about grief and bereavement, against the backdrop of which we introduce the everyday Javanese experiences of bereavement. For illustration, we use the personal experiences (in italics) of the first author as she recently went through the death of her father.

Religious Perspectives on Bereavement Treatment for “complicated grief ” (Shear et al., 2005) usually starts with sessions on “understanding grief.” This makes sense from the perspective of a secular cosmology, which considers emotion, body, and the brain as

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primary realities. By contrast, a religious cosmology may consider death as primary reality. To understand the Javanese experiences of bereavement we need to start with a proper understanding of death.

Death Is not the End of Life Conversations about death are not considered taboo for the Javanese, as death is not perceived to be the end of life, so much as the completion of a cycle. To the Javanese, life in this world is a transient stay to experience a mouthful of the water of life. As such, life is only part of a journey that extends beyond death—to the world of the ancestors. To the extent that life and death are two worlds that are inextricably connected, the place of ancestors—the central figures in Javanese world view—is essential for assuring this connection. The presence of ancestors.1 Since the aggravation of my father’s condition, particularly the last year when the family had sensed that death was near, we would usually spend the early evenings at his bed side—the time when he would usually undergo agitation. Even though agitation is part of the aging and dementia processes, we came to perceive it, through Javanese lens, as a brief period of time when a long-gone ancestor or family member would visit him. When a sense of calm was eventually restored in him, we would then ask who had paid him a visit (his late father, mother, grandfather, or grandmother, etc.) and the words they spoke to him. He would also usually tell us about the conversation they had. The Javanese perceive visits from long-gone ancestors in these hours as a beckoning towards the world of death. My father had mentioned several times how they beckoned him to come with them, but he refused. He often said that he was visited mostly by his mother and the uncles who spoiled him when he was a boy. During the conversations I had with him, I would often say to him: “find the path, pa! If you see a lit path and grandma is there, don’t hesitate to take the path. Our ancestors may have prepared that path for you to take!” It dawned on me that even though according to our Islamic beliefs the angel Gabriel is the figure who comes for you near your time of death, we would never link my father’s agitation with Gabriel.

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Each time my father recalled meeting his father, mother, or other late family members, one of us would immediately board a plane to Yogyakarta and carry out a visit to their graves—this is a ritual we had grown up with. As children, we used to visit the graves of family members who had passed away; and we knew well the names carved on each tombstone that we visited and the familial genealogy. Each time we encountered some problem (sickness, failure to secure a promotion, accident, financial struggle, lack of partner, etc.), we would link it to our absence from the graves. “Find your path pa!” Despite everyday talks about death being part of God’s mystery, in reality the Javanese believe that every one chooses his or her own time and way of dying. Concerning time, they believe that the time of birth and death of parents or intimate others—such as husband/wife, grandfather, grandmother, or other family members—is the ideal time to determine the time of one’s own death, based on the Javanese calendar. My uncle who memorized the days of birth and death in our family, began to warn us to always be alert and cautious on these days. When my father’s conditions deteriorated, my uncle insisted on flying to Yogyakarta in order to be able to visit the graves of my father’s family so that my father’s departure would be greeted well by all of the family members who had departed before him. As my uncle put it, “so that your father will be shown a good path and does not need to undergo the physical suffering he is currently experiencing.” Thus, besides determining the time of death, every person also has the right to determine his or her own way to die—being greeted by the ancestors, and so on. In his final years, my father would say that he longed for death to come for him. Nevertheless, at the same time we witnessed how his path to death remained closed despite his frequent hospital admissions. On various occasions, I would ask him whether there were any unfinished matters that he felt he still needed to attend to and whether these matters held him back from journeying peacefully toward death. Personally, I never use the verb “to die” in the conversations I had with my father about death. I would use the metaphor “path” or “journey” when talking about death with him. When he became anxious and disturbed in the aging process, which is quite common among the elderly, I would talk to him about the ways he could find his path. I also emphasized that he was the only person who knew the direction of the path he must take, as well as how the

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journey must be done. “Find your path pa!” was the sentence that I repeatedly stated for the last few years. Somehow despite the overall aging process and his dementia, my father understood the purpose of this metaphor, and he would usually show a calmness with less anxiety and apprehension. This also explains why we did not perceive the anxiety my father experienced in the aging process as a physical problem which could be resolved by sedatives.

A Good Death A story of the complete cycle of life for a Javanese is incomplete without the myth of an ideal way of dying. For example, death always comes at a good time, and it is not accompanied by any suffering, the person dying does not become a burden for anyone, the last breath is taken peacefully as if falling into a deep eternal sleep, the face is clean and glowing, a smile is left on the face, and so on. It is said that in order to achieve that kind of death, it is important to be able to sincerely receive or give anything in life with no strings attached, sincerely being able to surrender to whatever will come in life, and not to tie one’s self to worldly things including feelings or fleeting emotions (anger, hatred, disappointment, love, as well as expectations, ambitions and desires). This constitutes a good departure. There is a way to attain a good departure. This is the idea we have been brought up with since we were very young. My grandparents, and the uncle of my father, all of whom faced death this way, and we had automatically expected our father to take the same path. This is why in the many conversations we had about death, we also told him to be sincere, free from pretense, and especially to detach himself from worldly things. The same exhortations were given by his friends and relatives who visited him before he died. The same was also expected of us, his family, because only through being sincere and not holding back our father from death, would he be shown a better path toward the ideal death. Thus both the person facing death and the entire family who survive him must be able to detach themselves from the ownership bonds and surrender to death. In effect, we were trying to remove worldly ties and practice the most basic Javanese cultural practice– emptiness.

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Emptiness: The Journey of Letting Go To reach the goal of a good death, emptiness is indispensable. This cardinal Hindu-Buddhist belief in detachment constitutes a spiritual journey. More specifically, emptiness has to do with letting go of what holds one back. This entails patience, sincerity, and the discipline to empty oneself. More specifically, emptiness in this vein consists of detaching one’s self from the burden of emotions such as anger, disappointment, desire, and in particular guilt. In order to help the dying person gain the freedom to move forward, forgiveness plays an important role. Close to the time of my father’s departure at the hospital, a ritual was carried out by the family, the purpose of which was to ask for forgiveness on behalf of the dying from family members, for any actions or mistakes that the former might have made, regardless of the magnitude of offense. In the second week when my father’s condition failed to improve, my uncle and aunt both asked us—my mother, me and my siblings, individually or collectively—to tell our father that we had forgiven him for any actions that might hold him back from emptying out his feelings, and at the same time we had to state that no grievances were left because we had forgiven all actions which might have once made us feel burdened (with negative emotions). One evening, when there was only my mother and I in the room, I asked my mother to come closer to my father’s bedside. We asked for his forgiveness and at the same time we expressed our forgiveness. I emphasized that there was no need for him to think about the life that he will leave behind because I will take care of my mother, my brother and sister. Few days later my father passed away, and I was the only one to witness his final breath in my arms. There were no wailings or grief. We were only saddened by the fact that my father had departed without the company of his entire family. The final moment. During the two weeks my father was treated in the ICU, I would always sing to him a classic childhood Javanese song, even though the other relatives and close friends who visited him would pray and recite the Al-Qur’an Koran. When his time eventually came, as he closed his eyes in my arms, I continued to sing the same song to him. He left no message. He was perhaps too weak to do so. Nonetheless, silence conveyed his

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last message. I had the responsibility to protect the family that he left behind and to continue in his footsteps. Every time a guest came and asked about my father’s final moment, I would tell them the story of Ilir-ilir, the classic Javanese song which I sang to accompany my father’s departure. They would listen to my story, and pronounce that my father’s death was perfect (Husnul Khotimah) and that I have been blessed as I accompanied him on this journey. Husnul Khotimah is an Islamic term for the perfect death—a good end to face and be accepted by God via chanting the Shahada (repenting and asserting that there is only one God and acknowledging His greatness). In the Islamic doctrine, a good end can be attained by whispering the Shahada to the ear of a dying person. I did not whisper the Shahada to my father’s ear. Nevertheless, he closed his eyes peacefully, so I let go of him without shedding a tear. The notion of reincarnation, which loomed large in Geertz’s ( 1973, 1976) research, has disappeared. With its roots in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition, reincarnation was replaced by the heaven-and -hell narrative of Husnul Khotimah (the perfect death). What is interesting is that by using the Javanese chants to accompany my father’s departure, I had overlooked the Islamic requirement for a perfect death by reading the Shahada. This oversight not only comforts those who are in sorrow, but also shows that death continues to be seen as something positive in life, or as a journey to attain the Javanese ideal.

Life in the Aftermath of Death The morning my father departed, I sent a message to all my friends from my mobile phone using WhatsApp (WA): “My father passed away this morning. Kindly pray for his departed soul.” Shortly after, I received condolences using the word ikhlas, for instance,“Please accept our condolences. May his departed soul rest in God’s grace and the family left behind be ikhlas.” Reformulating Geertz’s ( 1976, p. 70) definition of Iklas, I define the term as “emptying the emotions of psychological pain at the departure of the deceased, and bringing it into true detachments, and readiness to let go.” A number of close Javanese friends sent me a simpler Javanese formula with the following message: “My condolence. May his path be well lit.”

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Slametan (Rituals) The social system in Java hinges on the symbolic exchange that is rooted in the principle that life in this world is a matter of goodness, and for this reason we are required to bring in tune all aspects of life to realize this goodness. Slametan is an expression of the willingness of everyone to realize this goodness. The slamet in its literal sense means a situation in complete harmony. The Javanese carry out slametan as an expression of gratitude for the lives that they have lived by the grace of God and the universe. They conduct slametan after harvest, at the start of the planting season, on wedding or birth of a child; when a person recovers from a sickness, passes an examination, secures a promotion, prepares a pilgrimage, and so on. Slametan on the occasion of a person’s death are mainly held on the first, third, and seventh day after death. They are then continued after the 40th day, the 100th, one year, two years, and finally the 1000th day. From the first to the 15th day, guests continue to come by and convey their condolences. A number of my father’s old friends who lived in Yogyakarta and Semarang even made time to fly to Jakarta for this purpose. Until the seventh day, we kept the tent set-up in the front yard and we never closed the front gate since friends, close friends, acquaintances, and relatives would come by now and then. We also visited my father’s grave every day and prayed for him. We wouldn’t always scatter flowers after praying, but we talked and shared stories with him as if he was simply lying there asleep in the ground. In general, there wasn’t any sorrow when we visited his grave or our own or together. My sister would always take selfie photographs with her children or with my mother and I. We would then see the photograph on her Whatsapp profile picture on the same day.

Telling Stories A topic that was repeatedly brought up every time we recalled the funeral was the story about how the rain stopped when we arrived at the cemetery, and resumed after the burial. Rain is believed to be one of the signs of a good death. In Java, when one’s departure is accompanied by rain it is a

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sign that the universe has blessed the journey of the deceased who has just returned home to the universe. Everyone who heard the story about the rain would then say that my father had been welcomed without specifying who had welcomed him. An elderly lady who was close to the family proclaimed that my father’s journey to the hereafter would be cool and chill because of the rain, and therefore he would not feel the heat of the flames of hell. Other topics that came up often included the manner in which my father faced death, who was the person beside him when he took his last breath, and the message he left at the end of his life. Thinking and talking about the deceased is referred to by Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Zhang, and Noll (2005) as grief processing. The authors found that in both US and Chinese samples, “grief processing at 4months postloss was a significant positive predictor of continued grief processing at 18-months postloss” (p. 95). This is not necessarily a good thing, because grief work is basically a ruminative process, according to Bonanno et al. (2005). However, grief processing predicted poor longterm adjustment for the U.S., but not for the Chinese participants. The Javanese vignettes we have seen suggest one possible explanation for this cultural difference in outcomes of rumination in grief processing between Westerners and Asians, namely, that whereas, rumination is not beneficial at the individual level, collective rumination about the deceased can be beneficial, as it replaces feelings of loneliness and loss with an ever-expanding circle of solidarity with family, friends, and acquaintances.

Emotional Refinement Managing painful emotions constitutes one major component of grief therapy in the West (Shear et al., 2005). Painful emotions do not loom large in the normal Javanese bereavement. Over all, emotional expressions remain the same as documented by Geertz (1973, 1976)—no hysterical expression of sadness (no wailing or grieving) but connectedness or solidarity through rituals, which are neither joyous celebrations, nor orgies of sadness. What looms large instead is yearning for the

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deceased. The calm emotional tenor associated with the Javanese practices of bereavement is understandable from the perspective of emotional refinement (Frijda & Sundararajan, 2007), which posits that all experiences, including negative ones, can be savored, if one knows how to properly cultivate one’s emotions. In the Javanese tradition, emotions are refined through the life-long practices of emptiness, which give the dead as well as the living the freedom to move forward. After all this emptying and refinement of emotions, what is left is the yearning for the deceased. In the West, yearning for the deceased can spell trouble. According to Shear et al. (2005), interest in memories of the deceased, yearning and longing for the person who died, and pleasurable reveries are some of the symptoms of complicated grief. Furthermore, this lingering yearning can be an addiction. A study of bereaved women by O’Connor, Wellisch, Stanton, Eisenberger, and Lieberman (2008) showed that, whereas, pain-related neural activity in response to reminders of the deceased was found in both those with and without the diagnosis of complicated grief (CG), only those with CG showed reward-related activity in the nucleus accumbens (NA). This NA cluster was positively correlated with self-reported yearning, but not with time since death, or positive/negative affect. From this perspective, yearning, longing, and nostalgia for the deceased are symptoms particularly difficult to treat, due to their addictive (rewarding) nature. Not surprisingly, yearning for the deceased is targeted for treatment of complicated grief (Shear et al., 2005). Treatment includes learning to live with reminders of the dead, and remembering the person who died. All these are bases covered in the Javanese practices below, except that the Javanese take a different approach to the issue concerning addiction to continued emotional bonds with the deceased. In the West, such addiction to the dead do not bode well, especially for those with the diagnosis of complicated grief. As O’Connor et al. (2008) point out, to the extent that reminders of the deceased still activate neural reward activity in those with complicated grief, yearning may interfere with one’s adapting to the loss in the present. By contrast, the Javanese approach is to savor this yearning. Put another way, if yearning for the deceased is an addiction, go for it.

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Savoring the Yearning Savoring, which literally means “to taste” in Chinese, entails a slow, sustained processing to better relish/appreciate and discriminate the ongoing experience in its multifarious nuances (Frijda & Sundararajan, 2007; Sundararajan, 2015). This type of processing capitalizes on sensory—especially olfactory—experiences and memory retrieval, which is especially suitable for processing yearning for someone who is no more, as evidenced by feelings of longing and nostalgia. Indeed, savoring possibly potentiates the many benefits of nostalgia, as documented in psychological literature (Zhou, Sedikides, Wildschut, & Gao, 2008). In the following we present some Javanese ways to savor yearning through reminders of the dead.

Living with Reminders of the Dead We believe in the inextricable relationship between real -life and the world of death. In Islamic teachings, it is thought that the children of the deceased play an important role in helping the soul depart. For this reason, every evening until the 40th day we would pray and recite Surah Yaseen in my father’s bedroom. Although I did not participate in the recital, I would pray and continue the conversation with him in Javanese. We believe that the departed soul still dwells with the family until the 40th day. Just as when my grandparents or our close relatives died, we would prepare small dishes of food, drinks, usually a cup of coffee, and cigarettes, which were placed on a tray and put in my father’s room for a night. Sometimes, I would add a flower that I had taken from our front yard to complete the offering. When we missed him, we would prepare his favorite food and imagine him enjoying it with us like he would in the old days. So every time we placed the offering, we would talk to him. We would observe this ritual closely, imagining that he had truly enjoyed it (see Figs. 11.1 and 11.2). Ten days after his departure, my father’s presence was marked by a strong fragrant scent –a concoction of roses, jasmines, and pandan leaves, which we would usually scatter on his grave during our visit –in my parents’ bedroom. My mother told us that this usually happened every morning after she woke

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Fig. 11.1 We completed the offering with a cup of hot coffee and cigarette, a glutinous rice snack and flowers Source Courtesy of the first author

up and later on in the late afternoon. I almost didn’t believe her, so I went to the bedroom where I also caught the scent. My siblings and nephews experienced the same thing. So we would spontaneously greet him. This meant that the fragrant scent was not my mother’s subjective illusion. The scent came in several times in different places and was experienced by every person who stayed in my parent’s home. Those of my friends who had lost someone to death also confirmed the belief that when a person dies he or she will remain in the house for 40 days. A Catholic colleague of mine with Chinese descent who teaches postmodern theories also said the same when I shared my yearning for my father. The masseuse who regularly came to our house even reminded us to watch our behavior and words for 40 days because my father could hear and see everything that went on in the house. She mentioned that it was only our good words and deeds that could make him leave the house peacefully. It was also believed that my father would come and join us for meals. Like all families in Indonesia, we cook rice using a rice cooker equipped with a heater to make sure that the rice is always warm and doesn’t get spoiled. The Javanese believe that when a deceased person joins a meal, this will cause the rice to be spoiled. For three Wednesdays in a row, during these 40 days, the rice in our rice cooker was spoiled. The two maids who worked in the kitchen showed the spoiled rice to me while joyfully exclaiming that my father had

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Fig. 11.2 The offering that we prepared for his birthday, 2 months after his death, with the traditional yellow rice, and his favorites dishes Source Courtesy of the first author

joined us for meals. Then one of the maids decided to set aside a small plate of rice (basically as offering) near the rice cooker. Since then the rice was never spoiled again. The belief that the presence of the deceased remains 40 days after the final departure also meets our need to relish memories and yearnings for my father. Nearing the 40-days-ceremony, my mother wanted to replace the sofa cover on which my father used to sit and watch TV for the past two years. All of the children disagreed and we insisted on keeping the sofa in the same place without considering how my mother also had the need to relish and take

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care of the memories of his presence in a different way. The sofa remained in its place, and we light-heartedly fought to sit on it in order to smell the odor left by my father which by then grew musty. In that sense, his presence was not solely caused by a belief that we held on to in order to perform the various rituals. My father’s presence was felt because we kept the memories of his presence through our yearnings, and through our endeavor to keep in place the objects that were part of his everyday life.

Bereavement: What Can We Learn from the Javanese Experience? By way of conclusion, we reflect on the Javanese experiences through the theoretical lens of strong-ties versus weak-ties rationalities (Sundararajan, 2015). Mark Granovetter (1973) was the first to call attention to the difference between strong-ties and weak-ties networking strategies—the former networks with those near and dear, whereas the latter with unrelated strangers. An implicit assumption behind the network theory is the element of personal choice in relationships, later known as relational mobility (Oishi, Schug, Yuki, & Axt, 2015). Strong-ties networking is privileged in societies where there is little choice in relationships, due to low residential and relational mobility (Oishi et al., 2015), for instance, in farming communities. By contrast, weak-ties networking is the preferred strategy of traders who travel a lot and make deals with unrelated strangers for a living.

Ties at the Exit In death, our relationship tie to the deceased finds itself at the exit, which poses different questions for different cultures. For the weak-ties society, the question is how to exit rationally, whereas for the strong-ties society, how to continue the connection beyond the grave. To exit rationally, the bereaved needs to move on by adapting to the loss in the present

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(O’Connor et al., 2008), which means (a) accepting the finality of death, and (b) overcoming attachment to what is no more in order to move on. To have continued connectedness beyond the grave, on the other hand, entails usually a communal project of myths and rituals—no individual endeavor alone can make this a reality. Consistent with this analysis is the observation of Bonanno et al. (2005) concerning the mourning rituals of the Chinese, another strong-ties society: … rather than prepare the bereaved to accept the finality of the loss, Chinese mourning rituals symbolize and reinforce cultural connectedness and the continuation of the relationship with the deceased. (p. 88)

Brain Event vs Communal Event Bonanno et al. (2005) made another relevant observation on grief processing in China (PRC): … grief processing in the PRC might not be experienced as an individual and spiritual endeavor but rather as a comforting and structured communal ritual that reaffirms cultural identity. (p. 96)

Cast in our framework, this suggests that whereas in the weak-ties society (the West), grief is a brain event, in strong-ties society, such as Java and China, it is a communal event. For illustration, consider a treatment modality for complicated grief in the West: An imaginal conversation with the deceased, in which “the patient was asked to imagine [with eyes closed] that he/she could speak to the person who died and that the person could hear and respond” (Shear et al., 2005, p. 2604). As we have seen, talking to the dead is commonly practiced among the Javanese, except that no one has their eyes closed—it is not something inside one’s head; nor is imagination needed. Quite on the contrary, the bereaved needs to keep her eyes and ears open to the feedback of those around her, who also shared her experience of communication with the dead.

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Self-Focus Versus Other-Focus Another cross-cultural difference in grief processing is self-focus versus other-focus, a difference that falls along the divide between individualism (weak-ties) and collectivism (strong-ties). A case in point is the task to move on—which is the most important task of the bereaved in the West. By contrast, among the Javanese, moving on is the primary task of the person facing death, who, through the practices of emptiness, gains the emotional freedom to embark on the journey to join the ancestors. And, as we have seen, it is the responsibility of the family to accompany the dying each step of the way on the journey of letting go. This analysis is consistent with Bonanno et al.’s (2005) cross-cultural observation: Whereas grief work among westerners is typically described as a means of accepting the finality of the death and overcoming the emotional pain of attachment, Chinese mourning practices are aimed more at honoring and comforting the deceased and promoting his or her transition to the spirit realm. (p. 88)

Coda After all is said and done, we are confronted with the naked truth about our relationship ties in death. We have examined how in response to the question of exit at death different societies come up with different myths. In strong-ties societies, the myth of continued connectedness beyond the grave takes the effort of a whole community to be maintained. In weakties societies, there is more freedom to exit relationships. The freedom of the individual to enter as well as to end relationships is well articulated by the notion of relational mobility: Relational mobility is a socioecological variable that represents how much freedom and opportunity a society affords individuals to choose and dispose of interpersonal relationships based on personal preference. (Thomson et al., 2018, p. 7521)

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However, the promise of exiting relationships rationally and at will does not always deliver in bereavement. It takes the suffering of those diagnosed with complicated grief to expose this rationality as a myth.

Note 1. The italicized portions above are the narrative of the first author’s experience of her father’s death.

References Bonanno, G. A., Papa, A., Lalande, K., Zhang, N., & Noll, J. G. (2005). Grief processing and deliberate grief avoidance: A prospective comparison of bereaved spouses and parents in the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 73, 86–98. Frijda, N. H., & Sundararajan, L. (2007). Emotion refinement: A theory inspired by Chinese poetics. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2, 227–241. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of culture. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1976). The religion of Java. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–1380. O’Connor, M.-F., Wellisch, D. K., Stanton, A. L., Eisenberger, N. I., & Lieberman, M. D. (2008). Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain’s reward center. NeuroImage, 42, 969–972. Oishi, S., Schug, J., Yuki, M., & Axt, J. (2015). The psychology of residential and relational mobilities. In M. J. Gelfand, C.-Y. Chiu, & Y.-Y. Hong (Eds.), Advances in culture and psychology (pp. 221–272). Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology, Volume 5. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Shear, K., Frank, E., Houck, P. R., & Reynolds, C. F. (2005). Treatment of complicated grief: A randomized controlled trial. JAMA, 293, 2601–2608. Sundararajan, L. (2015). Understanding emotion in Chinese culture: Thinking through psychology. New York, NY: Springer.

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Thomson, R., Yuki, M., Talhelm, T., Schug, K., Kito, M., Ayanian, A. H., … Ferreira, C. M. (2018). Relational mobility predicts social behaviors in 39 countries and is tied to historical farming and threat. PNAS, 115, 7521– 7526. Zhou, X., Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., & Gao, D.-G. (2008). Counteracting loneliness: On the restorative function of nostalgia. Psychological Science, 19, 1023–1029.

12 Anger Toward God Among Chinese Christians Yin Yang and Alvin Dueck

Religious beliefs are often experienced as comforting, but they can also bring strains or struggles. When people experience negative life events and attribute them to God, they may experience various negative feelings that challenge not only their own inner peace and psychological well-being, but also their relationship with God. Anger toward God is a common form of spiritual struggle in reported in Western Christian (Exline & Rose, 2013). More than 50% of the American Christian population reported that they have sometimes felt anger toward God (Exline & Rose, 2013, p. 317). Western researchers have found that experiencing anger toward God has a negative impact on one’s health and well-being. Although not all Y. Yang (B) School of Psychology, Beijing Sport University, Beijing, China e-mail: [email protected] A. Dueck School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Dueck (ed.), Indigenous Psychology of Spirituality, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50869-2_12

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negative feelings toward God were experienced as harmful but prolonged and frequent experience of anger toward God was associated with poor mental health (e.g., Ellison & Lee, 2010; Exline, Prince-Paul, Root, & Peereboom, 2013) and emotional distress (e.g., Exline, Park, Smyth, & Carey, 2011), including low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, trait anger, as well as insecure attachment style (e.g., Exline & Martin, 2005; Exline, Yali, & Lobel, 1999; Hall & Edwards, 2002; Pargament et al., 1998; Strelan, Acton, & Patrick, 2009). Anger toward God may also impact spirituality. People in the West were most likely to experience anger toward God when they themselves or their loved ones were suffering or in stressful situations. These struggles could result in doubts about the kindness, the power of God, or even the existence of God, thus impacting their spirituality negatively. For example, Kampani and Exline (2002) found that people who had been believers but then deconverted reported more negative feelings toward God. Considering the dramatic effect anger toward God can have on individuals, it is important to understand the causes and consequences of anger toward God. Western studies indicate that the variables which predict anger at God also predict interpersonal anger (Exline et al., 2011; Grubbs, Exline, & Campbell, 2013). For example, Exline and colleagues (2011) found that people were more likely to be angry when they viewed God as being clearly responsible for causing severe harm, when they saw God’s intentions as cruel rather than kind and loving, and when they did not have a close relationship with God. However, anger toward God may vary in the description, and the meaning, of the experience in Chinese culture. From a cultural perspective, we propose that emotion, such as anger, does not merely represent one’s own response to an external stimulus, but also carries cultural meanings about what one could, or should, feel angry about, and the “right” way to feel or express it in the context of a specific community. Emotion may differ in meaning in different cultural contexts. We find theoretical support from Sundararajan’s (2015) theory, in which culture shapes emotion by forming and reinforcing certain cognitive styles of people in different cultures. From her perspective, people in different culture could experience similar emotion, such as love,

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happiness, freedom, etc., however, the meaning of seemingly identical emotions vary and are heavily shaped by its cultural context. For example, emotional freedom in the Chinese culture did not mean to step out of an emotion, but to approach emotion and eliminate ensnarement at the same time. And this is achieved not through reason and reappraisal that requires high-cognitive-control, but through a low-cognitive-control path which facilitates awareness and savoring. These arguments provided fundamental support for the impact of culture on emotional experience. Empirically there are few studies focusing on the cultural meaning of anger. However, we could expect that, if the experience of anger has unique culturally shaped meanings, cultural differences on how people respond to or how they express and cope with anger should then be observed. Although no study has examined the most adaptive way to cope with anger toward God, Exline, Kaplan, and Grubbs (2012) did find that, in their Western sample, assertive protest (questioning and complaint) was considered most acceptable when compared to other negative feelings or protesting by leaving. Appropriate ways of responding to anger generally and to God in particular may vary across cultures. Novin, Rieffe, Banerjee, Miers, and Cheung (2011) found that while Dutch children preferred direct confrontation to aggressors after an anger-provoking situation, Hong Kong Chinese children demonstrated more tolerant responses by simply accepting the disadvantaged position (e.g., “I know you’re just careless. I’ll forgive you” or “It doesn’t matter, I will go home and change”). Park and his colleagues (2013) found an interaction between culture and social status regarding anger expression. For American participants, lower social status was associated with more anger expression while for the Japanese individuals with higher social status tended to express more anger. These studies indicated not just a cultural difference on anger expression and coping, but also the underlying concerns—anger has less to do with personal frustrations and violations in the Chinese (and Japanese) culture but served more to maintain interpersonal harmony and social order. Given this general finding, we expect a cultural difference in the experience of anger toward God as well. In the hope of providing some preliminary support for the role of culture on one’s experience of anger

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toward God, the present study attempts to explore anger toward God and the indigenous meaning it might have among a sample of Chinese Christians (Study 1). In particular, we focus on how the emphasis on relation in Chinese culture might shape individuals’ understanding and interpretation of their experience of anger toward God. Besides, we attempted to develop a measure of anger toward God based on this Chinese understanding of anger, and explore its association with perceived God–human relationship and with subjective well-being (Study 2). We hypothesized that the relational understanding of anger would be less destructive to God–human relationship and personal well-being.

Study 1 Anger Toward God Among Chinese Christians: A Qualitative Study Participants The participants were 13 Chinese Christians who at some point reported feeling discontentment, anger, resentment, or disappointment toward God. Based on our pilot survey, these feelings were the most probably ones that they would feel when dissatisfied with God. One participant was excluded because his anger and discontentment were not toward God, but to his fellow church members. The remaining participants consisted of 4 males and 8 females, aged from 26 to 47. All participants had converted for at least 5 years.

Instruments We developed a semi-structured interview protocol to explore interviewees’ experience of anger toward God. The purpose of this interview was to explore individuals’ experience of anger (and other negative feelings, e.g., frustration, dissatisfaction, feeling of hurt etc.) toward God, including both emotion and cognition (what this experience means to the individual, how would he/she interprets his/her experience). Interviews would also explore how the individual would respond, or deal with,

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their anger (or other negative feelings) toward God, e.g., whether to be assertive and express their anger directly was appropriate and preferred by the individual; and what is the purpose/function of his/her expression, what he/she hopes to obtain through expressing in a certain way.

Results and Analysis Results indicated that people became angry with God for a variety of reasons. Negative life events (e.g., financial difficulties, disease of family, immigration, etc.) and personal sufferings (e.g., fear of death, bad original family parenting) could all lead to anger toward God. Interviewees reported a range of anger-cluster feelings, from mild discontentment, to anger and resentment, even hatred. In addition to emotion words, interviewees also used a series of behaviors to show their anger. For instance, most interviewees would complain that God did not protect or care for them. Some of them even abreact through risky or self-injurious behaviors (e.g., driving fast or hurting oneself ), and through quarreling and swearing. However, these descriptions of emotions do not completely reflect the experience of anger toward God among our interviewees. Although all interviewees experienced discontentment with God to some extent, their actual experience varied dramatically, and it could not be explained merely by the intensity of their emotion. We will first take two cases to illustrate this difference, and then follow up on the two types of “anger” derived from Chinese literature that may help us understand the various meanings that anger could carry. The first case is Z (ID No. 6), who became angry when she saw poor people begging on the street. She could not understand why her righteous God would unfairly make some people very rich and others very poor. Sometimes she also felt disappointment with God and doubted God’s righteousness and kindness. However, the main emotion was anger—she would describe her experience as “pure anger and discontentment.” The second case is J (ID No. 3), whose parents divorced when she was a child and was raised by her grandma. She converted when she

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was in middle school, and then forced to move to the United States and live with her mother. After J arrived in the United States, she had to face challenges on language and adjustment, while Her mother was busy with her own business and her romantic relationship with an American. She complained to God about why he let her come and suffer. She was also angry at God, but in a very different way—she described that she would stand on the beach at night, and shout at God loudly, even swear. She viewed God as a real person who knew her well and cared for her. She did not use many emotional terms to describe her feelings, but her voice, her whole body was full of anger, and sadness. Underlying her anger at God was a deep sense of sadness, helplessness, and desperation, and by expressing anger, she could feel her eagerness for help and salvation. These two cases describe two types of “anger” we observed in our interviews: one characterized by “pure anger” and the other a hybrid characterized by a combination of anger and sadness/desperation. While the former was more a response to pain or violation, the latter had more to do with relationships. To better differentiate these two types of anger, I will expand on these two Chinese concepts related to anger, which called Nu (“怒”) anger and Yuan (“怨”) resentment (Ing, 2016). When we look at Confucius’ teaching and classic literature, we find these indigenous understandings of anger. According to the secondcentury Chinese dictionary Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字, anger, which was often translated as “怒” (Nu), meant 恚 (Hui), i.e., “indignant” or “bearing a grudge” (Xu, 2004). However, there is another Chinese character that also meant 恚 (Hui), which is called 怨 (Yuan, “resentment”). By analyzing the meaning of Yuan in early Confucian thoughts, Ing (2016) proposed that Yuan represents a feeling of frustration or anger that occurs when those close to us withhold their care or when they otherwise injure us. On the other hand, people use Yuan to express their requirements of care from significant others, and their vulnerability to neglect. While Nu (anger) was more about personal response to violation of personal rights or cultural conventions, Yuan (resentment) was often involved in the closest and most important relationship for nurturing, e.g., the parent–child relationship. Yuan could be differentiated from conventional anger by two characteristics: its relational nature and its experiential complexity. Yuan always

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comes out of intimate relationships. People only express Yuan to close others (e.g., familial relationship; Ing, 2016). In other words, expression of Yuan is a manifestation of closeness. It is not rare for Chinese to use anger to construct and confirm close relationships. In Sundararajan’s reflections on emotions in Chinese culture (2015), she proposes an indigenous emotion which is called sajiao (撒娇). Sajiao means “adorably petulant” and is often observed among small children and young women. In some cases, sajiao could contain a component of “pretending to be angry or displeased,” but it served to construct a nurturing relation (Sundararajan, 2015, p. 125). When a child is sajiao to his/her father, it will not be considered as a violation of authority, but a behavior of closeness and a chance for the father to show his kindness to his child. In the same way, Yuan can often (perhaps even only) be observed in the closest relationships, and it is considered as a sign of closeness. For instance, an interviewee (ID No. 2) from northeast of China said, “I just realized when I am talking to you, that the relationship between God and me is really like that between parent and child. I had this feeling, maybe other people could not understand, but people like me who live in the northeast of China, we quarrel with you because our relationship is close. That is what happened in my family, and I am this kind of person.” In fact, many interviewees, coming from places all over China, reported similar message—that their Yuan was proof that they were close to God. However, one cannot assume that a nurturing relationship can be consolidated merely by anger. We would propose that Yuan should be understood as a nuanced emotion, composed by at least two emotional components—anger and sorrow. One would show his/her pain, not just anger, in order to evoke others’ feeling of compassion, and motive to protect and care and to show how painful and miserable one is. This is why Yuan should consist of feelings of sorrow, sadness, or desperation. Furthermore, since sorrow itself is sometimes salient enough to catch the caregiver’s attention, the anger component may not be necessary in the expression of Yuan. For instance, we interviewed a mother (ID No. 4) whose son had made some bad friends. She was very worried and upset, and she would complain to God why he did not protect her son from

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those bad friends, and why he left her in this helpless situation. Later her son was injured and could not walk for a long time, she then complained to God why he let this happen to her son. However, from what she said her feeling was mainly being upset and anxious, and there was no anger. It should be pointed out that it is not accurate to say that she suppressed her feeling of anger. In fact, by taking her complaining and expression of sorrow as proto-narratives, which are pregnant with emotional meaning, and savoring them, one would easily empathize with her feeling of resentment and grief, which made explicit expression of anger unnecessary and ineffective. Thus, by going back to early Confucius’s thought of Yuan (resentment), we introduced two types of emotion in the anger-cluster—Nu anger and Yuan anger. Now we will use this differentiation to analyze the experience of anger toward God among our interviewees and try to understand the meaning of their emotions from the perspective of Yuan. According to the two characteristics proposed above, we divided the interviewees into two groups, in which the dominant emotional experience was Nu or Yuan (see details in Table 12.1). Five interviewees reported that their dominant feeling was Nu anger and/or discontentment and were assigned to the anger group; 7 interviewees who reported both feelings of anger and sadness/desperation were assigned to Yuan (resentment) group. Differences on dominant attributions were found between the two groups. For the Nu anger group, labeling their own experience as unfair was the most salient cognition, while for Yuan resentment group, the concerns were less about fairness or righteousness, but more about whether God’s protection or care for me. Note that the anger group also mentioned attributions regarding protection and compassion, but these attributions were not as frequently mentioned as those in the Yuan group. Besides, most interviewees mentioned “管” (Guan, which means to love and to discipline), which is a verb used to specifically describe what parents do to their children. Guan in Chinese can mean many things: it overlaps with taking care, protecting, educating, as well as disciplining. Guan could be perceived as unpleasant sometimes, but in general it is considered a sign of love and care. One of our interviewees (ID No.

2, 6, 9, 10, 12

1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 13

Nu/Anger

Yuan/Resentment

Desperation Disappointment Helplessness Upset Worry

Accompanying emotions 2/3

2/5

Unprotected Inconsiderate

Gender (M/F)

Unfair

Accompanying attributions

26–47

29–41

Age

Mi1 B4 M1 D1

B1 M4

Educ. level

Note For education level, Mi = middle school, B = bachelor, M = master, D = doctor

Interviewee ID

6–10:3 10+:2

6–10:1 10+:6

2:5

Years converted

2:3

Region R:U

Interviewee category based on emotion experience and demographic characteristics

Emotion category

Table 12.1

3 financial 1 parenting 1 family 6 family 1 death

Type of events

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1) quoted a verse in the Bible, which says “Because the Lord disciplines [Guan] the one he loves” (Hebrews 12:6 NIV), to show how she experience God’s love through the process that God Guan (disciplined) her. Though it is not the focus of our study, the use of Guan when describing their relationship with God supported the idea that when Chinese Christians accepted God as their heavenly father, they view their relationship with Father God based on the Chinese parent–child relational framework. Anger toward God is often considered as a negative emotion, as morally unacceptable, and as destructive to God–human relationship (Exline, 2013; Exline et al., 2012). However, if we view the experience of anger toward God from the perspective of Yuan, opposite conclusions may be obtained. First, the inclusion of sadness and sorrow neutralized the interpersonal threat that anger had, making the experience of Yuan less negative and destructive. Second, though like Western Christians, anger (and Yuan) toward God could be considered as morally wrong and unacceptable, this is more likely to be the case when God is viewed as an out-group, distant authority. However, if we take a look at the emotional interaction in the in-group members, emotions which contain anger (e.g., sajiao, and Yuan) are not forbidden, and could be easily observed between child and parent. Finally, while in the West a relationship can be determined by one’s emotion, this may not be the case in China, where relationship becomes the foundation of everything, and emotions have less relational impact. For instance, after living with and observing a village of Chinese peasants for 10 years, Potter (1988) claimed that Chinese could be quite expressive in a familiar group of people, and what was more interesting was that emotional expressions, on the one hand, were seldom forbidden, and, on the other hand, had little social and relational impact. For example, Potter recorded an incident in which explicit anger was expressed by a woman directly against government authority figures, but this expression of anger was regarded as “perfectly normal, and other villagers do not appear shocked or surprised… just as the villagers assume that their expressiveness will not be efficacious, they also assume that it will not be dangerous, in the sense of producing social consequences that will rebound against themselves… in practice, the Chinese are expressive

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entirely in their own terms, and do not share Western conventions about the connections between the sharing of feelings and relationship” (Potter, 1988, p. 190). Although this was a study conducted some 30 years ago and in a rural area of China, what we found in our interview was somewhat consistent with Potter’s claim. Some interviewees reported that anger (and Yuan) had nothing to do with their relationship with God. For instance, one interviewee (ID No. 2) told us how she felt abandoned by God and that God did not treat her well. However, she never denied that God was her father, it was only that he was not a good, caring father. And when J (ID No. 3) describes her interaction with God when she just arrived in America, she said “[I] got angry with God, and the next day I keep reading bible and praying… you felt that no matter how you swore him, he would never get angry, and he would never hurt me.” In her opinion, there were no consequences for being angry with God, because he was her father, and being angry at her father was legitimate for a daughter. This is consistent with Potter’s claim that the Chinese may not share Western conventions about the connections between feelings and relationship. In conclusion, we identified an indigenous type of anger, i.e., Yuan, among Chinese Christians’ experience of anger toward God, and found that Yuan was different from Nu by its relational nature and emotional complexity. Moreover, Yuan toward God was found to be less destructive to one’s relationship with God.

Study 2 Development of Anger Toward God Scale In Study 2, we developed a measure on Nu and Yuan toward God, and provided preliminary examination of its psychometric properties, as well as its correlations with measures on well-being and spirituality. We hypothesized that Nu toward God should be negatively correlated with psychological well-being and one’s perceived closeness with God, while Yuan would not. In addition, we hypothesized that more socially

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oriented individuals would be more likely to experience Yuan toward God, while more self-oriented ones Nu toward God.

Scale Development Initial items of Anger toward God Scale (AGS) came the interviews in Study 1. After discussion by three researchers in the project, fourteen items that were most relevant to experience of anger toward God were created to form the initial item pool of AGS. These items included emotional (e.g., I feel angry at God), cognitive (e.g., I feel that God does not care about me), as well as behavioral aspects (e.g., I complain to God) of both Nu and Yuan toward God. Each item was scored on an 11-point scale from 0 (not at all) to 10 (extremely).

Method Participants Participants were 253 male and 316 female Christians who reported to have converted to Christianity and had been baptized. Their age ranged from 18 to 70 years, with a mean age of 31.67 years (SD = 9.6 years). About 30.1% of the participants came from Shandong, 17.8% from Zhejiang, 12.1% from Beijing, 9.8% from Heilongjiang, 7.6% from Tianjin, 6.0% from Henan, and 16.6% from other provinces in China.

Measures Trait anger: Trait anger was measured using the trait anger subscale of the Chinese version of State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2). STAXI-2 was originally developed by Spielberger (1988). The trait anger subscale consisted of 10 items calling for ratings from 1 (never) to 4 (always). Chen (2012) revised the Chinese version of STAXI-2, in which the trait anger subscale consisted of 7 items, and Cronbach’s α was .81.

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Well-being: Index of well-being was used to measure individuals’ psychological well-being. This scale was developed by Campbell, Converse, and Rodgers (1976) and consisted of 9 items with a rating scale from 1 to 7. The Chinese version (Yao, He, & Shen, 1995) was revised and had good test-retest reliability (r = .849). Faith maturity: The short form of Faith Maturity Scale (FMS; Benson, Donahue, & Erickson, 1993) was used to measure level of religiosity. The 12-item scale used a 7-point Likert scale, and measured one’s love of God (Vertical subscale, 7 items) and love of neighbor (Horizontal subscale, 5 items). Zhan (2017) revised the Chinese version of FMS in a sample of 1659 Chinese adult Christians, which showed good internal consistencies (Cronbach’s α = .920 for the whole scale, and α = .909 and .820 for the vertical and horizontal subscales, respectively) and test-retest reliabilities (5-week r = .615 for the whole scale, and r = .665 and .700 for the vertical and horizontal subscales, respectively). Positive and negative attitudes toward God: Positive and negative attitudes toward God were measured using Attitudes Toward God Scale (ATGS-9; Wood, Exline, Yali, & Aten 2010), which included a 5-item positive scale and a 4-item anger scale. Each of the 9 items was scored on an 11-point scale from 0 (not at all) to 10 (extremely). We translated the items and used them as measure of positive and negative attitudes toward God. Closeness with God: We also created a single item measure closeness with God. People were asked to answer the question “How do you think about your relationship with God?” with an 11-point scale from 0 (no relation at all) to 10 (extremely close). Response to anger toward God: We created two items to measure how individuals would respond when they felt angry at God. The two questions were “I would suppress my anger/discontentment toward God” and “I wanted God to respond to me,” with an 11-point scale from 0 (no relation at all) to 10 (extremely close). Social orientation: Individuals’ tendency on self- and social orientation was measured using the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI; Cheung, Kwong, & Zhang, 2003) self vs social orientation subscale, which contained 10 yes-or-no items and had good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .70). We reversed the original scoring so

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that higher score indicated a higher tendency to be socially oriented (i.e., gets on well with others; feels comfortable in a group; willing to cooperate with others in activities) and lower score to be self-orientated (i.e., self-centered, independent, unwilling to join cooperative activities).

Procedure and Data Analysis All participants were able to complete the questionnaires online in 20– 30 minutes and received 60 RMB in compensation. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS22.0.

Results Item-Total Correlations and EFA Each item was correlated with the total score of 14 AGS items. All 14 items were highly correlated with total score, with the correlation coefficients ranged from .497 to .803, p < .001. Principal components factor analysis (PCA) was then performed to explore potential scale construct. The eigenvalue and scree plot suggested a two-factor model for the original 14-item scale, which explained 58.65% of the total variance. Since Nu and Yuan should be correlated, factors were extracted using Promax rotation. The Yuan subscale consisted of 8 items, and the Nu subscale 6 (see Table 12.2). Three items (item #1, #2 and #9) were found to have double loadings on both factor, however, since these items had high content validity, we decided to retain them.

Internal Consistency and Sex Difference The Yuan and Nu subscale of AGS had good Internal consistencies (Cronbach’s α = .864 and .796, respectively). Independent sample t-test revealed that male participants scored significantly higher on both scales than females (see Table 12.3).

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Table 12.2

Factor loading of the 2-factor model for the 14-item AGS (N = 569)

Items

Factors Yuan

13 I feel that God does not “Guan” (discipline and love) me 14 I would complain to God 10 I feel that God does not care for me 12 I feel that God is not considerate of me 11 I feel that it is God who let these bad things happen 8 I feel God is unfair/unjust 2 I feel disappointed with God 4 I feel discontent with God 6 I would curse God 5 I feel hatred to God 7 I want to stay away from God 3 I feel that God is unkind 9 I feel that God does not protect me 1 I feel angry at God

Nu

.929

−.120

.864 .784 .750 .594 .593 .577 .520 −.322 −.064 −.087 .176 .415 .422

−.206 −.029 .107 −.179 .272 .283 .375 1.028 .895 .700 .477 .453 .437

Note Extraction method = Principal component; Rotation = Promax with Kaiser normalization; Variance explained = 58.65%

Table 12.3 AGS

Internal consistency and sex difference on Yuan and Nu scales of

Cronbach’s α AGS .864 Yuan AGS .796 Nu

Mean (SD)

Male (N = 253)

Female (N = 314)

t

p

11.70(11.66)

13.94(12.68)

9.91(10.44)

4.153**