Abstract :
[en] ABSTRACT
Theories of religious conversion come under two paradigms: the classic/psychological and the contemporary/sociological (Granqvist & Kirkpatric, 2004). While the former sees conversion as a radical and sudden self-transformation, following an emotional turmoil, the latter sees it as a gradual and rational change in which the convert plays an active role. Varied ways of combining both paradigms have been proposed, but they apparently failed to provide really predictive models (Zinnbauer & Pargament, 1998). The work that we present here might be seen as another attempt to articulate the psychological and the sociological approaches of religious conversion. We compared ethnographic descriptions of two apparently very different “experiences of enchantment”: the learning of possession in an Afro-Brazilian cult and the enchanted encounter with Dolphins at sea. While the first one would fall into the social paradigm, the latter comes more under the sudden conversion paradigm. Our comparison aims to identify the common features in people’s experiences, but also in the technologies of enchantment themselves. By “technologies of enchantment”, we mean social and material environments that support “revelation”-like encounters with real or imagined intentional entities. By connecting individual minds, with their dispositions and expectations, and situations, with their specific material and relational features, technologies of enchantment create a “promise of surprise” (Belin 2002), as enchantment is neither automatic, nor purely contingent. If models of conversion cannot be fully predictive, looking at technologies of enchantment allows to identify the required (but not determining) conditions of both psychological and sociological models of conversion.
References
Belin E. 2002. Une sociologie des espaces potentiels. Logique dispositive et expérience ordinaire. Bruxelles: de Boeck.
Granqvist Pehr and Lee A. Kirkpatrick. 2004. Religious Conversion and Perceived Childhood Attachment : A Meta-Analysis. The Int Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 14(4), 223-250
Zinnbauer Brian J. and Kenneth I. Pargament. 1998. Spiritual Conversion: A Study of Religious Change among College Students. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 161-180
