New Article: Klin-Oron, How I Learned to Channel

Klin-Oron, Adam. “How I Learned to Channel: Epistemology, Phenomenology, and Practice in a New Age Course.” American Ethnologist 41.4 (2014): 635-47.

 

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12102/abstract

 

Abstract

New Age channeling aims at intimate and daily contact with benevolent incorporeal entities. In an Israeli channeling course, students learn to interpret external events in a new light and to monitor internal mental, physical, and emotional processes in new ways, culminating in an ability to achieve “controlled flow,” a state of consciousness in which self-attention is heightened but a sense of volition diminishes. Through the braiding of epistemology, practice, and phenomenology, they engage in a new mode of being-in-the-world and inhabit a new lifeworld where they become conduits to external forces. Anthropological fieldwork also aims at understanding epistemological systems through active participation, but by examining my own experience in the channeling course I demonstrate how temporary suspension of disbelief differs from permanent adoption of a new system of belief