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In
Drifting Through Samsara, Masoumeh Rahmani provides a fieldwork-based study of Goenka's Vipassana meditation movement in New Zealand. This group is distinguished by its refusal to identify as Buddhist and by a rich rhetorical repertoire for repackaging Theravada Buddhist teachings in pseudo-scientific and secular language. Drawing from qualitative research, the book examines the way the movement's discourse shapes unique processes and narratives of conversion and disengagement.
List of contents
- Abstract
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- A Note on Terminology and Transcription
- Conventions of Transcription
- Introduction
- Chapter I: Conversion Career
- Chapter II: Tacit Conversion
- Chapter III: Pragmatic Leaving
- Chapter IV: Vipassana Disaffiliation Narratives
- Chapter V: Disaffiliation Trajectories
- Chapter VI: Deconversion: Breathing New Self into Not-Self
- Concluding Discussions
- Bibliography
- Appendix 1: Vipassana Ten-day Course Timetable
- Appendix 2: Participants' Information
About the author
Masoumeh Rahmani is a lecturer in Religious Studies at the School of Social and Cultural Studies in Victoria University of Wellington. She received her PhD from the University of Otago in 2017 and has previously held a research associate position in the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour lab at Coventry University. Her research interests include religious change, meditation movements, atheism and unbelief, and Asian spiritualities in non-Asian contexts. Her latest longitudinal project explored the diversity of "unbelief" in the mindfulness subcultures of the UK and the US and examined the influence of the practice on the worldviews of non-religious/atheist practitioners.
Summary
In Drifting Through Samsara, Masoumeh Rahmani provides a fieldwork-based study of Goenka's Vipassana meditation movement in New Zealand. This group is distinguished by its refusal to identify as Buddhist and by a rich rhetorical repertoire for repackaging Theravada Buddhist teachings in pseudo-scientific and secular language. Drawing from qualitative research, the book examines the way the movement's discourse shapes unique processes and narratives of conversion and disengagement. Rahmani argues that conversion to this movement is tacit and paradoxically results in the members' rejection of religious labels and categories including conversion. Tracing the linguistic changes associated with the process of conversion and increased commitment, she outlines three main disengagement pathways: (1) pragmatic leaving, (2) disaffiliation, and (3) deconversion. Pragmatic leavers are individuals who were disengaged prior to developing a commitment. Rahmani argues that the language of these leavers is characterised by pragmatisms, dualistic discourse, and ambivalence, and their post-disengagement involves an active gravitation towards practices with easily accomplished goals. Disaffiliates and deconverts are individuals who disengaged after years of intense commitment to the movement. One of the distinguishing features of disaffiliation narratives is self-doubt resulting from the movement's ambiguous discourse regarding progress. For these people post-disengagement often involves the retrospective adoption of Buddhist identity.
Rahmani finds that as a consequence of its linguistic strategies, deconversion is a rare exit pattern from this movement. In general, however, the themes and characteristics of both disaffiliation and deconversion fit the contours of exit from other traditions, even though conversion was tacit in the first place. The book thus questions the normative participant recruitment approach in conversion studies and argues that a simple reliance on the informants' identification with or rejection of religious labels fails to encompass the tonalities of conversion in the contemporary spiritual landscape.
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Highly innovative, brilliantly written, and based on solid research, Drifting through Samsara is one of the best books on (de)conversion that I have read in the last fifteen years. The book addresses an important lacuna in the conversion literature by theoretically expanding religious disaffiliation. Rahmani's research findings challenge the conventional religious exit literature by showing that authenticity discourse is not a motive for disengagement, but rather an effort to reconstruct an alternative universe of discourse. Tacit conversion is a great new concept to capture how many converts deny and conceal their conversion experience, and why they do that.
