One of the things that "religious studies" as an academic discipline does, for me anyway, is make me think about the ways that human beliefs, patterns of action, pictures of the world, practices, and habits are connected to one another, often in ways that the inhabitants of those beliefs, practices, and pictures do not easily recognize.  What we can call the "phenomenology of the obvious" actually hangs on a fairly elaborate structure of contingencies that can be identified and, in multiple ways, analyzed.  This is as true of various forms of "non-religiousness" as it is of various forms of "religiousness," by the way; Talal Asad's discussions of different kinds of "formations of the secular" and Charles Taylor's critique of secularizing "subtraction stories" make this clear.  Humans experience the world as natural, as given; yet our experiences of the world are diverse enough, and our capacities for self-reflection are just barely powerful enough, that we can be brought to see that what we take for granted is, in part at least, the product of forces of cultural production and experiential shaping that are significantly contingent.

Of course, everyone likes this principle until it's aimed at them.  I am no exception.  Nor are scholars who say "everyone can be analyzed to uncover their contingencies."  They don't like it when you point out that if everyone is contingent, then they are too, and so are the methods that they use to reach the statement that everyone is contingent.  There are all sorts of self-reflexive challenges here, but I'll leave that for another post.

For now, all I want to do is highlight this quite interesting piece on "mindfulness" and "contemplative practices."  This has become quite a big thing lately, even at my own university, and while I'm not wildly annoyed at it, I find it interesting.  I also find some of the ways in which it doesn't even realize it needs to defend itself, quite amusing.  It walks right into analyses like this, which are the scholarly version of the ambush.  "To understand why mindfulness is uniquely unsuited for the project of real self-understanding, we need to probe the suppressed assumptions about the self that are embedded in its foundations."

Of course, this piece itself assumes there is a legitimate practice called "real self-understanding," but I allow that the piece can assume that (almost explicitly) while it complains that its interlocutor doesn't acknowledge its own assumptions.  That seems legit to me.  

The piece is worthwhile--check it out.