The “Wonder to Behold”: Reflections on Phenomenological Research of Alienic Spirituality

Abstract

This paper suggests the adaptation of the phenomenological research method for the study of indigenous spirituality. As a method by which one clarifies obscure forms of experience, phenomenology developed in Western academia. For such a context, spirituality is understood as historically and culturally situated province of meaning, i.e., a form of experience different from the pragmatic experience of the everyday. Further, indigenous spirituality is understood as spirituality of the other, and more so, of an alien, Being an alienic form of experience, which may in radical ways differ from both spiritual and pragmatic provinces of meaning of the researcher herself, such second person experience presents the unknown in need of discovery. To overcome the self-evident difficulties in description and understanding of alienic experience, I operationalize Waldenfels’ responsive interculturalism and Husserl’s historical reduction for the purposes of applied phenomenological research. Further, I emphasize distinctions between psychological and spiritual experiences, and explain why cultivating wonder comprises a necessary condition of possibility for accessing spiritual experience of the other on its own terms. Finally, I describe an attitude which I term “the attitude of discovery”, and articulate six principles which make it possible for the phenomenological method to work in the situations when second person experience of research subjects presupposes radical differences with the first person experience of the researcher herself. These principles include historical reduction, intentional cultivation of wonder, attention to embodied, attentive, enfleshed and affective unique “what it’s like” of experience, letting imagination run wild and examine seemingly impossible option, experimenting with transcendental and other forms of reduction, and aiming at discovery.