Etnografia simétrica y espiritualidad. Aproximación ontológica al laicismo

Abstract

In these pages I intend to connect the recent debates on secularism and a certain anthropology of religion/spirituality involved in an exercise of radical participation, symmetry and ontological recognition of the objects it studies. Detranscendentalising religion is effective as far as the effects of this intellectual operation cancel out the agency and methodological reality of the beings, energies and forces with which subjects deal. To disguise or omit the most exceptional or incommunicable aspects of ethnographic experience and field notes, diluting them in a scientifically-acceptable discourse -a common procedure according to Favret-Saada- is all the more disturbing when one does not share the premise according to which epistemes, religious narratives and practices belong to the universe of the irrational, the imaginary, the unobservable, when they arise from an error of perception or an intellectual delusion, which turns truth into a knowledge independent of the statements of the natives. This article, which deals with all of this and is eminently theoretical, would be inconceivable without years of fieldwork dedicated to the methodological, epistemological and ontological issues involved in the understanding of religions/spiritualities, understood as politics, but also as an exceptional form of perceptual and sensory alterity.