Performance has become a paradigm for analyzing contemporary culture, a pattern that structures a particular view of human interaction and experience. Performance is also widely used to better understand how we express values and ideas, including religious beliefs. Reckoning with Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance asks how the sensibilities of religious experience, which many people call spirituality, shape people's performance. When we observe people performing words, dances, music, and rituals they consider sacred, what (if any) conclusions can we draw about their experiences from what we see, read, and hear? By analyzing performances of spirituality and what people experience as "spirit," this book adds a new dimension to the paradigm of performance.

Rather than reducing the spiritual dimension to either biology or culture, the book asks what such experiences might have to offer a reasoned analysis of vernacular culture. The specific performances presented are meditative dance and shamanic drumming, including descriptions of these practices and exegesis of practitioners' writings on the nature of spiritual experience and performance.

Donnalee Dox is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University.

“Through detailed studies of two contemporary meditation practices and their founders, this book reveals how insufficient various materialist methodologies are to understanding the interior, life-changing, and often extreme experiences of the spiritual … Reckoning with Spirit is an especially powerful and effective tour de force.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, Rice University
 

“An ambitious and provocative study. Dox’s rigorous and innovative analysis challenges performance scholars to rethink how we approach questions of spirituality.”
—Henry Bial, University of Kansas