Experiencing Religious Rituals: A Schutzian Analysis of Navajo Ceremonies

For a Sociology of Religious Experience

“…To illustrate what such an approach can do, I have elsewhere applied Schutz's insights to traditional Navajo religion (Spickard, 1991b). I argue that Navajo rituals structure their participants' experiences of time; this structuring both generates and confirms the religion's conceptual principles.…”

“…Mary Jo Neitz and I have argued that this relationship can be the basis for a sociology of religious experience (Neitz and Spickard, 1990;Spickard 1991b). Experiences are patterns of inner time; like all patterns in inner time, they can be shared.…”

Religion and Healing the Mind/Body/Self

“…They interpret these experiences as a resonance of several individuals' experiences and thus a sense of sharing "inner time". Spickard (1991) suggests, for example, that participants in a Navajo "chant" -several days and nights of collective ritual acts -can attune their subjective experiences toward the culturally valued sense of harmony between the individual, social group and environment.…”

Ritual, Symbol, and Experience: Understanding Catholic Worker House Masses

“…Just as one does not exhaust the 'meaning' of a Beethoven sonata by naming its musical references, its chord structure, its orchestration, and the mental associations that it generates, so one does not ex-haust a ritual by interpreting its symbols. Living through it, experiencing it unfolding in time does something more than just orienting one's intellect toward a particular view of the world (Schutz 1951;Spickard 1991).…”

“…---Several years ago, I published an article on Navajo ceremonies that challenged the then prevailing system of 'reading' rituals (Spickard 1991). At the time, such readings focused primarily on symbols and sought to decode the meaning of ritual events using one or another interpretive scheme.…”