Building Blocks of Religion - Critical Applications and Future Prospects - Göran Larsson

Building Blocks of Religion - Critical Applications and Future Prospects - Göran Larsson

Invisible Hands and Sacred Unicorns: Occulture as a Schema for Supernatural Ascriptions in the Millennial Generation

Building Blocks of Religion - Critical Applications and Future Prospects - Göran Larsson

Ingela Visuri [+-]
Dalarna University
Ingela Visuri is a senior lecturer in the Study of Religions at Dalarna University (Sweden), where she is responsible for training future teachers in religion education. Her research centres the role of mentalization in religion, autism, and imagination, and her publications concern topics such as supernatural experience, embodiment, enactment, learning, and secularity. Visuri currently serves as post docfellow at the Interacting Minds Center at Aarhus University (Denmark) where she is pursuing a research project on social learning in autistic individuals involved in live action roleplay. She is moreover co-chair and initiator of the Nordic Network for the Cognitive Science of Religion, and steering committee member of the Religion and Public Schools, International Perspectives Unit in the American Academy of Religion.

Description

This chapter presents an empirical and methodological example of an interdisciplinary study on religious cognition, in which the approach is aligned with the building blocks approach suggested by Ann Taves and Egil Asprem. While autism is the focal point of the research project, the study also highlights a generational shift in the ascription of non-ordinary powers as these millennials appear to embrace occult phenomena in Western popular culture (‘occulture’). Besides illustrating how emic ascriptions of things set apart from the ordinary may vary between different generations, the chapter also provides a multilevel model of how unusual embodied experiences – which appear to be especially prevalent on the autism spectrum – are understood in terms of occult schemas derived from popular culture.

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Citation

Visuri, Ingela. Invisible Hands and Sacred Unicorns: Occulture as a Schema for Supernatural Ascriptions in the Millennial Generation. Building Blocks of Religion - Critical Applications and Future Prospects. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 71-81 Feb 2020. ISBN 9781781798676. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=37589. Date accessed: 16 Apr 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.37589. Feb 2020

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