Religion
February 10, 2026
Michal Pagis, Shlomo Guzmen-Carmeli
This paper sheds light on the interactive process in which religious practitioners work to achieve states that appear to contradict individual agency. Drawing on ethnographic studies of Buddhist meditation retreats and Torah study in a Haredi yeshiva, we track the delicate balance between ‘doing religion’ (active engagement) and ‘being done by religion" (experiencing religious forces as taking...
Finding Meaning
November 19, 2021
Michal Pagis
Abstract This chapter explores the rising popularity of Buddhist meditation in Israel and the self-identity that bodily based mindfulness offers its practitioners. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork among Israeli practitioners of vipassana meditation, this chapter illustrates how in periods characterized by doubt and uncertainty, Israelis find in meditation an embodied anchor for selfhood...
Sociology of religion
April 2, 2021
Daniel Winchester, Michal Pagis
While previous work has focused largely on discourse, contemporary sociological research has started to examine how the embodied, sensory dimensions of religious practice matter in the construction of religious experience. This paper contributes to this development by drawing sociological attention to the religious cultivation of a particular class of embodied experiences: somatic inversions....
The Oxford Handbook of Meditation
October 4, 2019
Michal Pagis
8 citations
Abstract Sociologists study meditation as a social phenomenon, utilizing the contemporary practice of meditation as a window to larger questions about social life and organization in the contemporary world. This chapter illustrates how meditation serves as a new institution and social sphere that balances the “secular” and the “mystical” as well as “being together” and “being alone.” It...
Ethnography
June 1, 2010
Michal Pagis
118 citations
The ‘problem of other minds’ is central to sociological theory and of immediate importance to contemporary research on subjectivity and interiority. How do we cultivate and maintain an intersubjective space during silent, private, experiences? Drawing on Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology, this study challenges the common view which regards silence as an obstacle to social relations. The data...