"Trauma" has become a widely circulating cultural framework for making suffering intelligible. Sociological research has documented its institutional expansion but paid less attention to how people use it to organize experiences that disrupt orientation to body, self, and world. This article examines that situated process in non-clinical psychedelic contexts. Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews...
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...