Sanctuary

Highlighting the interconnected roles of agency, habitus, and ambiguity, this chapter describes the book’s core thesis: the variability and interdependence of three culturally specific knowledge types (performative knowledge, unknowing, and unitive being), which result from practitioners’ differing capacities to “evoke the divine.” Expressed as an algebraic formula, this new epistemological theory of differential knowledge adds to classic studies of ritual and perception by detailing the diversity and fluidity with which “communitas” or phenomenological intersubjectivity actually occurs in a particular ethnographic context. It offers an anthropology of knowledge that can assist in the analysis of complex pluralistic societies. The chapter’s extensive use of ethnographic narrative and poetic language conveys how the three variable knowledge types arise in people’s ritualized lives and demonstrates how the ethnographer used intersubjective fieldwork methods to gain insights to contemplative experience even in environments of silence and interiority.