Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 1, April 2005

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Frankenberg, Ruth. (2004) Living Spirit: Living Practice. Poetics, Politics, Epistemology. Durham & London: Duke University Press.  ISBN. 0-8223-3295-7. Pbk. £16.95

Reviewed by

Maria Way

University of Westminster

The Cultural Studies scholar, Ruth Frankenberg, has in this book turned her attention to the thorny subject of spirituality.  We live in a “secular age”, we are continually being told and yet the UK Census 2001 gave the perhaps surprising information that 70% of the population of the UK considered themselves to be “White Christians”.  When we consider that there are in addition around 1.9 million Muslims, 1 million Hindus, 330,000 Jews, 100,000 Parsees, as well as “other Christians” and “other sects”, we begin to wonder if the age we live in is truly secular.  Richard Holloway, formerly Bishop of Edinburgh, has said a number of times that he believes we are moving to an age of spirituality and away from one where people adhere to an organized religion.  Evidently Frankenberg thinks this may be so.

Frankenberg has undertaken in-depth interviews with 50 people from various religious backgrounds and has looked at their thoughts and beliefs and how these affect and relate to each other in their lives.  From a European standpoint, this is a very American book and yet there are a number of important works on the study of the media, religion and culture, written in the American context, which she seems not to have considered.  Countries such as France, Germany Holland or the United Kingdom have a society which is very racially mixed, but there is a tendency, repeated in this book, that I have noticed in the United States, to consider that only the USA has an immigrant population.  While there is a very long chapter on people who live celibate lifestyles, I felt there was no need to mention the race of the respondents unless this was relative to their faith practice.  I have discovered, however, and please forgive my ignorance, that Professor Frankenberg has written a number of books on matters concerning race. The sexual orientation (also mentioned) of the interviewees would have more relevance for this chapter and is indeed noted. As one of her respondents says, the fact that the respondent is celibate almost seems to make the question as to sexual orientation irrelevant here also. There is in addition a tendency to discuss class, which I, as an English person who lives in a society which is generally supposed to be class ridden, found to be a little strange in a country where class is supposedly irrelevant.

Despite these reservations, Frankenberg has tapped into an understudied area which is rapidly gaining ground in academic circles. She has talked to people from a variety of faiths and spiritual groupings and this is creditable.  Too often books that deal with “religion” deal only with one faith group – something which I am myself doing at present. Hopefully the similarities which Frankenberg highlights between the faith and belief of the interviewees will help some to consider the similarities between beliefs rather than their differences. When one of her cohort of interviewees was asked what she understood by the term “spirituality”, she answered “it’s marketing”.  I would agree with both the respondent’s caustic comment and Frankenberg’s concern over what she has described as “the seemingly endless flow of new books, lead articles in mainstream magazines, even new lines in clothing and advertising” [p.3] which sell themselves as being aids to, or actually, some form of spirituality.  Since the beginning of time, man has needed something greater than himself, a higher power, in which to believe.  If we are indeed losing our will to belong to a religious group, then this is probably a good advertising ploy.  It panders to our need, but in the wrong way. It is worth noting here that, despite the “secular age” in which we are supposed to live, many of the respondents actually belonged to a more or less organized religious group.  As well as a need for a higher power, mankind also needs community – even the hermit monk or nun, or the anchorite, was dependent on a community to assist with their bodily needs. The spirit cannot be separated from the body, however hard mystics have tried in the past.  The writings of many of them are filled with very corporal similes – one look at the Bernini statue of St. Teresa [of Avila] in ecstasy in the church of Sta. Maria della Vittoria, Rome, to pick up on the evidently sexual ecstasies that are displayed here.

Another of the delights of this book is how well Frankenberg manages to prove that faith and its practice are not separate to the daily lives of her interviewees but are very central to them.  So often, I talk to groups of people without faith who think that faith and/or its practice are an add-on, a sort of value added thing, rather than having this centrality. Belief systems are at the core of the being of those of faith. Here also the notion of body/mind religious practice, which we see as being “Eastern”, would also be relevant, as Frankenberg notes [81]. In both Europe and the USA, still considered Christian areas – although in some countries the demographics are changing fast because of immigration and the falling off of “traditional” religion - we do not seem to think of Christianity as an “Eastern” religion, yet it did come to us from the East and from a Middle Eastern tradition of the Jewish roots from which both Christianity and Islam sprang.

This is a book for our times.  Not only are religions outside the Christian sphere coming to our attention, but these religions may be practiced by immigrants or, as Frankenberg shows, by people who have a different ethnic background but who have been living in our midst for many years.  When one adds to his mix the “New Age” religions or faith practices, one has a heady mix.  Even the Vatican has published a document on these “New Age” beliefs[1], which leads one to believe that the centre of the Roman Catholic church is taking these groups seriously.

Faith and spirituality are inherently personal.  Although we may individually belong to a faith group, there is no possibility that each member of that faith group will have exactly the same belief or spirituality.  Frankenberg speaks about this, perhaps particularly in regard to American Catholicism, but the same may certainly be said of other religious groups.  Our faith does not just happen, we have within us a grounding (which may or may not be in a particular faith), but which may also be relevant to place and to the culture which surrounds us.  For those who move to another place, joining with those of the culture from which they came may mean taking up a religious practice which they might not felt necessary to practice at home, but which was part of their culture.  It gives them a sense of belonging in a distant location and also helps to form their sense of identity.

This book is an interesting step in the direction of considering the variety of spiritual practices which now exist and I hope that it is another step in the direction of greater interest in the academic field of media, religion and culture.  The Conference on Media, Religion and Culture (the fourth of a series started by a group of scholars some years ago) was held in September, 2004, in Louisville, KY.  Each of these conferences has been bigger than the last and they will now be held every two years.  I look forward to attending the next one and hope that Ruth Frankenberg will be attending to present further research.