A rough paraphrase of Bromley's concept of 'spiritual edgework' might be 'rituals in which participants deliberately do things that people in their cultures would normally consider dangerous, in order to publically demonstrate that their spirituality enables them to transcend normal human limitations' (p.289). He illustrates this with two examples: Christian snake-handling and New Age firewalking. I think this make sense, but I had a couple of issues with the way Bromley goes about explaining this concept.
First of all, there's Bromley's explicit definition of the concept: in spiritual edgework, "practitioners challenge the presumptive safe limits of human activity by regularly and deliberately engaging in ritual practices that apparently risk certain physical or psychological injury or even death" (p.289). Bromley further clarifies that his definition of 'edgework' excludes cases where the practitioner actually "goes over the edge", as with martyrdom (p.301).
Most of this is reasonable, but I'm curious as to what he means by 'risk of psychological injury'. What's a 'psychological injury'? Is Bromley thinking in terms of specifically medical labels, like PTSD? Is it meant to be an emic judgement? Or is he just assuming it should be 'common sense' for us to define etically what this means? Guessing the answer to these questions is made harder by the fact that he may not intend this part of his definition to apply to either of his two examples. Or at least, snake-handlers and firewalkers don't seem to feel that their practices are likely to cause psychological harm, and I don't recall ever seeing any of their detractors argue that either (that is, there are obviously people who think that snake-handlers and firewalkers "must be crazy", but it seems like the usual argument is that they must already be psychological unstable in order to want to participate in rituals in the first place- not that the rituals seem likely to cause psychological harm).
Another problem with the vagueness of the 'psychological injury' issue is that if you start picking religious practices at random, you can probably always find somebody SOMEWHERE who would argue that they're potentially psychologically damaging. For example, it's not too hard to find people who argue that Catholicism instils a sense of pathological guilt (for the record, I'm not arguing that it does, but this is a claim which you do see cropping up fairly often). Does that imply that going to Mass is a type of spiritual edgework? I doubt Bromley would label it as such, but if he doesn't like a definition of 'psychological injury' that includes basic Catholic doctrine then that does raise questions about whose definition he would prefer to apply.
My other main issue with this paper is Bromley's frequent use of the word 'empowering'. Bromley doesn't define this word, so I'm kind of left to guess at what he means by it. I've always assumed that the word implies a value judgement. It's hard for me to imagine someone applying the word to a practice which they don't actively agree with (unless they were being sarcastic, or making it clear they were using it in the context of emic views- "some participants argue that this ritual is empowering", etc). Maybe it's just me, but if the word is generally assumed to carry a value judgement, then I don't think it's appropriate to use it in the context of etic statements in an academic article.
It's possible that Bromley just meant it as a value-neutral way to say "things that people believe give them power", but if so then I think it would have been helpful to state it explicitly. It's also possible that Bromley feels that the groups he's discussing have been the target of so many negative value judgements that it's necessary for him to use positive value judgements to compensate. Bromley discusses criticism of these groups on p.288. Small point- as evidence that snake-handlers have "often been treated derisively" even by academics, he quotes Williamson and Pollio: "unfortunately, most analyses of this practice tend to decontextualize it as pathological or characterize it in functional terms, that is, as mitigating the difficulties of life. For example, La Barre (1962/1992), a psychoanalytically trainedanthropologist, cast his unfortunate subject, Beauregard Barefoot, as a compulsive snake handler who attemptedthrough ritual to resolve the sexual conflicts of his childhood life." While I agree that these approaches to snake-handling don't sound massively helpful, it's worth pointing out that functionalists tend to describe EVERYTHING as functional, and followers of some psychoanalytic tend to describe EVERYTHING in terms of dysfunction resulting from childhood sexual conflict- it's not helpful, but it's not necessarily a sign than snake-handlers suffer from any special prejudice either.
The issue is further complicated by the fact that the first sentence in the entire paper states that "religion as a social form is constructed to provide adherents with a sense of empowerment and control" (p.287). I have no idea what Bromley means by this, or whether he's speaking in the context of religion in general or just religion in the modern West. I also don't know what he means by the word 'constructed'- is he thinking in terms of top-down or bottom-up models? That is, is he thinking in terms of the motives of people who start religious movements (or push for major changes within them)? Is he saying that these people are motivated by the desire to make the religion better at 'empowering' ordinary worshippers? Or is he thinking from the perspective of ordinary worshippers themselves? Is he arguing that they're always trying to find a way to make their religion more empowering for themselves personally? That would make more sense, assuming Bromley would be happy with this statement applying equally to pretty much every kind of social system (not just religion).
Although, weirdly, on p.289 he seems to be saying that some religions/spiritualities are more concerned to provide adherents with a sense of empowerment than others are ("The [New Age] movement is concerned withtranscending the apparent limits of human capacity through a diverse array of methods for personal growth and transformation. One common characteristic of many New Age quasi-religious therapies (Greil and Robbins 1994), therefore, is a ritualized means of enhancing a sense of individual empowerment and control.") Unless there's some nuance here I've missed (maybe New Age stuff stresses INDIVIDUAL empowerment whereas many other religions/spiritualities mainly discuss empowerment in a group context?), this seems to kind of contradict the idea from p.287 that providing adherents with a sense of empowerment is a function of religions in general.
On p.289, Bromley states that "while there is a substantial literature exploring the nature of ritual as a social form and different types of ritual (Bell 1997; Grimes 1995; Turner 1969), there is little inquiry into the issue of how ritual empowerment, particularly in its more radical forms, is socially constructed" (p.289). Maybe there's actually a substantial amount of academic literature examining the issue of empowerment in a descriptive way, and I've missed it (obviously the term gets used by consciously partisan academics like feminist activists and psychiatrists trying to find a way to enhance clients' self-esteem, but those are fields that have made a deliberate decision to use normative rather than desciptive terms, so it's a different thing). If so, then I've obviously missed it (entirely possible)- but at the moment, I suspect that maybe Bromley feels that there's "little enquiry" into the issue because he's using an idiosyncratic term and hasn't come across people who are using synonyms for whatever it is he means by it.
Final quibble: I don't understand why this paper was published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion when it's not a scientific study (I'm not trying to be snarky and use 'scientific' as a generic word for 'good' or 'intellectually rigourous'- I mean it's non-scientific in the sense that it doesn't involve any hypothesis testing. There are plenty of good non-scientific journals of religious studies out there, so I would have assumed that this particular journal would stick to scientific stuff).
So that's all the stuff I didn't like- what about the rest of the article? Distaste for the word 'empowerment' aside, I'm intrigued by what Bromley seems to be saying here:
"A foundational assumption of classic sociological interpretations of religion- that the transcendent is socially constructed is critical to the issue of empowerment and control. If the transcendent is socially constructed as an autonomous source of power, independent of humans,then it can be potentially both constraining and liberating, as has been noted in formulations of the holy (Durkheim 1965; Otto 1923). It follows that groups determine, through the way the transcendent is constructed, the extent of constraint/liberation to which they are subject and the means through which the transcendent can be apprehended and influenced. In fact, this is a common theme in sociological theory and empirical work on religious groups." (p.287)
On the one hand, I'm a little leery of the fact that he's apparently coming right out and saying "let's start with the assumption that religion is 'socially constructed as an autonomous source of power'" (I'm of the opinion that social scientists of religion should be really cautious about taking sides on this issue- reflexive passages where they explain their personal views on the matter are fine, but I feel their actual analyses should do their best to describe emic belief or scepticism without passing judgement. But obviously not everyone feels this way (and obviously one could argue it's kind of convenient for someone who's personally agnostic to endorse professional agnosticism as best practice). And I guess Bromley isn't coming right out and saying "I'm an atheist", or anything he's just stating the fact that most social science analyses start with the assumption that we can describe a religious system entirely in terms of human efforts, so I guess if you don't plan on doing anything differently then arguably it's better to just say that straight off rather than dance around the issue.
If I understand Bromley correctly, he's going on to say that cultures are to some extent 'choosing' the constraints or restrictions which they're prepared to abide by (particularly in terms of supernatural prohibitions, although obviously pretty much the same argument would apply to systems of secular law). Therefore, if we come across a group which abides by something that looks like a particularly harsh imperative (e.g. a commandment to handle venomous snakes), it's relevant to ask why the group has generally accepted this (even if some individuals have rejected the idea). If anyone here has read the Sandman graphic novel (that's an expensive comic book, for those of you who aren't as pretensious as me), I can see 90's-era Neil Gaiman really going for this idea.
So in the context of edgework, then, he's saying that communities accept the idea of doing stuff they'd normally consider dangerous because they believe that a higher power will enable them to transcend their normal limitations. When people make it through the ritual unscathed, they feel like they've achieved something miraculous, and so get a sense of empowerment. Bromley reckons that from this perspective, firewalking and snake-handling are both practices which are really well-suited for edgework (he argues this is why they've been picked up by multiple cultures- see p.291). There are several features of these rituals which make them especially suitable.
Firstly, they're both genuinely dangerous, in that it's possible to point to real examples of people who've been injured or died as a result of participating. This is particularly true of snake-handling, since it's apparently emically accepted that anyone who handles snakes on a regular basis is going to get bitten eventually, even if they're a faithful Christian. It's thought that snake-handling has killed around 75 people, presumably during public services with a lot of witnesses (thus potentially making the whole thing more obviously scary than if they'd died alone in their homes). With regard to fire-walking, it's not too uncommon to get blistered feet. Occasionally people get seriously burned, and there are a few documented cases of people dying because they tripped and fell onto the coals. So, most fire-walkers probably won't have personally witnessed a death or serious injury, but most fire-walking workshops will mention the possibility in their introductory talks (p.294, 299, 302).
However, Bromley reckons that neither ritual is actually as dangerous as it might appear at first. People can and do get through these rituals uninjured on a fairly regular basis (p.301). This is often true even if people behave in a way that looks pretty reckless to observers (e.g. just reaching into a box of snakes and grabbing one without checking if they seem about to bite you, or practicing firewalking until you can spend quite a long time on the coals- see p.297, 298).
"Both firewalking and serpent handling are regarded as a confirmation and not a test of
[practicioners'] beliefs" (p.299). That is, if someone engages in one of these rituals and comes away unharmed, that's seen as proof that they've been mystically sustained by God or your higher self. However, if someone DOES get burned or bitten, that's not usually emically seen as something that contradicts the validity of the ritual. Harm sustained during rituals can be blamed on several possible factors, such as:
- the injured person was foolhardy and refused to take proper instruction
- the injured person was too prideful, and was thus in need of a reminder of their human limitations
- it was necessary that participants' faith should be tested and thereby strengthened
- the ritual was disrupted by harmful forces, such as demonic interference (p.300)
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