Paula Pryce: “Silence of Being”: Performative Knowledge and Unknowing as Agents of Perceptual Change in Contemplative Christian Ritual

Mittwochskolloquium Ethnologie

Silence, meditation, chant . . . traffic jams?  One teacher in my ethnographic research among a global network of inter-religious Christian contemplatives said, “Commuter traffic, like silent meditation, is an invitation to the contemplative life.”  Though most set aside special periods each day for formalized ritual and silence, these contemplative practitioners of a meditation technique called Centering Prayer also approach ordinary activities as “prayer without ceasing.”   Monastic and non-monastic, religiously affiliated and independent, diverse members of the Centering Prayer network understand the “inner gestures” of meditation to be a way of cultivating a “silence of being” that can permeate all aspects of life, even in the uncertain, bustling spheres of their pluralized worlds.  Drawing from more than ten years of ethnographic research in North America and on pilgrimages to India, Italy, and Israel/Palestine, this paper describes how members of this global movement intentionally foster “unknowing”, a ritualized form of ambiguity, alongside intellectual knowledge and social activism in an effort to work toward a phenomenological transformation of consciousness in any context, whether acoustically still or not.  Here, I will introduce the terms, apophasis (ambiguous, contemplative “inner gestures”) and cataphasis (observable action), to the anthropological study of ritual and silence to help us understand how everyday behaviours can become acts of contemplation when addressed with intentionality and discipline.

Dr. Paula Pryce is a lecturer and research associate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  She is the author of The Monk’s Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2018)  and “Keeping the Lakes’ Way”: Reburial and the Re-Creation of a Moral World among an Invisible People (University of Toronto Press, 1999).

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