Date of publishing:

25.9.2023

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.21104/CL.2023.3.02

Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. The Český lid provides open access to all of its content under license
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.

Abstract:

In this study, I situate the phenomenon of intercultural religious encounters in a globalization perspective. I present it as a struggle of indigenous groups to carve out their own cultural space in the global scheme of things, as an effort to indigenize modernity and spirituality. Through a discursive analysis of a particular Maya lecture held in the Czech Republic, I trace the gradual formation and constitution of a global spiritual discourse that rises through the continuous connecting, merging or gluing together of diverse religious elements, through the likening as well as the delimiting of oneself to the dominant Euro-American culture. The aim of the text is to show that this is a deeply ambiguous process that entails both continuity and discontinuity, convergence and divergence, but also – and perhaps most importantly – equivocation; that it is a dynamic process of translation in which much is lost, but something is also found.

Keywords

indigenization of modernity; Maya spirituality; Western alternative spirituality; globalization; equivocation; discursive analysis

Article Text

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