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The sociology of self-cultivation: Life-coaching culture

In this ethnographic project I investigate the attempt of individuals to author their lives and selves with the help of a coacher. I follow the techniques of turning oneself into an object that can be remade, changed and cultivated. I recently completed six months of participant observation in a life-coaching course, and am currently interviewing individuals who have gone through a coaching process in Israel. This project serves as a comparative study to my previous work on vipassana meditation, investigating a self-reflexive practice that is based on discursive grounds.

Reembodying the Self: Vipassana meditation and the microsociology of experience.

I am interested in the process through which embodied practices constitute the self. This forthcoming book is based on two years of ethnographic research among practitioners of vipassana meditation in Israel and the United States. This meditation practice is taught in silent meditation retreats, where practitioners learn to increase their sensitivity to bodily sensations. Through this case study I develop a framework for a non-discursive process of self-reflexivity, examining the place of the body in interaction.

Religion on the edge

We are a group of scholars studying religion as a venue to other social questions that are not necessary concerned with religion per se. This project began in a two-day workshop hosted by the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion in October 2008. I am currently working on a paper entitled “Theorizing Self through Religion” that will be included in a planned edited volume that introduces this project.

Two ethnographies of silence.

Continuing my interest in the non-discursive bases of sociality, this paper, written with Jonathan Mermis-Cava, demonstrates the silent interactional rituals that take place in two meditation retreats - vipassana meditation and Christian meditation. The meditation retreat serves as a natural experience in which one important element, language, is removed from the normal structure of interaction. As we show, analyzing interaction in silence sheds light and exposes covert aspects of communication, aspects that also exist in everyday interaction.