Practice Makes Perfect: Meditation and the Exchange of Spiritual Capital

Abstract

Despite its ubiquity, the term ‘spiritual capital’ continues to lack a sufficient level of empirical scrutiny to merit categorical independence from its religious variant. To remedy this gap, this article presents an ethnographic study of a meditation group called the Dhyana Centre, situated at the heart of London, and offers a bottom-up account of the ways in which spiritual capital is recognized, exchanged, and adopted in the absence of institutional mechanisms of legitimacy. Building on Bradford Verter’s conceptualisation of spiritual capital as originally derived from Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this study argues that the distinct configuration between knowledgeable and practical mastery in the dynamics of spiritual capital exchange marks a modus operandi which is not fully accounted for by conventional notions of religious capital. This study of spiritual capital thus allows for the translation of a notoriously slippery phenomenon into a much more tangible object of study without having to resort to essentialist readings of spirituality.

Keywords:

• Spiritual capital
• religious capital
• meditation
• Bourdieu

Notes

1. Sanskrit for 'divine power', latent primal energy believed to lie coiled at the base of the spine.

2. Sanskrit for 'divine knowledge', collections of hymns, prayers, and liturgical formulas that comprise the earliest Hindu sacred writings.

3. Sanskrit for 'rule', precept summarising Vedic teaching.

4. Sanskrit for 'wheel', depicting seven energy points along the spine.

5. Sanskrit for ‘breath restraint’, yogic technique and exercise of regulating the breath.