In this project, I have developed a new research approach for the ethnographic study of practice in groups and organizations. I integrated the systemic paradigm (Systemik) into the discipline Religionswissenschaft (Study of Religions), developing an epistemic framework, methodological guidelines, quality standards for research, and two major theoretical tools: reality techniques and infrastructures.
In my PhD thesis, I propose a new research approach for the Study of Religions (Religionswissenschaft) focusing on practice in groups and organizations. Adapting the systemic paradigm (Systemik), I developed an epistemic framework, methodological guidelines, quality standards for research, and two major theoretical tools: reality techniques and infrastructures.
The epistemic framework is based on methodological agnosticism regarding ontological questions (Religionswissenschaft) and inspired by clinical systemic theory including constructivism, cybernetics and the study of group dynamics (Palo Alto Institute, Heidelberger Gruppe), practice theory (Bourdieu, Goffman, Butler, Reckwitz) and sociological perspectives conceptualizing the diverse experiences of reality as social facts (Durkheim, Thomas, Luckmann and Berger). I understand “the social” as a performative network of human and non-human actors (Gibson, Latour, Harvey, Laack).
The concept of reality techniques analyzes cognitive, psychological, embodied, social, and material techniques used by practitioners to (co-)create, validate, and share an anticipated and thus perpetuated perception, interpretation, and experience of reality. In my research, I worked with the case example of contemporary Chaos Magicians and their practice of occultism in organized group settings, focusing particularly on the aspects of how magic and the identity of being a magician is experienced, and occult secretive organizations are formed. As a result, I was able to identify a multitude of reality techniques used by the Chaos Magicians and the ways these techniques are learned in continual processes. As such, reality techniques is conceptualized as a systemic theoretical approach analyzing how reality in its experienced form is learned, constructed in, and fundamentally based on social systems.
The concept of infrastructures examines resources necessary for the process that people are actually able to experience and participate in a specific reality. In my thesis, I analyze the narrational, emotional, and performative infrastructures used by the Chaos Magicians I worked with, adapting and extending similar conceptual tools such as codes (Hall), access (Foucault), body techniques (Mauss), performances (Fischer-Lichte), and emotions (Scheer). These infrastructures are not invented and used by individuals alone, nor are they freely available for everyone. Instead, they are exclusive, mostly implicit knowledge that is available only to initiated members of a social system.
