UC San Diego

The thesis titled An Understanding of the New Age Through the Lens of an Embodied Experience of the Sacred is a work of anthropological character which aims to explain how the New Age phenomenon manifests in the context of globalization.

From an Anthropological stance, the New Age is a cultural phenomenon of religious connotation. It is part of a process of Globalization of Religion in the context of a Global Religious System. The New Age phenomenon is embodied throughout the deterritorialized trajectories of its spiritual foragers in a quest for an experience of the Sacred as Otherness. The consequence of these trajectories is an intertwined rhizome configured by a complex interconnection of eclectic elements gravitating around the experience of the sacred in a global society.

These concepts are used to demonstrate how the New Age manifests in the embodied experience of persons in concrete local contexts, maintaining a constant dialogue with the global dimension of the New Age. Three particular cases are analyzed regarding this objective: Aztec Dancing, Neomayanism and Deoceltism, and Neoshamanism.