By Clifton B. Parker

Culture makes a significant difference in how people experience spirituality, according to new Stanford research.

Christians might "kindle" or generate different kinds of spiritual experiences than Buddhists because their cultural understandings of these mental or bodily sensations are different, said Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropology professor and co-author of a new article in Current Anthropology.

"We suggest that phenomenological experience is always the result of the interaction between expectation, cultural invitation, spiritual practice and bodily responsiveness," she wrote.

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. As Luhrmann noted, comparing spiritual or phenomenological experiences across different social settings "shows us how deeply cultural expectations shape intimate human experience."

Bodily or mental sensations have different meanings in different spiritual traditions, Luhrmann said. One person may feel a damp coldness and believe that a demon is present. Another person may shake uncontrollably and attribute this to the Holy Spirit. A third feels a light, floating sensation this is what happens when he meditates.

Luhrmann's research examined how the presence of a specific cultural name for a mental or bodily sensation may affect that sensation within a specific cultural and social setting. Her co-author was Julia Cassaniti, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.

"We call this the 'cultural kindling' of the spiritual experience," said Luhrmann, the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Department of Anthropology.

In an interview, Luhrmann elaborated on cultural kindling as the way people "think about thinking and sleeping and other everyday experiences, along with the way people think about God, which will affect the kind of startling, spontaneous experiences they identify as spiritual experiences."

Luhrmann and Cassaniti conducted open-ended interviews with 33 American members of evangelical churches in Northern California and 20 members of a Thai Buddhist community in northern Thailand. In hour-long formats, the subjects were asked questions such as, "What has been your most memorable spiritual experience?" and "Would you say that you hear from God?"

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Spirituality shaped through culture, according to Stanford anthropologist