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Paper short abstract:

By looking at how the everyday experience and political convictions of practitioners of hagiotherapy are shaped by attentional processes, this paper argues that careful consideration of attention is essential for understanding socio-cultural phenomena.

Paper long abstract:

Observing the close relationship between attention and subjective experience, William James famously wrote: “my experience is what I agree to attend to”. More recently, this relationship has been further explored and theorised in a body of work emerging from the confluence of cognitive psychology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind that identifies attention as a crucial factor in the unfolding of conscious experience. At the same time, scholars in anthropology and the humanities, interested in the prevailing narratives and cultural concerns about attention, have been conceptualising attention as a collective and socio-cultural phenomenon. This paper brings together these two approaches to bear upon a single ethnographic context, deploying ‘attention’ as a theoretical thread capable of weaving together various domains and scales of analysis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Croatia among practitioners of a spiritual practice known as hagiotherapy, this paper argues that careful consideration of attention is essential for understanding a range of phenomena, from the spiritual to the political. It does this by revealing how the practitioners’ experience of everyday life is shaped by practices, behaviours, events, and situations that direct, train, shape, and attract their attention. More broadly, this paper suggests that an explicit focus on attention, underpinned by a cogent theoretical framework, can provide novel insights and produce more cohesive accounts of socio-cultural realities.