Paper short abstract:

Among mindfulness practitioners in the UK, health and happiness are at stake in their capacity to manoeuver from one way of being-in-the-world to another. In this very manoeuvrability between worlds, rather than unreflective inhabitation of one, practitioners enact the imperative of askesis itself.

Paper long abstract:

The definitional ground of the ontological turn has been increasingly disputed since Mol's (2002) 'body multiple'. 'Ontologies are not simply linguistic or mental…phenomena', claims Pedersen (2012), yet to Laidlaw the ontological turn 'delivers…merely the familiar old idea that different peoples have different theories about the world' (Laidlaw 2012). However 'ontology' next manifests, a question remains: 'What on earth happens at the boundaries between…different ontologies, and when things or people cross from one to another?' (Laidlaw 2012).

Although Laidlaw offers this in a spirit of critique, my fieldwork among mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) practitioners in the United Kingdom leads me to take his question seriously. MBCT is an evidence-based treatment for recurrent depression and stress, derived from Buddhism and cognitive therapy. Practitioners learn to reshape their minds through extended meditation, but mindful selves are not simply 'transformed' from one state of being to another. Instead, practitioners' reality is a perpetual series of shifts among multiple 'worlds' of practitioner personhood. These worlds are ethnographically discernable through context-dependent (re)definitions: at different times, 'mindfulness' is an object, a practice, or an innate capacity; the 'practitioner' is a passive recipient, self-responsibly active, or 'inherently' mindful. Although practitioners rarely acknowledge such multiplicity, their worlds are not merely 'conceptual artifacts internal to anthropological argument' (Candea and Alcayna-Stevens 2012). Indeed, health and happiness are at stake in the practitioner's capacity to manoeuver from one way of being-in-the-world to another. In this very manoeuvrability between worlds, rather than unreflective inhabitation of one, practitioners enact the imperative of askesis itself.