Paper Short Abstract:

The aim of this presentation is to unwrite the dominant framework around extraordinary experiences and to address the issue of the underlying reality. I am developing an ontological approach in which embodied extraordinary experiences give access to a different world, made of invisible dimensions.

Paper Abstract:

The main issue with grasping extraordinary experiences is an ontological one: those experiences open up people to invisible and intangible dimensions of the world as well as subtle dimensions of themselves and living beings more generally. As such they strongly collide with the dominant rationalist, materialist, and scientific ontology.

In social sciences, the treatment of this hiatus is threefold. One approach dismisses those experiences as being naïve, non-scientific, erroneous beliefs, or pathological. At the opposite of the spectrum, few researchers affirm the reality of those invisible and subtle dimensions. In between those extremes, the dominant framework treats those experiences as parts of different worldviews or representations of the world, the reality of which shouldn’t be questioned following cultural relativism. In doing so, the crucial ontological issue is overlooked, and the dominant materialist and rationalist ontology tend to be implicitly (and probably unconsciously) reaffirmed.

In this presentation based on a research project among Canadians, my aim is to unwrite this dominant framework to do justice to extraordinary experiences. Drawing on an ontological anthropology (especially Ingold as well as Clammer, Poirier & Schwimmer), I am developing an approach of a world multiple (directly inspired by Anne-Marie Mol’s “The body multiple”) which is made of conflicting configurations of what is real and different ways of inhabiting it. This world is accessed to through embodied extraordinary experiences, which mobilize the senses and non-ordinary states of consciousness, that give people a peek in it as well as knowledge and practices.