Paper Short Abstract:

Based on fieldwork carried out in a Catholic spiritual practice over four years, mystical experiences - alien and their own - cried out to be taken into account due to the centrality they occupied in people's trajectories and narratives. Autoethnography made it possible to accommodate those experiences that often remain unwritten

Paper Abstract:

During my doctoral thesis, I conducted fieldwork with the idea of tracking and pursuing those people referred to as spiritual seekers. After a first period of participant observation, my phenomenological concerns and my interest in lived religion led me to adopt an autoethnographic approach with a radical participatory implementation.

After four years of experiential immersion in a Catholic spiritual practice, called ‘Journeys of Experiencing God’, there were many moments when I had to deal with experiences that, in most cases, are usually left in the ‘unacceptable’ drawer. Either for possible loss of credibility on the part of the researcher, or for not compromising those with whom we share the research process.

There were many reflections on methodological asepsis and agnosticism, or dispositional atheism, being aware of the self-censorship and silencing of our experiences with the radically other, due to scientific fundamentalism. I therefore elaborated ways of re-writing the unwritten, of using other forms of representation according to one's own lived experiences.

The written format, required for the presentation of the thesis, thus became a space from which to rethink diverse forms for the representation of other worlds that the textual medium hardly accepts; how can ethnographic work be relevant to delve into other ways of seeing, feeling and experiencing the world? How to narrate central experiences without betraying them, without cutting out their multiple dimensions? Many of these questions continue to motivate experimentation both in the way we research and in the formats for re-presenting them.