Paper short abstract:

Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Croatia among practitioners of a spiritual development practice known as hagiotherapy, this paper shows how an analytical focus on attention can weave together individuals’ praxis and wider social-cultural patterns.

Paper long abstract:

Whether we look at the myriad of newspaper articles, blog posts and books that announce a ‘crisis of attention’ brought about by new technologies or at the increasing interest in mindfulness-based interventions for well-being and productivity, it becomes clear that attention is a salient topic in the public sphere. However, despite psychological anthropology being in a privileged position to study attention in all its socially-embedded complexity, only a handful of scholars (e.g. Jo Cook and Nick Seaver) have turned the anthropological gaze towards this topic. This paper joins these scholars by presenting an ethnographically grounded attempt to consider attention as a feature of human cognition with great relevance for the understanding of culture and society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Croatia among practitioners of a spiritual development practice known as hagiotherapy, the paper explores how the concept of attention can drive anthropological analysis. Hagiotherapy practitioners subscribe to a model of the person in which its ‘spiritual dimension’ can be worked upon to achieve healing and personal growth. By analysing some of their practices as techniques that train and redirect attention, this paper shows how an analytical focus on attention can weave together individuals’ praxis and wider social, cultural and political patterns. Attention is approached form a standpoint informed by research and theories of cognitive science and psychology while, at the same time, critiques of these theories are raised where the ethnography warrants it.