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REVIEWS Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing

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REVIEWS Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing REVIEWS Ann Taves, Fits, Trances,And Visions:Experiencing Religion And Explaining Experience From Wesleyto James. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999. xii + 449 pages. ISBN 0-691-02876-1, cloth; 0-691-01024-2, paper. One hundred years after William James's publication of the Varieties of Religious Experience, Ann Taves has produced what might be seen as a Varieties for a new century. Like James, Taves describes and catego- rizes religious experiences. Her focus is "involuntary" experiences involving the body: trances, somnambulism, speaking in tongues, fits, visions, mysticism, conversion. Also like James, Taves draws prima- rily (but not exclusively) from Anglo-American Protestantism and its eighteenth and nineteenth century offshoots: we encounter the voices of the Spiritualists, the Adventists, the "shouting Methodists" (who, Taves points out, were, quite often, interracial groups), the Theoso- phists, the proponents of animal magnetism, etc. Again like James, Taves explores the role of the subconscious in producing and inter- preting these experiences. But Taves goes well beyond James, producing a volume that is strikingly contemporary in both content and method. Fits, Trances and Visions is far more than an updated Jamesian description of the "va- rieties" of religious experience. Rather, this is a tour de force of current Religious Studies scholarship. Taves's project is three-fold. First, it is an historical discussion of religious experiences and their interpretations. Second, it is an analysis of the psychology of religion, both as a popular ideology and as a scholarly discipline. Third, it is a meditation on methodology in Religious Studies. The historical framework is the most visible of these three projects. By foregrounding the shifting historical discourses regarding the validity and meaning of involuntary religious experiences, Taves traces a complex cultural history. Are fits, trances, and "altered states" expe- riences evidence of the presence and power of the holy spirit? Or are they products of excessive "enthusiasm"? Are they mesmeric states? Products of the subconscious? She addresses these questions by locat- ing each in a particular historical and cultural discourse or practice, showing how explanations of religious experience expressed three major perspectives: secular, natural, and religious. Participants and 445 practitioners found religious experiences "supernatural" (i.e., "reli- gious") and "true"; secularist critics found them "natural" and "false"; while innovative scholars offered a mediating approach, find- ing the experiences both "natural" and "true." Taves herself em- braces this middle path. The second dimension of Taves's project focuses on psychology. She shows how interpretations and explanations of experience func- tioned both religiously and psychologically: animal magnetism, for example, was the foundation of a popular psychology with spiritual dimensions; it developed, in turn, into an academic theory of the subconscious mind. Linking religious experiences with psychological explanations for these experiences, she shows how a psychological approach to religious experience represented a liberal Protestant so- lution to the shifts accompanying the institutionalization of Methodism. As Methodism became more and more mainstream, education for Methodist ministers in seminaries and divinity schools overshadowed the earlier tradition of charismatic ministry in revivals and camp meetings. In this educational milieu the academic disci- pline of the psychology of religion became so popular and important by the early twentieth century that it nearly eclipsed theology. Taves demonstrates that James's famous theory of the subcon- scious in The Varieties represented a response to both the secularist critics and the religious defenders of supernaturalist explanations. Her revisionist reading of James will significantly change our assess- ment : James offered, she convincingly argues, not just a descriptive categorization of religious phenomena, but rather a complex psycho- logical theory successfully mediating between the secularists and the supematuralists. The third dimension of Taves's project reflects on scholarship and methodology in Religious Studies. James is important in her meth- odological reflections as well as her psychological interpretations. By focusing on James's universalistic understanding of religion "in gen- eral" ("a generic something, apart from any particular tradition"), she shows that he was responsible for constituting religious experience as an object of study in the modern sense. His universalism, in her view, offered a sophisticated understanding of "true religion" accessed through the subconscious. She proposes a path out of our entrap- ment in ongoing debates over theological vs. social scientific ap- proaches to religion through a Jamesian notion of religion "apart from any particular tradition". .
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