Reflexive Religion: The New Age in Brazil and Beyond by Anthony D'Andrea (review)

Anthony D'Andrea's basic thesis in Reflexive Religion: The New Age in Brazil and Beyond is that the New Age is a "post-traditional religiosity" and "religious pragmatic" reflecting, among other things, the self-absorption and anomie characteristic of late modernity. Less a tangible religious movement than a "set of conditions that retools traditional resources within new purposes," the New Age emerged among educated, creative seekers longing for meaning and purpose in the highly secularized, individualistic, materialistic, and globally interconnected societies of the west (50).

D'Andrea's key concept is "reflexivity," which he borrows from Anthony Giddens: "the routine incorporation of new knowledge or information in environments of action that are thereby reconstituted or reorganized" (14). New Agers thus freely draw on a diverse and heterogeneous range of influences to address their "existential needs for meaning and a sense of empowerment" (14), crafting idiosyncratic blends that evolve along with their practitioners' own self-actualizing quests. It is this singular focus on the "reflexive cultivation of the self" that defines the New Age for D'Andrea and unites a diverse assortment of therapies, spiritualities, parasciences, alternative psychologies, and more under the New Age rubric.

Although the author's ethnographic work informs the book and is the explicit focus of two of its twelve chapters, on the whole D'Andrea is more interested in laying out a general theoretical model that accounts for New Age phenomena globally. The first seven chapters plumb in repetitive detail various theoretical abstractions that the author thinks are key to understanding the New Age as a scholarly category. This mapping of the contours, characteristics, and tendencies of the New Age and its antecedent influences (Enlightenment rationality, Romanticism, the counterculture of the 1960s) takes the reader through discussions of psychologization, globalization, the "crisis of modernity," neo-liberal capitalism, "reflexive xenophilia," "utilitarian individualism," and various other conceptual formulations within contemporary social theory. Yet D'Andrea completely ignores the important work defining and historicizing the New Age by scholars like Wouter Hanegraaff, Phillip C. Lucas, J. Gordon Melton, and others within the field of religious studies. As a result, he misses the esoteric roots of the New Age, which account for many of its characteristic features.

Two Brazilian case studies of the popular author Paulo Coelho (b. 1947) and the movement called Projectiology enable D'Andrea to turn his analysis from the macro- to the microlevel. These chapters show how New Age innovators like Coelho and Projectiology's founder Waldo Vieira (1932–2015) have crafted reflexive forms of spirituality that draw on and re-tool traditional religious forms (Christianity for Coelho and Spiritism for Vieira) towards projects of perfecting the self. These chapters provide much needed examples of D'Andrea's contention that the New Age "is modernity moving into the religious field" and updating it to "the complexity of globalized reflective societies" (159).

The payoff of bringing social theory to bear on the subject of the New Age is the bird's-eye view it provides of an otherwise confusing landscape. The problem with D'Andrea's definition is that potentially all forms of social life, to the extent that they center on reflexivity and self-cultivation, fall under its aegis. This is where the literature produced by scholars of religion might have helped D'Andrea define the New Age in a more precise and historically accurate way. Although the Brazilian data is valuable, the book's plodding prose and jargon-filled abstractions make it inaccessible to all but specialists and advanced graduate students interested in social theory.