Channeling is an old practice dressed up in a new name. Every culture has its conduits to the afterlife. In late 20th-century America, it seems those conduits tend to be primarily female, middle-class, and in touch with their inner Sufi warriors. Starting in the early '80s with JZ Knight and her 9,000-year-old Sufi guide, Ramtha, channeling in its most recent, new-age persona entered the mainstream consciousness. Earlier, in the days of good old-fashioned seances, people visited mediums to get in touch with the deceased; now they go to hear variations on 12-step affirmations. In his book
The Channeling Zone, Michael F. Brown, a professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at Williams College, offers an insightful look at the religious, commercial, and psychological aspects of channeling.
Professor Brown bills himself as a "participant-observer" in his study, a role that permits him to explore some aspects of the subject at greater depth. His book details the phenomenon of channeling without attempting either to debunk or support it. Although Brown provides an artful analysis of a controversial practice, some readers may find it frustrating that he describes channeling's rather self-absorbed messages at length but seldom submits them to rigorous examination.
[An] artful analysis of a largely artless, anti-analytical phenomenon...Happily,
The Channeling Zone digs beneath the fluff [of its subject]. Mr. Brown explores the ways channeling experiments with sexual identity (most channels are female, while most of the spirits they embody are male), retails religion and celebrates our post-modern fascination with multiple identities (channeling has 'elevated the protean impulse to a sacred principle'). He sees channeling, correctly, as utterly American in its individualism, commercialism and faith in progress...Mr. Brown...deals splendidly with the subtexts of channeling. (Philip Zaleski
New York Times Book Review )
Brown spent four years studying channelers and their clientele in New Mexico, Arizona, and Upstate New York, often working as a participant-observer in channeling sessions. His descriptions of these encounters are detached but vivid, often admiring, and not without a sense of humor. In modern channeling Brown sees the continuation of a positive tradition of renegade spirituality that dates back to the birth of the nation. He also recognizes a worldview that is largely asocial, amoral, and self-absorbed, as well as a sense of 'universal community' that seems ironically at odds with the civic engagement necessary in a true community. (Will Hermes
Utne Reader )
Michael Brown is an anthropologist, who is admirably typical of his trade in refusing to be drawn into endorsement or rejection of the beliefs of those he studies. It is revealing that the mere fact that he takes an interest in channeling is a matter of surprise to some of his academic colleagues. (Hugo Meynell
Globe and Mail [Toronto] )
[An] interesting and objective new work...Brown's book is part anthropological account, part history. He aims to show that a seemingly bizarre and marginal phenomenon in modern life actually has parallels in American religious history and reveals much about the American psyche past and present...[Brown] has interviewed 40 channelers and hundreds of session participants. The fearless anthropologist himself took part in numerous sessions and weekend seminars. These ranged from informal meetings in suburban living rooms to elaborate, staged events with professional channelers like Kevin Ryerson. (David Myers
Chicago Tribune )
Michael Brown's investigation into New Age religiosity and specifically into the phenomenon of channelling is lucid and informational and shall come to rank as one of the more accessible and comprehensible presentations of 'a diffuse social movement of people committed to pushing the boundaries of self and bringing spirituality into everyday life'...For anyone seeking a provocative and thorough, yet entertaining, understanding of the New Age and the practice of channelling, [this book] is an excellent and highly recommended work. (Michael York
Journal of Contemporary Religion [UK] )
The Channeling Zone explores the quintessentially American phenomenon of channeling. Michael Brown donned the hat of a participant observer, attending New Age workshops and interviewing both practitioners and participants. Channeling practices range from the bizarre to the therapeutic, with channelers (or channels, as they prefer to be called) acting as vessels for noncorporeal entities who emerge from the past, the future, or other worlds. (Diane Diamond
Contemporary Sociology )
Michael Brown's
Channeling Zone is an absorbing book, eminently readable and also exemplary for its brand of scholarship. In it Brown seeks to provide a comprehensive account of the late-twentieth-century phenomenon called 'channeling,' a variant, broadly speaking, of spiritualist activity in the United States. With an anthropological background and a sophisticated adaptation of fieldwork methodologies to the demands of his subject, Brown moves well beyond the traditional anthropologist in his pursuit of this new urban shamanism and in his ability to articulate its concerns with religious studies sensitivities. He is also willing to glance, however briefly, backwards through time to point to nineteenth-century spiritualism in a comparative gesture that help makes his work an overture, at least, to a new ethnographic history. What is as remarkable is Brown's evenhandedness in treating his subject. There are no snide remarks here, no subtle asides to remind the reader that he thinks these folks are crazy; nor, on the other side, are there saccharine celebrations of religious freedom and creativity among channelers. Rather, in a series of chapters that probe the phenomenon of channeling from a variety of perspectives, Brown examines the cultural world out of which channelers operate and how that world works. He explores questions about individual expression and communal formations, about theological meaning-making and gendered roles, about commerce and commodity in the goods of the spirit...Brown has produced a solid work that makes an important contribution to out knowledge of contemporary New Age culture. He has also produced a model study for a new kind of scholarship that positions itself in a place from which both criticism and kindness are possible and out of which both methodological suspicions and regard can come into play. (Catherine L. Albanese
Journal of the American Academy of Religion )
[An] admirable new study of channeling--the popular New Age practice of receiving spiritual information and guidance from 'higher sources'...Brown covers the more commonly discussed aspects of channeling in a clear and well-informed manner, and his discussions of the relation between channeling and so-called 'multiple personality disorder' merit particular mention...Readers owe him their gratitude for indeed keeping a near-perfect balance between 'respect and detachment,' thereby producing what must be considered one of the very best introductions not only to channeling but to the New Age phenomenon in general. (Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion )
[A] provocative work...[Brown's] accounts of his personal involvement with a number of channeling groups are at once empathetic, good-humored, skeptical and critical...This is a fine work: engagingly written, theoretically sophisticated, skeptically sympathetic. (Peter W. Williams
American Studies [UK] )
