Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As an avid on-and-off yoga enthusiast, I was almost giddy to read Paul Heelas's recent book Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism, hoping for some scholarly ammunition to justify the purchase of the hundred-dollar yoga pants I ideologically oppose yet secretly wish to purchase. Throughout the pages, my ideological opposition eventually won out, as Heelas provides an extremely well-researched treatise on contemporary spiritualities of life that encompass holistic activities and practices such as yoga, tai chi, reiki, and art therapy. Heelas dismisses the easy temptation to reduce these activities to the hedonistic consumption thesis that is prevalent in much of the relevant literature by exposing us to the underlying meaning of holistic activities. By examining the ways in which these activities can serve as countercultures to consumerism and capitalist modernity, Heelas moves away from typical conceptions of “airy fairy” spiritualities by exposing a deeper experiential significance of these practices, moving beyond reductionist consumeristic consumption models.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".