“Separation, but not Division”: A Southern Italian Perspective on “Lived Conspirituality”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conspirituality—that is, the connection between conspiracy theories and spirituality—has recently gained popularity in academic and non-academic circles. Often associated with populist and irrational beliefs, it has been linked to right-wing politics, faulty thinking, and disruptive and potentially violent behaviour (Greenwood 2022; Russell 2022). While these connections have been proven to be true in some cases, in this paper, rooted in my long-standing ethnographic research, I offer a contribution that illuminates other aspects of conspirituality—in line with recent attempts to honour the complexity and internal variability of the phenomenon (for example, Greenwood 2022; Ong 2021). In particular, differently from the overwhelming majority of current approaches in the study of conspirituality, I propose to frame the study of conspirituality not only by focusing on ideas and beliefs, but in conversation with the study of “lived religion” (see, for example, Ammerman 2021; Hall 2001; McGuire 2008) in a way that distinguishes the actual experience of persons from normative beliefs and practices. Similarly to what the study of “lived religion” does to the study of religion, I claim that the study of “lived conspirituality” could offer insights into the phenomenon of conspiracism, today (Ong 2020). By analyzing discourses and practices of conspiritualists that I observed on the field, I will challenge mainstream interpretations of the role of the individual and of marginality in New Age conspirituality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.006 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".