"Spiritually seeking the Maya"

This article is a theoretical essay that offers an approach to the study of new age spiritual seeking in general and to the study of New Age Maya spiritualism in particular. The theoretical framework of “spiritual seeking” and “cultic milieu” has been productive, especially regarding the relationship between emergent spiritual technologies of subjectivity, forms of modernity, and capitalist logics of consumerism. This article, however, identifies shortcomings to this research paradigm: It does not provide either the analytical focus or conceptual tools for understanding seeking spirituality through the alterity of other cultures and communities marked by racial-ethnic difference. This article explains the contradictory and confusing use of Maya and Mayan as a point of entry to illustrate the need to attend to transcultural processes and the politics of transculturation. By drawing from established work in the sociology of religion on cult typologies, I offer criteria by which to create an analytical ideal types framework that can both begin to address questions of politics, transcultural exchange, and seeking/community dynamics as well as allow for productive comparison and contrast of different emergent spiritualities and religiosities in the Americas and elsewhere. The first steps toward developing this ideal-types framework is presented by thinking through issues in establishing new age Maya spiritual seeking as objects of study.