2025 Bassingthwaighte Fellows Lecture

‘Gurdjieff and the Guru Field: Analysing the Life of a New Religious Movement using a framework derived from Bourdieu’.

Dr. Steven Sutcliffe

Monday, September 29 | 5:30pm doors for a 5:45pm start

In this lecture I will explore the emergence and growth of the Gurdjieff movement, now a little over one hundred years old, through the sociological approach developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. I will first locate Gurdjieff and his followers within cultural networks of the interwar period which included new interests in subjectivity, psychology, ‘spirituality’, dance and literature. The religious authorities who participated in these network formed what Amanda J. Lucia has called a ‘guru field’ and it is within this nexus that we can locate G. I. Gurdjieff (c. 1866?-1949) as one of numerous teachers and writers offering expertise for ‘seekers’ in a new ‘search culture’. I will use the Gurdjieff movement as a case study to shift focus from the South Asian roots of guru discourse, which provide the basis of Lucia’s model, into the rather different contexts of West Asia and Europe, which will help to develop the transnational traction of the model. At the same time I will analyse the structure of the guru field, again with Gurdjieff as the case study, using Bourdieu’s key concepts of field, habitus and capital.

Please join us for some refreshments after the talk.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Dr Steven Sutcliffe was formerly Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Edinburgh and is now an Independent Scholar based in Stirling, Scotland. He is a scholar of religion in late modernity with a focus on two main fields: new religion/s and ‘spirituality’, especially in Europe and Nordic countries, and the sociological history of Religious Studies since 1950. His methods are interdisciplinary and draw on oral and social history, sociology and ethnography. Publications include Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (2003) and three-co-edited collections: Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality (2000, with Marion Bowman), New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion (2014, with Ingvild Sælid Gilhus) and The Problem of Invented Religions (with Carole Cusack).

Dr Sutcliffe is a past President of the British Association for the Study of Religions and has also published widely on Religious Studies, including the edited collection Religion: Empirical Studies (2004), and a paper for the 50th anniversary issue of the journal Religion, called ‘What’s in a Name? The Case for Study of Religions’.

With Professor Carole Cusack, he is currently researching the oral and archival history of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky movement since its origins in and around the Russian Revolution and interwar Modernism. He is also preparing a monograph on European ‘Life Reform’ networks c. 1907-1957 for the Edinburgh University Press series on Scottish Religious Cultures, based on the archive of the Scottish vegetarian, and conscientious objector, Dugald Semple (1884-1964)