ABSTRACT

This chapter begins by exploring Mircea Eliade's analysis of primordial, shamanistic transformational ritual and a similar Hasidic view of continual self-transformation as an everyday sacred practice. It provides a theoretical context for reselfing processes by investigating classical and postmodern views of self-transformation in Marx, Weber, Melucci, and Foucault. The chapter argues that the basic categories of a political economy of social relations— alienation, exploitation, and commodiñcation— formed the basis of critical social psychology. It shows how class differentiated social identity processes shared a common absence, lack, or emptying of self. The discursive, structural shift makes the self important—intensifying both congratulatory individualism of modernity and anxious self-dispersion of postmodernity. Religious practices take power away from the self and, like the fetishism of commodities, empty human being of its capacities and potential. The chapter suggests that reselfing is a socially transformative, though microcosmic, change process and that it is an empowering counterprocess to alienation and mechanical petrification and disenchantment.