Unveiling the Dual Technological and Cultural Identities of Meditation

Approaching the term ‘meditation’ in the American milieu, one encounters a wide range of use cases. Meditation is sometimes represented as a distinct religious practice, other times a perennial human behavior, and popularly a kind of secular wellness practice. Depending on the context in which one encounters the term, meditation can be a specific technique or a therapeutic category. As an intervention to make sense of these competing conceptions, one can articulate meditation as appearing either as a ‘technological’ or a ‘cultural’ artifact. These categories can represent alternating and conflated epistemic identities inherent in the approaches taken by researchers, educators, and practitioners of meditation. Providing this distinction for how meditation is treated in different contexts allows scholars to more accurately assess the state of the term within societies, and engage in reflexive inquiry into how epistemologies of meditation are informed by implicit expectations concerning each identity.