The originality of my enterprise lies in my contention that this activity is grounded in the structure of human nature (and ultimately of life and even of matter) and finds expression in every part of the world. Because it is a formative process leading to varied and inherently unpredictable outcomes, the spiritual quest is a universal fully compatible with the diversity that is inevitably its product. The meaning and scope of my central terms will become apparent as the book progresses, but in brief by spirit I mean the dynamic potentiality latent but unrealized in the given (much as form, in Aristotle's terminology, is potential in matter), and by quest the deliberate effort to transcend, through self-transformation, the limits of the given and to realize some portion of this unbounded potentiality through pursuit of a future goal that can neither be fully foreknown nor finally attained. The quest, as I conceive it, is the culminating expression of a universal activity by which humanity is in large part defined as human: a formative activity, as opposed to a static category (like "religion," "marriage," or "property" in the " consensus gentium " whose emptiness Geertz and others rightly repudiate), which finds expression, however varied, in philosophical or scientific investigation no less than in the Native American pursuit of a guardian spirit or the Siberian shaman's perilous journey to worlds beyond yet embracing our own. ![]() We must grasp, with Tambiah (1990, 112), that "the doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind or human universals and the doctrine of diversity of cultures/societies are not contradictory dogmas," and with Geertz (1973, 51) that "there is no opposition between general theoretical understanding and circumstantial understanding, between synoptic vision and a fine eye for detail." Ours is an age not only of "cultural diversity" but of "human rights," and true respect and understanding of our many differences requires recognition of the underlying commonalities that make us all-"by nature" or even "in essence"-equally human. Yet skepticism concerning often dubious and sometimes ethnocentric affirmations of human uniformities (whether by Frazer or Freud, Jung, Lévi-Strauss, or their many popularizers and epigoni) need not eventu-Īte in a relativism that rejects the very possibility of meaningful common human denominators. Sharing this respect (and some of this suspicion), I have devoted the bulk of both my research and my book to examining variant forms the quest has taken among specific peoples of our richly polychromatic globe. It is on the diversity of these practices, in the particularity of their widely differing cultural contexts, that ethnologists of our age, with deep respect for multicultural traditions and deep suspicion of facile universals, most often focus. In this book I have undertaken, after extensive research in many fields as the dimensions of my subject became increasingly evident, to examine both the essential foundations or preconditions-social, biological, psychological, and linguistic-of the spiritual quest as a fundamental human activity and some of its principal variations, as manifested in religious practices of tribal peoples throughout much of the world. ![]() My initial project, therefore, remains, in large part, for the future. ![]() I originally intended to examine some of the major forms the quest has taken in Western literature and thought from ancient to modern times, but, like any true quest, this one took a direction that could not have been fully foreseen, and opened onto new and largely unexplored territory. I began my unfinished investigation two decades ago while preparing to teach a comparative literature course at Harvard University, "The Spiritual Quest: From Virgil to Kafka" (a course I subsequently taught, in different forms, at Brooklyn College and the University of California, Davis), and returned to it years later, after completing my book The Comic Hero.
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