Finding God in Grain: Crop Circles, Rationality, and the Construction of Spiritual Experience

Abstract

Crop circles, which are intricate geometric patterns cut in fields of grain, have taken on spiritual significance for thousands of people across the globe. Based on field work in southwest England and interviews with believers, I analyze the socially constructed bases of this form of “New Age” spirituality. Using a symbolic interactionist framework, I illustrate how believers define crop circles as spiritual using subjective and normative rationality. Crop circle culture furthers this construction by providing a normative foundation with which to understand and experience the circles, as well as a basis of legitimizing this intersubjective reality to skeptical outsiders. In these ways, and others, spiritual experience is constructed, maintained, and defended by the individual in a subcultural context.

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