Thomas Sullivan

Thesis Title: “As Above, So Below": Contemporary British Cosmologies of Spirituality and the New Age

My research focuses on the interconnections between lived experiences of popular New Age spirituality and anthropological theory. Following, and critiquing, the cutting-edge "ontological turn" in anthropology, my research understands the New Age a critique of mainstream Western culture, which provides new ways for us to reconsider anthropology itself.

I am a social anthropology PhD student and artist working with text, sound, and performance, researching "New Age" spirituality and wider esotericism in contemporary Britain. My research is designed to push anthropology to its limits, drawing from the anthropological and artistic avant-garde, as well as the esoteric cosmologies and of my ethnographic interlocutors. In doing so, anthropology itself is rethought as ontological deconceptual processes.