Hard Work: Locating Gurdjieff in the Study of Religion/s

Abstract

What kind of data do Gurdjieff and the ‘Work’ provide the student of ‘religion’, and how is this material best approached within the disciplinary field of the study of religion/s? This article is an exercise in general orientation to the Gurdjieff ‘movement’ from the perspective of the comparative study of religion/s. It briefly reviews existing secondary sources on Gurdjieff and selected associates and descendants in order to identify lacunae in scholarly conceptualisations, before moving on to discuss how best to locate the Work academically in the modern history of culture and religion. The merits and pitfalls of three different academic approaches to representing the Gurdjieff phenomenon will be considered: (i) as a sui generis ‘Gurdjieff Studies’; (ii) as a study of a ‘new religious movement’; (iii) as data for modern social and cultural history. Despite the respective attractions of (i) and (ii), I argue for the (deferred) benefits of (iii).