ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, ‘belief’ has a taken-for-granted status, with casual references to ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’ masking deeply held but rarely articulated assumptions. In this chapter I shall draw upon primary empirical data and relevant secondary data to argue that how people make sense of their paranormal experiences depends on their pre-existing ‘relationship-based’ beliefs. Only by expanding what scholars understand about belief does it become clear that much of belief is related not to intellectualist statements but to emotional, embodied relational experience.
