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Feeling Religion

Feeling Religion

296 Pages

Paperback
ISBN: 9780822370376
Published By: Duke University Press
Published: January 2018

$25.95

Review
Author(s)
Author Interview

The study of emotion within the field of religion is both old and new. It is old because some of the most influential early theorists of religion, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto, held that the essence of religion was the believer’s affective, rather than rational, knowledge of God. It is new because scholars in religion, following scholars in the humanities and the natural and social sciences, have begun to think anew about the role of emotion in human social life. There are a variety of new approaches taking shape around the study of emotion, among which the editor of this volume, John Corrigan, includes “constructivist theory, affect theory, embodiment, cognitive science, the affecognitive” (10). This collection of essays embraces variation in order to demarcate possible ways of using emotion as an analytical tool for studying religion. In doing so it challenges not only those theories of religion that would treat religion primarily as a matter of propositional belief, but also those that would prioritize constructing theoretical edifices that would separate the scholar from the object of his or her research. Several terms are used to describe the subject matter of this volume: affect, emotion, and feeling. Even though all of these terms unsettle the priority of rationality in analyzing religion, defining what they mean, and whether or not they point to the same phenomenon, is difficult. Two essays in this volume think through these definitional difficulties. Diana Fritz Cates argues that constructing a stable theory of emotion across time is difficult, if not impossible. Through a comparison of Seneca and Thomas Aquinas, she shows that when we talk about emotion philosophically, we need to know the role of emotion in a philosopher’s larger theoretical framework if we want a true understanding of how that philosopher defines emotion. With this knowledge, however, it is difficult to compare different accounts of emotion across time and place. Mark Wynn makes a similar point in his essay when he shows how emotional experiences are dependent upon, even if not wholly determined by, the metaphysical assumptions that frame our understanding of the world. Anna M. Gade and June McDaniel add complexity to our understanding of emotion by considering how we prioritize some emotions over others. Gade shows how emotions connected to our relationship with the environment differ in the West and among Muslims in Indonesia. Those associated with international environmentalist groups generally assume that the earth is something that we should care for as an end in itself, whereas among Muslims in Indonesia less connected to such groups, care for the world is in service of the next life. McDaniel likewise challenges normative conceptions of emotion in the West through cross-cultural comparison, but in doing so challenges the contextualist approach for conceptualizing religious emotion. She does so by prioritizing the first-person descriptions of religious emotion. Through an analysis of Bengali Shakta literature and Shi’a ritual and poetry, McDaniel shows how those dark emotions we in the West often try to explain away as the emotions of “madmen” or “fanatics” (118) form a central role in the lives of these religious actors. While all of the essays in this volume engage with theory, four of the essays in particular work through the theoretical stakes that come with adopting one theory of emotion or another. Donovan O. Schaefer, M. Gail Hamner, and Jessica Johnson apply affect theory to different religious phenomena, and David Morgan uses the work of Émile Durkheim to examine the relationship between religion, nationalism, and sport. Schaefer and Hamner apply affect theory to texts and film. Schaefer uses feminist affect theory—often associated with the work of Lauren Berlant and Eve Sedgwick—to show that, despite their claims to the contrary, those thinkers associated with the “new atheist” movement are driven not simply by a disinterested respect for the facts but by “fear, anger, and scorn” at what they perceive to be the inadequacies of religion, an inadequacy that is also often racialized (85–86). In her analysis of several documentary films focused on religious actors, Hamner shows how, at their best, documentaries can help us “feel and then think the interval between truth and meaning” (105). Those films that seem to collapse this distinction, for example Jesus Camp, provide an audience with certainty—that the film’s subjects’ religious practices are troubling—and thus allows the complexities of religious identity to be ignored. Those that maintain this distinction, and create cinematic moments that reveal the space between truth and meaning do better on Hamner’s account. For example, Trembling before G-d reveals to the viewer the complexity of being both an LGBTIQ person and an Orthodox Jew without giving the viewer the satisfaction of knowing how to easily reconcile these identities. Johnson, drawing on affect theory, shows the ways that affect moves between subjects without ever settling. She argues that scholars who do ethnographic work need “a willingness to acknowledge our vulnerability and lack of control as fieldwork involves us in unpredictable social experiences through unruly bodily encounters” (212). While not drawing on affect theory, Morgan’s essay follows a similar line, showing that people are bonded together through collective action, and that such action is primarily transferred from person to person affectively rather than rationally. Watching World Cup football binds the people of a nation together and “sacralizes” that bonding (227–28). It is not that football is religion, for Morgan, but rather that football is a social practice that bonds people together in the way that Émile Durkheim once thought was the exclusive province of religion. Challenges to prominent theories of emotion appear in essays by Abby Kluchin and Sarah M. Ross. In focusing on the effects of treating affect as a fluid phenomenon that points to the instability of the subject, Kluchin suggests that affect theory, at times, neglects the importance of autonomy in marginalized groups’ social and political projects. She draws on psychoanalytic theory to show how the importance of affect can be preserved without merely treating the individual as a “site to be traversed” (251). Kluchin reminds us of the normative implications for adopting one theory of affect over another and forces us to reflect on the ethical implications of such adoption. Ross’s essay complements Kluchin’s by showing how the first-person perspective is indispensable when thinking about the response of an audience to religious music. Ross challenges what she sees as the bias in musicology toward examining the technicalities of written music when studying the emotion that music elicits. Taking objective measures of people’s emotional states is difficult, she argues, and because of this difficulty she advocates reflecting on and self-reporting one’s own emotional state while listening to music. A question that will surely be at the forefront of readers’ minds when grappling with these essays is whether or not current affect theory recreates the same problems associated with the (Protestant) emphasis on feeling typical of theories of religion that are indebted to Otto or Schleiermacher. Indeed, relatively little space in this volume is devoted to providing a genealogical account of the role of affect or emotion in past theories of religion, and how we can make sure that returning to emotion does not return us to Protestant biases. In other words, an account of how theories of emotion can be applied to religion is not all that is needed. What is also needed is an account of how our ideas about religion have influenced our understanding of emotion. Joshua S. Lupo received his doctorate in religion from Florida State University in 2018. His dissertation, “After Essentialism: Possibilities in Phenomenology of Religion,” traces the relationship between the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and the work of phenomenologists of religion such as Mircea Eliade and Rudolf Otto. Joshua Lupo
Date Of Review:

August 23, 2018

John Corrigan’s new volume, Feeling Religion, was released by Duke University Press in December 2017. Graduate intern Jeremy Hanes spoke with Corrigan on the phone at his office at Florida State University in July 2018.

JH: Could you explain the contents of Feeling Religion and the main takeaway you want readers to get from it?

JC: Well, as a collection of essays from a lot of parts of the scholarly world—some are historians, anthropologists, sociologists, people who work in literary studies, philosophy…there are a number of different areas—what I wanted to do was get people together who could describe the kind of specific interests that readers in their own fields would have when it came to the study of religion and emotion, and to present some kind of picture of what it would be like to study religion and emotion from that perspective. These essays were all originally papers presented at a conference at the National Humanities Center, and the object of that conference was to get people to talk about all the different ways we study religion and emotion. One of the things that’s very important, I think, in the beginning stages of the coalescence of a new scholarly field is that we develop a way of talking about it that does not become a secret language, a jargon, so full of neologisms that we miss the point, such that people who aren’t already familiar with that language won’t be able to understand it. So my idea has been all along that the study of religion and emotion is, in certain ways, a new kind of thing—although people have studied religion and emotion for centuries, even millennia—and that we try to get to some common denominators in the way we talk about it, so that we maximize the possibility for people to draw on scholarship in this new field.

JH: At the National Humanities Center conference, did you feel like people were engaging with each other’s methods and approaches to emotion and religion? In some of the chapters, for instance, I noticed there is a kind of back and forth between whether we’re talking about emotion or affect. Could you speak to the way people are trying to nail down the terminology?

JC: Yes, I think it’s important to be somewhat specific in terminology, but I also think it’s a potential danger if not done well. We have to watch out for this risk that we become too wedded to one set of terms over another. One of the things, I think, that everyone at the conference was interested in doing was to make sure that whether we were talking about affect or emotion or feeling, passion, or anything else, that we were still talking about some of the same things. So although there are some scholars who really focus on affect, others on emotion, the terms themselves are only useful to a certain point. In fact, the reason that we gravitate to one term or another is because the scholarly literature that we pay attention to has already done that. So people in literary studies tend to talk more about affect; in philosophy, they tend to talk more about emotion, as do people in history. People who work in the social sciences, they talk about both of those. The point is, we’re all talking about the same sort of thing at some level, and although it’s good to leverage the specific theory, whether it has to do with affect or emotion or feeling, it’s useful only in order to get to what I see as shared goals. We still have to learn to talk clearly about the same thing.

JH: Your interest in veering away from some secret language or jargon seems to line up with something you mention in your introductory chapter, which is that emotions tend to be inscrutable to analysis. What it is about religious emotions in particular, or religious affects, that are so prone to this perceived need for secret language, and different sets of terminologies?

JC: Well, it’s up for debate whether there are such things as religious emotions. Are there classes of emotions that we call religious that are different from other emotions? For a long time, people said there were. There was a specific kind of feeling people believed was religious, and it was thought to differ from other kinds of emotions, other kinds of feelings. That’s up for debate. But it might be more useful to talk about emotions like this: “Here are some emotions we find prominent in religion, here’s some emotions we find in other places, and here’s some emotions we find in both.” I think that we’re overstating things when we talk about specifically religious emotions. That said, there’s been an effort to talk about religious emotions, as you just said, as if they’re inscrutable. I think part of the reason for this is that people would like to keep some kind of idea of mystery about religion, some kind of sense that it isn’t reducible to an analysis of emotion, that there’s some kind of hidden content that you can’t completely get to. So the whole idea of religious emotions, to me, can be a way of ducking a serious critical analysis of emotion. Emotions might be hard to study, they might be complex, but I don’t think they’re inscrutable. If they were inscrutable, we wouldn’t study them.

JH: There seems to be a recognition that emotion isn’t a given or a natural category, right? That understandings of it stem from personal history, gender, race, different factors. For instance, in Abby Kluchin’s piece, she says that not everyone is equally counted as a subject. Scholars in postcolonial studies talk about how people deemed or created as “subjects” of discourse have been said to be more prone to “religion,” and more prone to emotional display. Do you think the contributors are recognizing this history?

JC: I think that gender and race and ethnicity are absolutely crucial to the study of religion and emotion. Not just those categories though; I think age is really important; class is really important; in certain contexts I think language is important; family and constructions of family are very important in all of this. I think the personal lives of people, how they grew up and what they did, when you get down to that granular level of study, becomes very important as well. Those kinds of big structures that we always pay attention to, such as race and gender and so forth, those are really important. And the study of religion and emotion has taken account of those things, and it can also shed light on them. By studying emotion and religion, sometimes you come to insights about gender or insights about race that you might not have come to in other ways. It provides a tool, a kind of leverage, that can crack open some problems that seem very resistant to other forms of analysis, and other approaches.

JH: That builds off of another idea mentioned in your introduction, that you understand religion as practice and emotion as performance. What lines of inquiry open up when you work from this understanding of religion and emotion?

JC: I don’t think practice and performance are completely different. When I wrote that, I was trying to highlight something about emotion, mainly that emotion is performed with reference to certain kinds of religious contexts—ritual contexts, literary contexts, community stuff:. Emotion is prompted by what’s going on in other aspects of community life. It can also be diminished by what’s going on in other aspects of community life. Religion is practiced as traditional, sometimes in a way that emotion is not. You know, you practice tradition. Emotion, of course, is practice as well. Monique Scheer has been very clear about emotion as practice. But sometimes I prefer the word performance because when you talk about emotion and religion, it’s not a practice in the same way as habitual genuflection in front of an altar, or a habitual uttering of a prayer at a certain time of day. It’s a performance in that it has that very specific dimension of affectivity which is often spontaneously or unpredictably provoked. Emotion is in many ways culturally constructed, but sometimes it is also unforeseeable. It isn’t just a rote practice. It is a performance that certainly draws upon tradition, while at the same time altering it or bending it because of the immediate circumstances, including any changes taking place in the body of the feeling person.

JH: You don’t seem to see a difference in the way certain theorists differentiate between emotion and affect in terms of spontaneity, with affect being uncapturable while emotions are constructed culturally. Do you see both emotion and affect having a potential for spontaneity as they’re performed?

JC: I don’t think they’re irreconcilable. What people mean by emotion, what people mean by affect…they’re more alike than different. As I said, when people talk about one or the other, it’s because the literature that they found most useful to their particular kind of research has gravitated toward using one term or the other. I think it is most useful to recognize culture in each, and the body—nerves, hormones, organs—in each. It is a mistake to pursue them analytically as if they were separate things. That might make for informed-sounding discussion in closed circles of specialists, but in the long run it is likely to be counterproductive, bordering on academic conceit.

JH: Is there anything else that you want our readers to know that we haven’t covered so far?

JC: I think that the study of emotion and religion can open up a lot of questions that are sometimes difficult to see when taking approaches that do not recognize emotion. But more importantly, we’re just not doing a very good job of studying religion unless we make the study of emotion a really essential component of our research. We miss out. You can’t imagine having a conversation with friends over the course of an evening and not talking about feelings, whether you’re talking about your own, or someone else’s, or about some kind of collective identity that has something to do with feeling. It’s a way we take ourselves to be human, how we are related one to another, how we have roles to play within these social-historical formations. So unless we pay close attention to that in the study of religion, we’re not getting the larger story.

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