Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations

Rating:
Summary: Emotion Boosts Religious Studies
Review: Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations by John Corrigan (Oxford University Press) (Hardcover) Over the past decade interest in emotion has developed very substantially across a number of academic disciplines, including religious studies. This anthology of recent papers is the first collection to address the relation of religion and emotion. Each of the selected pieces is a foundational interpretative essay in the renaissance of the study of religion and emotion. The authors examine attitudes toward and expressions of emotion in a wide range of religious traditions and periods, through various textually based, historical, and ethnographic approaches. Among the themes considered are the relation of emotion to moral or religious norms, the role of emotion in faith, religious emotion as a performance of feeling in ritual con-texts, and the relation of emotion to religious language. Specific topics range from filial emotions and filial values in medieval Korean Buddhism to weeping and spirituality in sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism. A substantial introduction places the essays within the broader context of the study of emotion and elucidates the major themes of the book. This volume provides a much-needed introduction to this growing area of study and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of comparative religion, anthropology, and psychology.
Excerpt from Editors Introduction: The essays collected in this book is a remarkable interweaving of emotional life with morality, especially on the manner in which emotionality ex-presses, reinforces, is shaped by, and challenges social and moral orders. In this volume the settings for religious emotion vary widely, from medieval Europe and Japan to nineteenth-century Korea and twentieth-century Melanesia and India. An assortment of religious traditions is represented: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and indigenous religions. Much of the analysis in these various studies would comport with the observation of William A. Christian Jr. in Chapter i that "People in society produce their own stimuli-entertainment in the form of theater, games, celebrations, religious rituals-that provoke necessary emotions, whether laughter and fun, tension and release, or weeping and sorrow." Christian explores the "economy of sentiment" underlying religious weeping in Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For Christian, Spanish weeping was a learned behavior, and expression of emotion in the religious context accordingly was a matter of individual discernment of cultural expectations for feeling and of the effectiveness of theological ideas and social mores in organizing the timing and expression of emotion in tears. Religious weeping expressed feeling, but at the same time it served as a means to produce a desired emotional state. The public performance of weeping at various times in the annual Catholic calendar was a collective testimony of religiously licit feeling toward God, and the expectation of the performers was that God would respond benevolently.
The investigation of culturally shaped emotional performances in religion has borne fruit with regard to a number of religious traditions. Another body of research illustrates the manner in which the display of emotion in ritual settings, or the depiction of emotion in religious literature, challenges, rather than cooperates with, dominant social mores. In a study of Sufi emotionality, Helene Basu details, in Chapter 2, the way the emotional element in the religious life of Indian Sufis is fundamental to the construction of resistance to traditional social hierarchies. Basu shows how groups of low status manipulate culturally derived understandings of emotion in such a way as to lay claim, through their emotionality, to the pinnacle of social status, and how religious ritual facilitates the performance of such status reversal. Her exposition of the complex nature of local Sufi ritual, where numerous ideological threads-good and evil, male and female, hot and cold, and so forth-are interwoven, reveals both the clarity and ambiguity of a culture of religion and emotion. Her study also exemplifies how a focus on emotion can lead to the discovery of previously unsuspected linkages among the various elements of religious ritual. For Basu, the subversive aspect of religion consists of emotional experiences and cognitions interwoven in the liminal contexts of ritual, where status reversal takes place.
Another challenge to the social order framed by religiously grounded conceptualization and performance of emotion is represented in a study of religious literature and family structure in Korea. In Chapter 3, JaHyun Kim Haboush demonstrates how the depiction of emotion in Buddhist-based popular literature provided a framework for challenging Confucianist insistence on primogeniture and resistance to female filiality. Engaged by Koreans as myth, that literature was embraced as counter-hegemonic discourse and served to delegitimate a dominant Confucian worldview. Its effectiveness in so doing rested on the fact that although it shared with the Confucian worldview a valuation of filial emotion, it depicted love of one's parents in such a way as to critically confront the social logic of Confucianism, to advance a view of the social consequences of filial emotion that Confucianist policy disallowed. Haboush, in focusing on characterizations of emotion in religious literature, is able to identify key contradictions in Korean social life and to demonstrate how ideals and imagery drawn from one religious tradition can be marshaled both to reinforce and to undermine another.
The place of emotion in religious literature is likewise the subject of Debora K. Shuger's study of Renaissance literature in Chapter 4. Shuger aims squarely at the view of the history of Western thought as a struggle between philosophy as the pursuit of truth, and rhetoric as sophistic discourse characterized by emotional play. Offering the example of Renaissance sacred rhetorics-religious writings published between 1500 and 1700-Shuger argues that emotion, taken to be a key element of religious experience, was linked with knowledge in premodern epistemology. Sacred rhetorics were important because they were conceived as the means by which knowledge that was hidden from the mind was made visible. Rhetorical writings, through their appeal to the emotions, allowed persons to fully apprehend truth that was otherwise only vaguely sensed. Religious writings opened pathways to truth by sparking the imagination with images that "make what is unseen accessible to both feeling and thought." Emotion accordingly was fused with argument. In the sacred rhetorics, emotion and knowledge were "mutually dependent," joined in the perception of truth and the judgment of propositions, and thereby equally represented in the construction of moral visions.
The association of emotions with cognition likewise is the subject of Harvey Whitehouse's analysis of Melanesian initiation rites in Chapter 5. The "rites of terror," that is, the ordeals undertaken by initiates, are for Whitehouse more than simple cognitive processes in which the transmission of religious knowledge takes place through a transaction between teacher and pupils. Drawing on psychological research supporting the daim that events are better remembered if they are emotionally rich, and emphasizing the collective aspect of initiation rites-initiates together with their supervisors-Whitehouse argues that "extreme emotions and cognitive shocks become intertwined" in the rites of terror, leaving a "flashbulb memory" of the events. In this way the proceedings form an occasion of collective revelation for all involved, leaving a powerful 1 and living residuum of images (of persons and particular events) that continuously shape religious and political community.
For Shuger, images that appealed to the emotions were the portal to philosophical truth for Renaissance religious writers, and for Whitehouse, the formation of commanding images in initiation rites came about through the combination of emotional and cognitive elements in those events. In Chapter 6, Steven M. Parish, in a study of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley, proposes, like Shuger, that emotions are judgments and, like Whitehouse, that emotions engage people more powerfully with their world and "prepare people to be agents. The experience of emotion mediates engagement with life, priming social actors to find meaning in events and experiences . . . readying them to act." Like Whitehouse, he views emotion as more than cognitive judgment, as more than moral discourse. In proposing a middle ground between theories that decontextualize emotion (i.e., in favor of universal psychological/physiological processes) and those that disembody it (i.e., those that focus exclusively on its cultural embeddedness), he argues that the Newar feel moral evaluations as well as experience them cognitively. For Parish, moral emotions are moral judgments in the sense that feelings embody moral evaluations. Persons do not form judgments based solely on their understanding of social norms, but actually feel the pain of shame or remorse in their moral orientations. The heart, nuga: as the center of emotional life, actually hurts, flutters, and sinks. Through this embodiment of emotion and moral judgment, Newars frame a worldview, they "ethicize and sacralize mind, emotion, and self and come to know themselves as moral beings."
Like Parish, Gary L. Ebersole, in Chapter 7, complicates our understanding of the relationship between emotional expression and moral discourse. In a study of ritual weeping, he observes the tendency of some researchers to vie the tears of other peoples and times through a lens ground by the ideas and cultural assumptions of their own situations. This inclination to universalize the meaning of tears, especially with regard to the moral dimensions of weeping, sometimes includes a view of ritual weeping as faked behavior. Ebersole criticizes such projects as shortsighted, first of all, for their inability to recognize how actors exploit ritual weeping for their own purposes-how they turn cultural expectations into legitimations for personal rather than collective ends-and second, for how they depersonalize those who participate in ritual weeping, rendering them passive players, emotionally disconnected as they go ' through the motions of a collective drama. He proposes that ritual weeping be viewed as "symbolic activity that marks out the existence or the breach of social and/or moral relationships" so that some weeping might be understood as resistance to social norms, rather than performance of them. Or, as in the case of filial emotion in Korea, weeping may have contested meanings. For Ebersole, the moral discourses represented in incidences of ritual weeping are complex, at times even contradictory, and consist of meanings framed by personal interests as well as social expectations.
The fact of variant meanings of an emotional performance is directly addressed in Chapter 8 by Paul M. Toomey in observing three bhakti traditions at Mount Govardhan. Arguing that bhakti devotionalists objectify emotion as food, Toomey takes a forthrightly constructivist position, and as such his approach shares much with Basu's. But where Basu focuses on evidence of conceptual correspondences across an extended sample of contexts-cosmic, gender, social status, and so forth-to strengthen her claim for coherency among seemingly diverse aspects of religious life, Toomey takes a more explicitly comparative tack. He organizes his study in such a way as to account for variations in the construction of the emotional component of religious pilgrimage. He analyzes how emotion is objectively represented in the ritual of eating, which includes all aspects of setting, menu, preparation (including the identity of the preparer), calendar, duration, and consumption. Material aspects of religious culture, especially icons and food, are associated with emotion as repositories for it, in fact serving as a reservoir for emotion that is transmitted to devotees in the course of the food ritual. In consuming food, persons take into themselves holy emotion supplied to them by the deity. Toomey then shows how variations in the experience of emotion-as motherly love, erotic passion, and so forth-rest on differences in the background of the performers, determined by their membership in one or another of a particular sect of pilgrims.
The association of emotion with material substance is present in many religious traditions. The identification of emotion with food, as in certain cases of bhakti devotionalism, and the association of shame with the pain of the heart among the Newars are two examples of the ways certain aspects of emotionality and morality are materialistically coded. In her analysis of emotion in Bengali religious thought in Chapter 9, June McDaniel writes about the way emotion is "substantial rather than conceptual" in Indian traditions, one part of the Indian universe that is experienced as networks of continually flowing substance. Emotion is not a passive response to the world, but an active engagement in it, a matter of aesthetic and spiritual self-making, in which per-sons arrange emotions (raga, colors) as paints on a canvas as they construct the "subtle body," or ideal self. McDaniel's interpretation is grounded in analysis of language, especially with regard to the complexes of metaphors that are deployed by Indians in addressing various aspects of emotional life. And, like several of the other authors whose work is represented here, she stresses the difference between Western and Indian approaches to emotion, in particular the Indian focus on intense emotion as opposed to the everyday.
Elliot R. Wolfson in Chapter 10 also focuses on extreme emotion in writing
about sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism. In his exploration of the emotional dynamics underlying the Kabbalists' ecstatic journey to the heavenly realms, Wolfson proposes that weeping served as the focal point for a complex of religious ideas and behavior. Sixteenth-century Jews linked ecstasy with esoteric knowledge and cultivated weeping as an "ecstatic technique" that would gain them that knowledge. Wolfson invokes testimony from the diary of a Jew from that period, Hayyim Vital, arguing that Vital viewed weeping as both the avenue to ecstatic experience and a means to knowledge. Weeping opened the gates of the higher realms, and as such was associated with the ascent of the soul. In this study, Wolfson also demonstrates the manner in which ideas about gender, the phallus, seminal emissions, the symbolism of the eye, sleep, and death were interwoven in Kabbalists' views of the meanings of ecstatic weeping. The picture of Jewish mysticism that emerges is one in which emotional experience itself is the goal of the mystical ritual of weeping, as well as the means by which the soul makes its ascent and obtains gnosis. The performative aspects of mystical emotionality accordingly stand side by side with the acquisition of religious knowledge in this form of Jewish mysticism.
The focus on a single individual, such as Hayyim Vital, can reveal some-thing of the complexities and subtleties of emotional life that the investigation of collective emotional experience cannot. Moreover, in certain cases it is possible to situate an actor within a historical context in such a way as to illustrate that person's creativity in negotiating overlapping individual and collective frameworks for emotional life. In Chapter ii, Catherine Peyroux sets out to describe the "affective world of Frankish nobility" through an analysis of St. Gertrude's furor. Gertrude's anger is linked to her rejection of a suitor proposed to her by her parents. By demonstrating the location of Gertrude's emotionality within the world of feeling of the seventh-century nobles, with particular attention to Gertrude's self-understanding of her betrothal to Christ, Peyroux is able to explain the intensity of Gertrude's response, its religious meaning, and the appeal of the story to her subsequent hagiographers. Gertrude's rage at her parents' presentation to her of a prospective husband reveals both her devotion to God, whom she takes as her only true husband, and her realization that she will open herself to the charge of adultery should she agree to the marriage her parents have arranged. Working from a hagiographic text, Peyroux examines the various possible meanings of the furor therein described on the way to concluding that the saint's rage was in fact taken by her community as a sign of her status as the beloved spouse of Christ. For those who knew her as abbess and for those who engaged The Life of St. Gertrude, her anger represented her religious identity as the bride of Christ, her authority as a spiritual leader, and her keen grasp of the socioemotional codes of the Frankish aristocracy.
Just as cultural codes govern the emotional lives of persons as they interact in various social settings; certain cultural assumptions about emotional aspects of self can frame a group's understanding of the relationship between humans and superhuman beings. Charlotte E. Hardman, in observing Lohorung Rai in Nepal, notes how emotion saturates the relationships of Lohorung with the powerful spirits of ancestors (sammang). In the relatively seamless world of people, nature, sammang, society, mind, body, past, and present, emotion experienced by the sammang is also experienced by the Lohorung. Because of the interconnectedness of all phenomena, the anger of sammang, which can be the result of persons' transgression of social codes for behavior, is also experienced by Lohorung, usually as physical pain or misfortune, such as a landslide. Just as the social expression of anger is accepted and even encouraged by Lohorung in certain situations, so, too, are maladies engendered by the angering of sammang understandable as part of the dynamics of emotion on a grand scale. The "emotion rules," as it were, are not merely social, they are cosmic. By focusing on emotion as a key to understanding Lohorung conceptualizations of morality, self, and the superhuman, Hardman is able to demonstrate the profundity of the linkages among those aspects of Lohorung culture, and contribute as well to discussions about the embodiedness of emotion alongside its construction in culture.
By linking various aspects of religion-ritual, authority, community, ideas, and other features-to a new center, the study of religion and emotion promises to disclose meanings previously hidden. Thus far, research has taken shape as an assortment of approaches and themes. Like most new academic ventures, it enjoys the luxury of relative freedom from confining academic discourses and, in the absence of a tradition of investigation that maps and authorizes specific terrain, it can explore where it wishes.
The study of religion and emotion is in an early stage, well-begun but still finding its feet, and not yet invested in a secret language, an exclusivistic discourse that identifies it as a field of study and reduces its view to a handful of official themes. To realize its ample possibilities, however, it eventually will have to generate classifications of its subject matter and develop linkages among its various foci. But in the course of that enterprise, it must avoid doctrinaire taxonomies. It must look beyond disciplinary boundaries in theory and method. It must remain sensitive to the differences and similarities between culturally constructed standards for emotion and the actual emotional experiences of people. The research represented in this volume exemplifies some of the most promising approaches to religion and emotion, but it by no means exhausts them. Other studies framed by theological and philosophical concerns, and especially the work of neuroscientists, will make their own contributions to the development of this area of study. The consequences of all of this research may be far-reaching. As investigation of religion and emotion
from all of these perspectives progresses, it is likely to challenge current paradigms for the study of religion, and it may lead to the reconsideration of the study of religion as a whole.