The Emotional Side of the Study of Religion?

Can you imagine how might you productively apply an analysis of emotion to your own research?

Preliminary Thoughts:
I can truly say that before this week I had never heard of scholarly discussions connecting the words emotion and religion. I think that it is because of my preconceived ideas about the word emotion, and that as a scholar it is less reliable to study emotions than studying empirical evidence. As a result I tend to think of emotion and religion as two separate spheres of study. I am not entirely sure where my ideas about emotion were conceived, but I think that my training in history and historical methods have had a large impact. In my studies I tend to focus more on the provenance of a text; the date of composition, the source/authorship, and the way in which a text borrows/incorporates motifs and themes from other literature. By focusing on these aspects of a text I have largely ignored the idea of emotion in my studies.

What is Emotion?:
The study of emotion is a recent development in the field of religious studies. Corrigan writes that it came about as a reaction against the analytical model proposed by thinkers such as Emile Durkheim (5). The analytical model they proposed focused on the investigation of sources, causes and explanations of religion, and had no interest in the study of emotion. Since then scholarship has moved from using an analytical approach towards a deeper appreciation of the value of emotion in both modern and ancient cultures.

But what is emotion? It is a difficult term to define and for many scholars it remains inexplainable (6). Corrigan does not lay out a single all-encompassing definition, but somehow manages to elude the issue by explaining around the term. He does this by pointing out the origins of the study of emotion and some of the problems which it presents. The closest he comes to a definition is when he describes emotion and religion as a new center for which aspects of religion (ritual, authority, community, ideas, etc.) can be studied with the intention of disclosing “meanings previously hidden” (25). Thus, emotion is a lens through which we can seek to understand religious acts.

Problems:
One of the problems of studying emotion is the danger of universalism. In the article by Elliot R. Wolfson, he writes about extreme weeping as a characteristic Kabbalist spiritual practice. It is through this experience of intense emotional fervor which an individual can receive “revelatory experiences or mystical illumination” (Wolfson, 272). By doing a study focusing on emotions modern readers could inevitably draw connections between the weeping of the Kabbalists and modern expressions of weeping. While this could add understanding to the Kabbalists’ weeping, it could also diminish the value of their weeping. If we wanted to understand the significance of the weeping we should first seek to place it within its historical period and compare the different emotional experiences of that time. If we simply compare their weeping to modern conceptions of weeping we could undervalue or overvalue the importance of that emotional fervor as a religious experience. (Again, my emphasis on a historical approach creeps up)

Corrigan mentions in his introduction, “the study of religion, is steeped in issues of definition, questions about reductivity, and debate about the role of emotion in cultures” (7). I thought about this as I was reading through some of the articles and concluded that the term “emotion” is really no better than the term “religion”. It seems like emotion is used as a way of trying to get away from some of the stigma associated with the term religion. Not only is it vague, but it seems to be very subjective and thus could easily fall prey to the same discussions and scholarly biases which have plagued the study of religion.

I also took issue with the broadness of the term emotion. I read through several articles and they were all so completely different! I found it very difficult to draw connections between them. For example, the article by Shuger looked at philosophy and rhetoric and makes the argument that belief was grounded in emotion. This was quite different from Basu’s article about the Sufi saints and their emotional associations with cultural ideas and concepts. The differences between the articles highlights the different ways in which emotion can be studied.

Concluding Thoughts:
In conclusion, I think that emotion is something that has value to its study, but as with any methodology, it is important to use a variety of methods to access information rather than focusing on a single method. I don’t think that emotion is a strong methodology which is able to stand on its own. Although I do agree with Corrigan that it helps us as scholars access material and information that other approaches do not reveal. I do not think that I would ever write that my methodology was the study of emotion, although perhaps it would be an aspect of a certain methodology which I would adopt.