Gerrit Lange
,@gerritlange
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Dear Andreas,
I find your questions provocative in the best sense, in that they force me to make clear what I did during the last years. To be honest, I have no final answer yet to either of Your questions – but these answers are exactly what I need to finish my thesis. Understanding emotions as practices comes very close to what I am doing. To me that is rather an epistomological than an ontological stance, as I am leaving the ontology question open: Whether the atmosphere is really there or not is not my question, no more than whether the goddess I study exists or not, whether she really has fealings or not. Speaking about “distributed agency”, as my second supervisor, William Sax, does, enables me to speak of the agency of the goddess without saying that she exists. I try to add concepts of “distributed intentionality” and “distributed or shared emotions” to the agency – coming closer and closer to what I would describe as an atmosphere, but also to the ritual effects described in local terms as the śakti (power) of the goddess. In my film, I aim to catch some glimpses of how shared feelings, induced by sensual means (drumming, throwing marigold flowers, burning incense, singing, standing close to each other, …), can result in heightened tension and possession trances. Employment of Fatboys (I had to look that up…) is also very interesting as a sensory strategy!
I study atmospheres both as a metaphor occuring in ethnographic writing and as something happening in my field. “Fleshing out” or “solidifying” something aerial – which is, in a way, more “fluid” than the fluids everyone is talking about – might be as paradoxical as a project as verbalizing the non-verbal, taking the defining feature away. But anthropologist have never shied back from paradoxical projects, so why not.
Your praxis theory approach sounds very interesting and promising! Indeed, I have referred to Monique Scheer as well in my chapters on metaphors of emotions “within” and “around” people. As I am interested in “atmosphere” as an alternative to the conceptual metaphor of emotions as fluids in containers, I think that atmospheres are as much “done” as are emotions, since both terms are not so far from each other:
The distinction between “inner” and “outer” sides of emotion is not given, but is rather a product of the way we habitually “do” the experience. Practice may create an “inner” and “outer” to emotion with the “ex-pression” of feelings originating inside and then moving from inner to outer. (Scheer 2012, p. 198).
I am also sceptical of the well-established distinction between (culturally constructed and interpreted) “emotions” and (flowing, pre-linguistic, body-based animalistic) “affects”, as this seems to imply that there are un-interpreted or, on the other hand, un-embodied feelings around.
Of course, I am not the first one to have this idea: As Alexandra already pointed out above, “it is no longer the question of whether the effects of atmospheres are individual OR universal; it is self-evident for an AoR approach that it is the processual interaction that creates the possibility of cultivating expectations”.
In a meeting of the network, we discussed a text by John Leavitt, who brought together these either-or-poles under the titel Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions (American Ethnologist 23.3 (1996), 514-53). I find this article very helpful, not only because it is about religious emotions in a region very close to where I did my fieldwork – it also starts with the same question we are thrown back to time and again (sorry for quoting someone quoting someone):
In his book on Jewish festivals, Hayyim Schauss describes a scene during the Rosh Hashanah observances in an Eastern European synagogue early in this century:
The greatest and most exalted moment of the services comes when the ark of the Torah is opened and the chant of Un’saneh Tokefbegins. An unnatural fear grips the hearts of the worshipers. They pull their prayer shawls over their heads and recite the words in a loud voice, with tears and sobs…. [At the end of the chant] the moans die down and the congregation calms itself somewhat at the words: “But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity avert the evil decree.” [1938:147-148]
“How does he know?” the reader may ask.
Yes, how do we know?
Thanks for distracting me from watching the sickening news of this so very frightening day.
Gerrit
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Dear Alexandra and Andreas,
thank you for keeping this going!
Unfortunately, I have nothing so far published on atmospheres. I spent the last years making a kind of ethnographic movie series to “capture” something like moods or atmospheres and the strategies of their creation, but I have so far shied away from writing about my movie and its methodology, for film editing as a kind of non-verbal thinking about my “material” or “footage” brings forth insights which cannot be translated into words. To be sure, I do not regard non-verbal forms such as dance or film or filmed dance as “non-rational” or “immediate”. However, there may be some specifically modern desire for immediality behind my search for nonverbal forms, feelings, and atmospheres, which is why I am thankful to be reminded of the prevalence of such words in advertisement and marketing, and of the ways an immediateness of experience might be evoked for very specific and potentially dangerous political ends.
I am writing a short chapter on the term “atmosphere” right now: This chapter is much more theoretical than methodological, even meta-theoretical, in searching for the implications, historical roots and inherent dichotomies of the term. Reading Rademacher’s articles, I was struck by the fact that most of its sources refer to atmospheres in terms of a “pre-dualistic”, “pre-linguistic”, “pre-rational” or even “pre-conscious” realm, without making clear whether this was “before” humans evolved, “before” an individual has grown up, or “before” sense data are processed. Without wanting to unfold a whole evolution of the idea of this idea from Husserl to Affect theory, I think some awareness of the desires inspiring also my own search for the “the nonverbal” is necessary to engage with the term, especially if I do not want to identify emotion, feeling, or atmosphere with “the irrational” in the sense of Otto.
As I doupt that feelings or emotions can be “grasped” without using metaphorical concepts, I also wonder whether there could be non-metaphorical models of shared moods or feelings. Atmosphere seems to provide an interesting alternative to the model of “emotions in bodies/selves as fluids in containers” (Kövecses 2000). Both alternative metaphors of feelings as contained within bodies or as flowing around and between bodies are based on the bodily experience of emotions or feelings (even “feeling” as a haptic sensation and “emotion” as a motion are to some extand metaphorical). Thus, also atmosphere as a metaphore is more than a metaphor, but also something “really felt” – including bodily, if imaginative experiences of the metaphor’s “source domain”. As Alexandra pointed out, “atmospheres emerge from air pressure, temperature, humidity, sound waves, colour. There is an impact to be described that becomes clear when we look at extremes, such as creating absences, fainting, desired moments of fear, or release of emotions” (May I quote that in a footnote? I am not sure yet how common these “commons” are…)
The recent publications of the Network have highlighted imagination as a process involving experiences of all the senses and their blending. Regarding your question, “What is the relationship between imagination (as a process, using humans’ ability to perceive through their senses what is not actually there) and atmospheres?”, I would guess that atmospheres are one of the fields where the blending of imaginative objects of different sense organs help to increase the emotional intensity of a situation, especially when a gathered group shares similar imaginations, associations and emotions. This sharing might be afforded by how bodies and brains in general work and/or by the shared cultural history informing the imaginative worlds of those coming together.
From Old Indian Aesthetic theory, I know several terms refering to multimodal sense objects which point to the mood or “atmosphere” of a shared situation: Most well known is rasa, described in the Natyashastra, as a sentiment created on a stage to be “tasted” by an audience, in a disattached and refined state of consciousness, like a meal tasted by a gourmet. Annette Wilke shows in some of her articles how this term evolved over the last two millenia from a shared mood savored from an aesthetic distance (but not without immersion) to a word for religious ecstasis and rupture in Krishna Bhakti. In current Indonesia, rasa is even a term for possession trance.
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Dear Andreas (if I may),
In my PhD dissertation I aim to capture the “atmospheres” which are “evoked” in the worship of a Central Himalayan Hindu Goddess by means of writing and filming, especially with an AoR framework. I know the articles by Martin Rademacher and think that he is methodologically quite close to the AoR (or AestoR) approach, which is quite diverse and bring together postions from a more culturalistic / social constructivist as well as those from a more universalist / neuropsychological background. As far as I understand this potentially very productive tension, it makes it necessary that we leave open the question to what extend atmospheres are real and “there” in a sense that all those evolved perceive in a similar way – or whether they simply aren’t. Rademacher, if I remember correctly, also tries to bring together both aspects. Most members of the network would agree with Rademacher’s remark from his 2018 article that – in addition to everything which might be afforded by spatial arrangements, by bodily synchronization and by neurological conditions which favor multimodal perception or synaesthestic experiences – we depend on verbal information from our informants which contain terms like “atmosphere” in the first place (Rademacher 2018, S. 151).
There are plenty of articles about atmospheres or similar concepts contained in the volumes published by the network – among them, the Bloomsbury handbook of the cultural and cognitive Aesthetics of Religion, whose very title points to the ambition to bring together different epistemologies. In their introduction to the 2017 volume on the “Aesthetics of Religions – a connective concept”, Alexandra Grieser and Jay Johnston demark the field of Aestor by the following questions:
- How in the context of religious practice are the senses stimulated, governed and disciplined?
- How are religious experiences, emotions and attitudes created, memorized and normalized?
- How do religious perceptual orders interact with those of a larger culture?
(Grieser & Johnston 2017, p. 2)
I find these questions particularly helpful to mark Aestor off against approaches from Material Religion or Affect Theory, which go into a similar direction, but with less focus on the (often orchestrated) stimulation, creation and normalization of “atmospheres”, which imo belong to the field of “experiences, emotions and attitudes”. Sebastian Schüler’s contribution the the same volume brings in more cognitive science to think about how synchronized, collective experience of an atmosphere is possible. Mohr 2020 provides an extensive vocabulary on the ways atmospheres can be – sometimes intentionally – orchestrated, created or shaped. Luhrmann 2020 sums up some results from her decades of research on “training and talent” as conditions for having religious experiences of “absorption” – a mental or aesthetic state which might be seen as a product of a shared atmosphere, but also as a precondition for experiencing an atmosphere in the first place.
I have many more notes on atmospheres and related phenomena as discussed in the Bloomsbury Handbook. To keep it short, I wrote in a review in the Marburg Journal of Religion that I found interesting and various tools in the Handbook to answer questions such as these:
- What is an “atmosphere of gravity”, built up and used to increase sincerity/seriousness of motivation (pp. 65-66)?
- Do rituals build up a “virtual reality”, characterized by “emotional tangibility” and “emotionally labelled sensory experience” (p. 66)?
- Do religious techniques, devices and designs engage universal psychophysiological dispositions, for instance “making use of bodily resistance toward dead and stinking objects and creating an unpleasant emotion” (p. 261)?
For studying religious “dramaturgies”, as I call it in my PhD thesis, it is worthwhile to be aware of the “filtering mechanisms” (Mohr in ibid. p. 131) of attention, motivated by exogenous and endogenous stimuli, controlled in “hierarchies of media that are privileged, restricted, or even banned (such as dance)” (Borelli&Grieser in ibid. p. 41) and even becoming measurable in “somatic modes of attention” as “bio-chemical processes” (Kreinath in ibid. p. 49). Dramaturgic means are not only directing ritual action, but also the narration of stories, which is also performative: it engages an audience by utilizing its scenery (for instance, a fire in the night). A final chapter of the Handbook even rises questions about how and whether atmospheres, “intensive personal experiences” or “deep emotions” (p. 288) might be utilized in teaching about religions.
Best,
Gerrit
Grieser, Alexandra; Johnston, Jay (2017): What is an Aesthetics of Religion? From the Senses to Meaning – and Back again. In: Grieser, Alexandra; Johnston, Jay (ed.): Aestetics of Religion. A Connective Concept. Berlin/Boston, pp. 1-49.
Guggenmos, Esther-Maria (2020): “Smell as Communication”, in: Anne Koch und Katharina Wilkens (Hg.): Handbook of Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion, London: Bloomsbury, 219-227.
Koch, Anne & Katharina Wilkens (2020): Introduction, in: ibid. (eds.): Handbook of Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion, London: Bloomsbury, 1-11.
Koch, Anne (2020): Aestheticscapes und joint speech als ästhetische Strategie. Analyse eines katholischen Fürbittgebets mit ‚Exorzismus‘. ZfR 28(2): 259–275
Luhrmann, Tanja (2020): Absorption. Koch, Anne & Wilkens, Katharina (eds.): The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 85–95.
Mohr, Hubert (2020): “Sensory Strategies”, in: Anne Koch und Katharina Wilkens (Hg.): Handbook of Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion, London: Bloomsbury, 129-142.
Schüler, Sebastian (2017): Aesthetics of Immersion. Collective Effervescence, Bodily Synchronization and the Sensory Navigation of the Sacred. In: Grieser, Alexandra; Johnston, Jay: Aestetics of Religion. A Connective Concept. Berlin/Boston, pp. 367-387.
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