Emotions and Religious Dynamics

Nathaniel A. Warne, Douglas J. Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317144540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

We all feel emotions and are moved to action by them. Religious communities often select and foster certain emotions over others. Without understanding this it is hard to grasp the way groups view the world and each other. Often, it is the underlying emotional pattern of a group rather than its doctrines that either divides it from, or attracts it to, others. These issues, so important in today's world, are explored in this book in a genuinely interdisciplinary way by anthropologists, psychologists, theologians and historians of religion, and in some detailed studies of well and less well known religious traditions from across the world.

Chapter 1
The Role of Emotion and Identity in Mixed-faith Families

Elisabeth Arweck

Introduction

When I was invited to be part of the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Network on Emotion, Identity and Religious Communities, it was explained to me that the Network aimed to explore the ways in which patterns of emotion are preferred and encouraged within different religious–cultural groups and the way in which those emotions may be related to the scriptural or other more formal aspects of the tradition. The reason for assembling the various members of the Network was to focus on their respective fields of study in order to shed light on the significance of emotion in religious communities. Therefore I shall first outline the field in which the data reported here are situated, to provide the wider background of the research project that gave rise to the data. I shall then offer some thoughts on emotions in general and the sociology of emotions, before discussing some of the emotional aspects arising from the research in question.

The Project on Mixed-faith Families

With Eleanor Nesbitt as the principal investigator, I worked, as the researcher, on a three-year project (2006–2009) that investigated the religious identity formation of young people in mixed-faith families. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Fieldwork – consisting of semi-structured interviews with young people and their parents – was conducted over a period of about 18 months, from autumn 2006 to the end of February 2008.

The stated aim of the project was to identify and explore how young people in mixed-faith families formed their religious identities. The study’s objectives comprised three aspects, which built on one another:

• to identify differences and commonalties between children’s identity formation and parents’ expectations and perceptions of this;

• to assess the impact of religious socialisation (formal and informal) and religious education on young people’s religious identity and their response;

• to inform theoretical debate in religious studies and religious education on the representation of ‘faith communities’/‘religious’ in syllabuses.

The research questions explored the importance of a range of factors – such as gender, how much parents were committed to their faith traditions, education, socio-economic status, locality, religious calendars, perceptions of faith – in young people’s faith development. Also, we explored how these factors and their importance were represented by the young people and their parents.

In our study, the term ‘mixed-faith families’ referred to combinations of the following four faiths: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism. There were a number of reasons for choosing these four faiths, including the numerical preponderance of the four religions in the UK (see ‘Census’, 2001),¹ the increase in intermarriages crossing various boundaries, previous research experience in the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit (WRERU), and the analytical advantage of matching two Semitic with two Indic faith communities.

In semi-structured interviews we explored a range of topics with young people and their parents. The young people’s ages ranged from 5 to early 30s. The criterion of eligibility for participation was whether they still lived at home. The parents’ ages ranged from late 20s to early 50s. We aimed for a sample of 30 families – five families of each possible combination of the four faiths. When we approached families to ask whether they would be willing to take part in the study, parents identified themselves as Christian, Hindu, Sikh or Muslim and we then explored their varying levels of ‘commitment’ in the interviews.²

Given the involvement of young people and potentially sensitive issues, careful consideration was given to ethical aspects of the study, including issues of consent, negotiating access to families, contact with young children, confidentiality and data management.

We gathered 185 interviews, of which 112 were with adults, the rest with young people. On average, four or five interviews were conducted with each person. Some interviews took over an hour, some only 20 minutes. Most of the interviews (110) were conducted in person, face to face, the rest by phone. We counted 28 ‘families’ as our sample. The term ‘families’ is used here in a wide sense, comprising varying family constellations, such as a family consisting of two parents and two children (as envisaged in our original research design) and a family represented by one person only. In some cases, not all the members of a family who were eligible to take part in our study were available for interview, for a number of reasons, including time constraints and language barriers. The families in our sample did not represent the full range of possible combinations of the four faiths, as we were not able to include Hindu–Muslim or Muslim–Sikh families. Our sample comprised two Hindu–Sikh, ten Hindu–Christian, six Christian–Sikh and ten Christian–Muslim families.

Having provided an outline of the study, I shall now look at the notion or concept of emotion and how it relates to religions in general.

Conceptualising Emotion

In order to gain an understanding of the notion of emotion, one’s first recourse might be to look up the term in a dictionary. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary provides a range of aspects of ‘emotion’: it states that the term is derived from the French word ‘émouvoir’, which means ‘excite, move the feelings of’. This leads to ‘a (physical) moving, stirring, agitation’ and then to ‘any vehement or excited mental state’ and its use in psychology as ‘a mental feeling or affection’. The Shorter Oxford also lists all the words around emotion, such as ‘emotional’ and ‘emotionalist’ and so on. There is thus the connection of emotion with feeling, which extends the conceptual field: ‘feeling’ can be used interchangeably with ‘emotion’, but it also means the ‘capacity or readiness to feel’, ‘state of consciousness’ and ‘intuitive cognition or belief’.

All this points to the subjective dimension and the interior of the individual. Ken Wilber’s integral framework (see Figure 1.1) maps the subjective as one of four fields, the other fields being the intersubjective, objective and interobjective.³ For the purpose of the discussion here, the second field of the interior – the intersubjective – is probably of more relevance rather than the two fields of the exterior – the objective and interobjective – although they also play a role. Wilber’s framework shows the close relationship between emotions and memories – which points to the work of Danièle Hervieu-Léger,⁴ who conceptualises religion as a chain of memory and thus examines the ways in which religion is transmitted from generation to generation, a topic that is pertinent to the project on mixed-faith families.⁵ The connection between emotions and memory in Wilber’s framework points beyond the individual and the subjective, towards the collective, which is also a concern in Hervieu-Léger’s work. Wilber thus highlights the importance of culture in the intersubjective dimension, which is – according to Bikkhu Parekh – where religion is located. Parekh considers religion to form part of culture, together with language, memories, ethnicity and shared values.⁶

Figure 1.1 Ken Wilber’s integral framework

It has not been possible to amend this figure for suitable viewing on this device. Please see the following URL for a larger version http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/ebooks/9781472415042Fig1_1.pdf

The Sociology of Emotions

Another theoretical framework that informs the present discussion is the sociology of emotions, a fairly new field of study that I discovered when reading an article by Janet Holland, published in 2007, in which she discusses emotions in research, drawing attention to the importance of emotions in the production of knowledge and in advancing understanding, analysis and interpretation.⁷

The sociology of emotions emerged in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s and took hold in the UK during the 1990s.⁸ Its exponents basically recognise that emotions can contribute to an understanding of the social, thus going against the historical view in sociology that emotions are associated with the irrational and thus opposed to the objective scientific search for knowledge. Sociologists of emotions have argued that understanding emotions is essential to the pursuit of knowledge and that the relationship between them should be re-thought:

rather than repressing emotion in epistemology it is necessary to rethink the relation between knowledge and emotion and construct conceptual models that demonstrate the mutually constitutive rather than oppositional relations between reason and emotions. Far from precluding the possibility of reliable knowledge, emotion as well as value must be shown as necessary to such knowledge.⁹

According to the sociology of emotions, the study of emotions can transcend the dichotomous ways of thinking that have restricted Western thought, since emotions lie at the juncture of fundamental dualisms such as mind–body, nature–culture and public–private.¹⁰

There are differences within the field also, regarding the theoretical perspective on what emotions are, which – as in other sub-sets of sociology – varies between the biological and the social. From the biological perspective, emotions are instinctual or the brain’s conscious response to instinctual visceral change. The social perspective is based on a social constructionist approach, but with variations within it, including a post-modern trend arguing for the primacy of discourse in the construction of emotions. An interactionist position sits somewhere between them or combines them.¹¹

One of the proponents of the sociology of emotions, Arlie Hochschild, for example, sees emotion as the most important sense, but crucially as linked to both action and cognition. Hochschild introduced into the field influential concepts relating to the management of emotions. These include ‘emotion management’ (an effort by any means – conscious or not conscious – to change one’s feeling or emotion), where individuals try to shape and re-shape their feelings to fit their ‘inner cultural guidelines’.¹² There are ‘feeling rules’ that guide individuals’ ‘emotion work’ of management. Hochschild says further that ‘in managing feeling, we partly create it … We can see the very act of managing emotion as part of what the emotion becomes.’¹³ Hochschild has been particularly interested in the commercialisation of emotion work in her studies of flight attendants and other workers and in gender differences. She states:

Th[e] specialisation of emotional labor in the marketplace rests on the different childhood training of the heart that is given to girls and to boys … Moreover, each specialization presents men and women with different emotional tasks. Women are more likely to be presented with the task of mastering anger and aggression in the service of ‘being nice’. To men, the socially assigned task of aggressing against those that break rules of various sorts creates the private task of mastering fear and vulnerability.¹⁴

According to Holland,¹⁵ another influential figure in the sociology of emotions is Norman Denzin,¹⁶ who links emotions with the body, considering emotions as embodied experiences; thus the ‘emotions body’ becomes ‘a moving, feeling complex of sensible feelings, feelings of the lived body, intentional value feelings, and feelings of the self and moral person’.¹⁷ For Denzin, the sociological perspective on understanding emotions should be built at the intersection between emotions as embodied experiences, their social nature and their links with feelings of selfhood and personal identity reflectively experienced.

There have been what Holland¹⁸ refers to as ‘disciplinary border skirmishes’ between psychology and psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic approaches to the study of the emotions and the sociology of emotions as to who can best understand the place of the emotions in the experience of human beings. While these ‘border skirmishes’ can be set aside here, two things are important to note: first, the complexity of understanding emotions in human experience, and second, the need to beware of objectifying emotion¹⁹ and to take emotion as a way of knowing the world, the means ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Emotion, Identity and Group Communication
• 1 The Role of Emotion and Identity in Mixed-faith Families
• 2 Sikh Spectrum: Mapping Emotions in the Panth
• 3 Emotions in Buddhism
• 4 Emotions in the Writings of Two Church Fathers: Evagrius of Pontus and Mark the Monk
• 5 Metaphysics, Emotions and the Flourishing Life: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Use of Aristotle on Religious Emotions
• 6 ‘Being in love without restriction’: Emotion and Embodiment in Bernard Lonergan
• 7 Forced Migration and Meaning-making
• 8 Identity Under Pressure: Motivation and Emotional Dynamics in Cultural and Religious Groups
• 9 William James on Religion and Emotion
• 10 The Knowing Body: Structuralism and the Somatic Aspects of Biblical Sacrifice
• 11 Death, Emotion and Digital Media
• Index