Rewilding Religion
Affect and Animal Dance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.33270Keywords:
affect, animals, perception, experience, epistemologyAbstract
This article follows just one of the numerous filaments that emerge from Schaefer’s proposition and its configuration: perception. The aim in not to purely analyse and critique Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (2015), but rather to enter into an ‘animal dance’ with it. The discussion-dance seeks to contribute to the space deftly opened by Schaefer in which theoretical accounts of religious affect that exist ‘outside of language’ may be developed. Centrally, it asks: How do we perceive and represent the dance? Indeed, the case studies found in Religious Affects have already proffered a response to that question. This modest contribution aims to further explore how scholars may take account of elusive immateriality — forces, emotion, energy etc. — methodologically. In taking up this challenge the central focus is on the utility of embodied perception and the rendering of such knowledge in academic discourse.
References
Bekoff, Marc. 2014. Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence. Novato, CA: New World Library.
Feldt, Laura, ed. 2012. Wilderness in Mythology and Religion: Approaching Religious Spatialities, Cosmologies, and Ideas of Wild Nature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Foster, Charles. 2016. Being a Beast. London: Profile Books.
Johnston, Jay. 2008. Angels of Desire: Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics. London: Equinox.
———. 2016a. “Enchanted Sight/Site: An Esoteric Aesthetics of Image and Experience.” In The Relational Dynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization: Changing the Terms of the Religion Versus Secularity Debate, edited by Peik Ingman, Terhi Utriainen, Tuija Hovi, and Mans Broo, 97–114. Sheffield: Equinox.
———. 2016b. “Slippery and Saucy Discourse: Grappling with the Intersection of ‘Alternate Epistemologies’ and Discourse Analysis.” In Making Religion: Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion, edited by Frans Wijsen and Kocku von Stuckrad, 74–96. Leiden: Brill.
———. 2017. “Esoteric Aesthetics: The Spiritual Matter in Intersubjective Encounter.” In Aesthetics of Religion: A Connective Concept, edited by Alexandra Grieser and Jay Johnston. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. In press.
Lorimer, Jamie. 2015. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation After Nature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816681075.001.0001.
Monbiot, George. 2013. Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books.
Schaefer, Donovan O. 2015. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution and Power. Durham NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374909.
Taylor, Bron. 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley: University of California Press.
