Ritual, Emotion, and Materiality in the Early Christian World

Soham Al-Suadi, Richard S. Ascough, Richard E. DeMaris, Soham Al-Suadi, Richard S. Ascough, Richard E. DeMaris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032054797
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000534740
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume advances our understanding of early Christianity as a lived religion by approaching it through its rites, the emotions and affects surrounding those rites, and the material setting for the practice of them.

The connections between emotions and ritual, between rites and their materiality, and between emotions and their physical manifestation in ancient Mediterranean culture have been inadequately explored as yet, especially with regard to early Christianity and its water and dining rites. Readers will find all three areas—ritual, emotion, and materiality—engaged in this exemplary interdisciplinary study, which provides fresh insights into early Christianity and its world.

Ritual, Emotion, and Materiality in the Early Christian World will be of special interest to interdisciplinary-minded researchers, seminarians, and students who are attentive to theory and method, and those with an interest in the New Testament and earliest Christianity. It will also appeal to those working on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman religion, emotion, and ritual from a comparative standpoint.

Chapter 1 Theorizing ritual, emotion, and material

Sharday C. Mosurinjohn

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197720-2

In the context of studying ritual and emotion, especially when relying on archaeological records, some kind of foundation is needed for theorizing the materiality of emotional practices and the affectivity of material. Rituals cultivate moods and dispositions that sustain a larger cultural system of which they are part. In doing so, they work through things—artifacts, architectures, spaces—linking them in affective relationships with humans. Therefore, in addition to knowing the steps of a ritual and its religious logic, scholars of ritual need to ask, as archaeologist Sarah Tarlow puts it, “how do things become emotionally meaningful?” (emphasis added).¹ One way of doing so is by focusing on things themselves as agential kinds of beings, as well as aesthetic objects with formal qualities and as artifacts with social histories. In this paper I aim to offer theoretical resources for writing, as Tarlow calls for, “object biographies and context.”² I do so by joining certain strains of thought about objects, including the materiality of the spaces, relationships, and processes in between them and (non)human actors. Namely, I synthesize “new materialist” resources for theorizing how emotion—and those kindred categories of feeling, sensation, perception, and experience—works in ritual through material things and places. Hopefully this will provide, as Lawrence Lessig puts it, “a way of talking about things”³ that counterbalances the fact that the history of emotions has “turned inward to some extent, speaking increasingly to members of its own guild”⁴ at a time when historians of ritual would benefit from its insights.

Feeling things

Let me begin by explaining what I am referring to when I use the term “new materialism.” New materialist theories deal with the way qualities of experience seem to consist within us (e.g., as “prediscursive compulsions circulating heavily in bodies”⁵) in objects of the world (e.g., Sara Ahmed’s “happy objects,”⁶ in which “happiness functions as a promise that directs us toward certain objects,” sticking to them habitually and ritually, and accumulating positive affective value as they circulate as social goods), and throughout spaces in between. They are often therefore speculative. Speculative, in this sense, means speculating as to what it is like from the perspective of different kinds of beings—humans, nonhuman biological creatures, inanimate objects, imaginary concepts—without privileging any viewpoint, especially the human, as the defining perspective for the others. The motivation for this speculation is different for different thinkers. The concern of philosophers coming from a “speculative realism” position is primarily that philosophy has “stopped being occupied with reality”⁷ since Immanuel Kant insisted that humans only ever have access to the world as it appears to them, and never to the world in itself. The concern of feminist philosophers like the “agential realist” Karen Barad⁸ is to move past the retrograde binaries of material versus discursive, human versus nonhuman, in order actually to fulfill what she sees as an ethical responsibility to shed our limiting beliefs and respond to the universe as it is. For Bruno Latour and philosophers influenced by his thinking on processes and relationships (notably “actor-network theory”⁹), the concern is to recognize the agency of nonhumans, including things, ideas, and processes, seeing them as factors in creating social situations as much as humans are. On this view, beings are conceptualized in terms of processes rather than entities. Conceptualized as a process, ritual performers and ritual objects can be thought of as “interfaces” that become “more and more describable” the more receptive they are to being “affected by many more elements.”¹⁰

These speculative strains of materialism are part of yet a larger “material turn” that emerged with the term “material culture” in anthropological archaeology throughout the twentieth century, especially the last quarter.¹¹ Some scholars, like Manuel A. Vàsquez in his book More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion, take an even longer view. Vàsquez’s genealogical approach marks Spinoza and Nietzsche as a turning point away from classical epistemologies that ignored the role of the body. However, what all have in common is that, similar to the way the Frankfurt School realized “culture” was missing from Marxism, attention to materiality, the nonhuman, and affect is seen here as a supplement to analytical modes focused on ideology critique and discursive analysis. The “material turn” aims to be a corrective to the wide “linguistic turn” that preceded it, where, at its apogee from the physical world, everything was to be read as a text.

As some critiques¹² have pointed out, however, it is by no means inevitable to construe text and language as immaterial or uninvolved in emotion.¹³ The disposition of any affective approach is a poetic one, leaning on devices like metaphor, allusion, simile, and techniques like prosody. The sensory qualities of the language matter. With this in mind, we can think of how power sometimes also inheres in the materiality of words, drawn in their familiar shapes and spoken with resonance both sonic and connotative. Words might “work not through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds.”¹⁴ For instance, the biblical scholar Erin Runions has ventured that scholars ought “to consider how cultural texts such as the Bible are purveyors of feelings and bodily responses.”¹⁵ As she says, “if affect is central to cultural and political reasoning, as cultural and queer theorists have recently been suggesting,” then it is important to appreciate how these texts “both support and subvert violent relations of subordination.”¹⁶ Another biblical scholar, Maia Kotrosits, takes a similar tack. Appealing to the categories of trauma studies and diaspora theory, she challenges the idea that texts conventionally described as “early Christian literature” are even interested in a distinctive Christian identity or self-definition.¹⁷ Instead, she explores in them the complex entanglements of desire and revulsion, forgetting and anxiety of colonized and diasporic peoples. Attention to feeling and experience in language, things, humans, and the spaces in between is therefore a useful supplement to any analytics of power (one indebted to Foucauldian power-knowledge) that primarily seeks to know: what is something’s efficacy within a particular ideological regime? Letting the category of “experience” roam in an expanded field links the concrete material of tangible things with the ephemeral material of affective processes, relationships, and atmospheres.

It may also be a subtle but illuminating shift in the philological imagination to consider how often certain words have been used to pin down the sensation of meaning long enough to grapple with it. Words are objects of the senses too. “For writers of the past,” reminds the anthropologist Tim Ingold,

a feeling or observation would be described in the movement of a gesture and inscribed in the trace it yields. What mattered was not the choice and semantic content of the words themselves—these could be wholly conventional, as in a liturgical text—but the quality, tone and dynamic of the line itself [that represented the words].¹⁸

Nor was the page mute; since speech is primary and writing only follows from speech, the semantic content of the words themselves always exists alongside the sensory information of how they sound, either pronounced aloud or inside one’s own head. Considered affectively, words can be part of a materialist analytics in religious studies, as with other humanities disciplines.

What is more, in its concern with the material, the bodily, and the everyday, new materialism can—though it does not always—mitigate a problem with theory itself tending toward the view from nowhere, or the “God’s eye view.” The “mandarin elitism and feckless utopianism” of master theories¹⁹ has been a matter of concern at least since the activist New Left took up the formerly conservative critique of theory in the mid-twentieth century. Yet the matter of everydayness is complicated when those everydays cannot actually be observed in the quotidian. Archaeology and other historical modes rely on material culture in lieu of participant observation. Yet compared to archaeology, anthropology has actually been readier to embrace “aesthetics as related to the sensory (and technical) qualities, emotional impacts, uses and evaluations of objects (as well as bodies and landscapes) in varying places and times and to their shaping of social relations.”²⁰ Recently, though, scholars like Howard Morphy²¹ and Robin Skeates have drawn inspiration from “everyday aesthetics” to study “the affects of the physical properties of objects on the senses and the qualitative evaluation of those properties.”²² Everyday aesthetics is a subfield of philosophical aesthetics that engages the sensations and feelings involved in everyday meaning-making practices and attempts to cultivate unconventional ways of working with them.²³ In the context of “everyday aesthetics,” the “aesthetic” functions as both an abstract noun and as an adjective. The adjective “aesthetic” is a modifier of “experience”—that is, one might have a special experience of, for instance, a common, everyday ritual, which transports the experiencer out of the everyday. The abstract noun refers to aesthetics as a method—that is, to analyze something as one would an art object. One can take an everyday experience and analyze it aesthetically by using its formal qualities as a grounding for imaginative speculation about its affective powers on the people and things that int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Theorizing ritual, emotion, and material
• 2 Emotional display in the necropoli at Roman Thessalonike
• 3 Water Rites in the world of the New Testament: Archaeological Highlights
• 4 Water rites in Greek and Roman associations
• 5 Water rites, emotions, and epiphanic encounters in the literary and material record of the Roman east
• 6 Ritual experience and emotions: The right place for water rites in Luke-Acts
• 7 Early Christian ritual from the perspective of affect and emotion studies
• 8 Precious, powerful, and pernicious: The polyvalence of water and water symbolism in early Christianity
• 9 Scared disciples: Emotions of fear in Mark 4:35–41 and 6:45–52
• 10 “Let the children be fed first” (Mark 7:27): Rituals, emotions, and identity in the Synoptic tradition
• 11 Water rites as structuring elements in ancient meals: An examination of foot washing in John 12 and 13
• 12 Physical affect and ritual as starting points of Pauline paraenesis
• Conclusion
• Modern authors
• Subject index
• Ancient sources