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Introduction: How Do We Study Religion and Emotion?

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... 8 By elevating the role of affects vis-à-vis reason and knowledge, affect theorists deconstruct a powerful and persistent view of the hierarchical structure of the human being. This hierarchy certainly dates back millennia and posits our rational nature as superior and controlling and our affectual or 2 Schaefer, Religious, p. 23. 3 (Corrigan 2017). 4 Schaefer, Religious, p. 15. 5 Schaefer, Religious, p. 94. 6 Schaefer, Religious, p. 24. ...
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Affect theory has made important contributions recently to the study of religion, particularly drawing our attention away from ideas and practices to the emotional or affectual experience of religion. However, there is a danger that affect theory may become yet another “protective strategy” (to use a term from philosopher of religion Wayne Proudfoot) in academic wars about the nature of religion. As a consequence, there is a danger that affect theory will become too restrictive in its scope, limiting our ability to use it effectively in investigating “religious” or “spiritual” affects in otherwise secular practices and institutions (such as sport). If we can avoid turning affect theory into a protective strategy, it can become a useful tool to provide insights into the “spirituality” of sport.
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This chapter is a shortened version of the essay “Taking Subjectivity into Account,” in Lorraine Code’s (1995) book Rhetorical spaces: Essays on gendered locations (New York: Routledge, pp. 23–57). Code argues that the subjectivity of the knower in the well-known epistemological formulation “S knows that p” matters a great deal more than the dominant positivist-empiricist perspective suggests. In spite of the appearance of neutrality and universalizability of the knowing or knowledge-producing subject “S,” Code argues that most knowledge production is politically invested, and that the social and historical locations of “S” (such as gender, race, and class) affect the range of topics likely to be selected for investigation. Moreover, taking subjectivity into account also means examining political and other structures for the ways in which they direct research to focus on certain lines of inquiry rather than others.