Cognition, Performance and the Senses
14-15 April 2011
A Wenner Gren sponsored workshop to develop anthropological theory
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
Workshop Description
This workshop aims to shed new light on the anthropology of religious transmission by bringing together cognitive theories of ritual with the anthropology of the senses, and performance studies. It points towards key omissions in the cognitive understanding of religious ritual, suggesting that these omissions can be rectified through the confrontation of theories coming from cognitive anthropology, the anthropology of the senses and performance studies.
The objectives of the workshop are to bring together scholars from this cognitivist theoretical tradition, and those from the anthropology of the senses on the one hand and performance studies on the other hand, in order to confront some of these short-comings with the cognitive account, and explore the potential of bringing these three analytical frameworks together, for improving our understanding of religious transmission.
Cognitive anthropology – and particularly the work of Harvey Whitehouse – has gone some way towards explaining the role of experience and emotion in religious transmission (Whitehouse 1997, 2000, Whitehouse & Laidlaw 2009). Whitehouse makes a distinction between two ‘modes of religiosity’: the imagistic mode, characterised by periodic, often sporadic but intensely emotionally stimulating ritual occasions; and the doctrinal mode, characterised by more frequent and regular ritual which is highly discursive and less emotionally intense. What is more, he suggests that the imagistic mode, as a strategy of religious transmission, is more successful, or stronger, than the doctrinal, and that therefore emotion has a central role in the process of religious transmission. This cognitive approach goes some way towards answering the criticisms of Asad (1993), Bell (1992), Humphrey & Laidlaw (1994), and others, that the anthropology of ritual has been overly-dependent on linguistic-communicative theory. These scholars call for analysis that is sensitive to the non-linguistic aspects of practice, embodiment, emotion inherent in ritual. However, the cognitive account maintains central dichotomies – between cognition and emotion; word and affect – where these other scholars call for an approach that integrates them. As a consequence, cognitive anthropology appears rather reductive and universalising, mobilising different ethnographic case studies to pursue a single, universal theory of ritual transmission – based on a singular theory of emotion.
The anthropology of the senses has since the 1980s developed into a major subdiscipline of cultural anthropology, particularly in the hands of David Howes and Constance Classen at Concordia University. Classen argues that two central assumptions have impeded our understanding of the senses in social life (Classen 1993, Herzfeld 2001). First, that the most important sense is the visual, closely followed by the aural – but only inasmuch as the aural is defined by the verbal. Thus, anthropologists have looked at action and listened to talk, to the exclusion of the other senses – and indeed other aural processes. This tendency is effectively reproduced in Whitehouse’s appeal to the imagistic (visual) and doctrinal (verbal). Second, that the senses are mere ‘windows on the world’, and therefore both transparent in nature, and universal because precultural. Again, this is implicit in Whitehouse’s project, in its aim to identify the universal dynamics of imagistic transmission. What the anthropology of the senses has developed, in criticising these two tendencies, is firstly, a systematic investigation of the significance and implications of the other senses – not just sight and sound, but smell, touch, taste and other senses, such as kinaesthesia (Stoller 1989, Potter 2008); and secondly, a cross-cultural investigation of the ways in which different social groups not only classify the senses differently, but also experience them differently. We suggest that by bringing together the universalism of the cognitivist framework with the relativism of the anthropology of the senses, we will further our understanding of the place of the senses in religious transmission.
Performance studies emerged in the 1970s to combine ritual theory inspired by Victor Turner’s notion of the ritual process(1969), which shifted attention from ritual per se to other forms of performative action, with theatre studies (Schechner 2002). Performance studies attempted to displace the distinction between non-Western ritual activity – seen as the preserve of anthropologists – and Western performance, by focusing on ‘any action that is framed, presented, highlighted, or displayed’ (ibid: 2). Performance studies has a central focus on the body, embodiment, action and agency. Just as the senses are an implicit and under-investigated component of imagistic ritual, so too is performance – not in the sense of a distinctive object, ‘a performance’ – but in a more processual sense; performance as what is done within ritual. We suggest that performance studies has something to offer to the understanding of religious transmission in the imagistic mode, but also something to gain from its engagement with the anthropology of the senses and cognitive accounts of ritual in this workshop. Performance studies have left the senses as a largely implicit and unacknowledged component of embodied performance. Where they have explored the senses, this has largely been in the context of Western ‘performances’ rather than ritual activities central to religious transmission (Banes & Lepecki 2006).
Call for Papers
The emphasis of Wenner Gren workshops is on productive discussion and debate and to encourage this we plan to work with pre-circulated papers around the workshop themes. We are therefore asking all contributors to write papers which address any or all of the themes outlined above, for circulation prior to the workshop. Papers can be speculative or provisional, or ‘position papers’ – indeed we would encourage participants to open up discussion rather than present completed, definitive works.
The workshop description foregrounds issues of religious transmission, though this need not be the central topic of each paper. Rather, we are interested in ascertaining the current ‘state of play’ within each of the three sub-fields of Anthropology (Cognitive Anthropology, Anthropology of the Senses, Performance Studies) and thinking about how they might combine to shed light on this issue. So in considering their paper, we would like participants to think about how they would place themselves within these sub-fields (or perhaps against/in relation to them), and what they consider to be the possibilities for dialogue across the sub-fields. The workshop will proceed from these contributions.
Deadlines
Could we ask all contributors to provide:
Paper title and brief abstract – by January 1st 2011.
Paper (which can be in draft form, so long as it is intelligible) – by March 1st 2011
Participants
Dr Jon P Mitchell (University of Sussex) – Convenor, Paper Contributor and Discussant
Dr Michael Bull (University of Sussex) – Convenor and Discussant
Dr Greg Downey (Macquarie University, Sydney) – Paper Contributor
Dr Abigail Wood (SOAS, London) – Paper Contributor
Prof Zoila Mendoza (University of California, Davis) – Paper Contributor
Prof Sarah Pink (Loughborough University) – Paper Contributor
Prof Phillip Zarilli (University of Exeter) – Paper Contributor
Dr Trevor Marchand (SOAS, London) – Paper Contributor
Dr Caroline Osella (SOAS, London) – Paper Contributor
Prof David Howes (Concordia University, Montreal) – Paper Contributor
Dr Boris Wiseman (Copenhagen University) – Discussant
Prof Harvey Whitehouse (University of Oxford) – (tbc) Paper Contributor
Prof Robert Turner (Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig) – Paper Contributor
Convenors
| Dr Jon P Mitchell,
Anthropology, University of Sussex ++44 1273 872565 |
Dr Michael Bull,
Media Film and Music, University of Sussex ++44 1273 678788 |
The Sensory Studies Group
This workshop might be considered part of a broader cross-disciplinary investigation of the senses, as embodied in the group Sensory Studies: www.sensorystudies.org
The convenors were invited by Boris Wiseman to the cross-disciplinary workshop ‘The Construction of the Sensible World’ (‘L’invention du sensible’), funded and hosted by the Institut d’Études Avancées (www.paris-iea.fr) and the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, July 2009.