Theorizing ritual, emotion, and material

Abstract

The study of ritual and emotion, especially when it relies on the archaeological record, requires a foundation 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: how do things become emotionally meaningful? 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 chapter I aim to offer theoretical resources for writing about objects, including the materiality of the spaces, relationships, and processes in between them and (non)human actors. That is, I synthesize “new materialist” resources for historians of ritual to theorize how emotion—and kindred categories of feeling, sensation, perception, and experience—works in ritual through material things and places.