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Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power
In Religious Affects Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. Drawing on affect theory, evolutionary biology, and poststructuralist theory, Schaefer builds on the recent materialist shift in religious studies to relocate religious practices in the affective realm—an insight that helps us better understand how religion is lived in conjunction with systems of power. To demonstrate religion's animality and how it works affectively, Schaefer turns to a series of case studies, including the documentary Jesus Camp and contemporary American Islamophobia. Placing affect theory in conversation with post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Schaefer explores the extent to which nonhuman animals have the capacity to practice religion, linking human forms of religion and power through a new analysis of the chimpanzee waterfall dance as observed by Jane Goodall. In this compelling case for the use of affect theory in religious studies, Schaefer provides a new model for mapping relations between religion, politics, species, globalization, secularism, race, and ethics.
304 pages, Paperback
First published November 13, 2015
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181 people want to read
About the author
Donovan O. Schaefer
5 books18 followersDonovan Schaefer is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his B.A. in the interdisciplinary Religion, Literature, and the Arts program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His master’s and doctoral degrees are from the Religion program at Syracuse University. After completing his PhD, he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Haverford College. From there, he went on to teach in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford for three years before taking up his position at Penn in 2017. His research focuses on the role of embodiment and emotion in religion, science, and secularism.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 30, 2021
We were assigned this book as part of our Religion and Material Culture seminar, but never got around to it because of schedule changes (yay, COVID semester), so nerd that I am, I cracked it open now that it's summertime, and I am so glad I did.
Put simply, this book puts into words things I'd been wondering about, especially when it comes to the interplay of what we know about human evolution and religion. Namely, if all religions are not "paths up the same mountain" – a position on which both fundamentalists and religious scholars agree – then how do we explain the fact that all human culture, including religion, almost certainly evolved alongside humanity itself from common origins. In that sense, all religions must derive from the same source. If they're not paths up the same mountain, perhaps they're paths down from the same summit, or streams originating from the same headwaters.
Anyway, Religious Affects seems to agree. Jumping off from Jane Goodall's revelation that chimpanzees seem to engage in religious rituals, Donovan Schaefer asks whether animals – other than humans, that is – have religion, and if so, what does that mean for how religion functions?
His answer, at least in part, is to explore the role of affects in the creation of religion, the idea that humans experience strong emotional responses below the level of linguistics – that is, these responses cannot be subjected to the normal patterns of description through speech and writing because they happen too quickly or too strongly or too subtly.
The implications are important and wide-ranging. Schaefer brings in a host of scholars from both science and religion, making much-needed corrections to the insufferably overbroad claims of the humanities' "linguistic turn" and the natural selection fundamentalists in the New Atheism camp. Evolution and religion, Schaefer argues, are powered by affect at least as much as by language or adaptation, and to the extent affect powers religion, it connects religion to power. If we assume everything about religion operates on the level of words, we miss important ways in which power is established through much more primal means.
Overall, while not a breezy read, it's not overly difficult, and Schaefer's arguments strike me as incredibly important for developing a more nuanced view of both evolution and religion, two subjects often placed in conflict but which need each other more than ever.
Put simply, this book puts into words things I'd been wondering about, especially when it comes to the interplay of what we know about human evolution and religion. Namely, if all religions are not "paths up the same mountain" – a position on which both fundamentalists and religious scholars agree – then how do we explain the fact that all human culture, including religion, almost certainly evolved alongside humanity itself from common origins. In that sense, all religions must derive from the same source. If they're not paths up the same mountain, perhaps they're paths down from the same summit, or streams originating from the same headwaters.
Anyway, Religious Affects seems to agree. Jumping off from Jane Goodall's revelation that chimpanzees seem to engage in religious rituals, Donovan Schaefer asks whether animals – other than humans, that is – have religion, and if so, what does that mean for how religion functions?
His answer, at least in part, is to explore the role of affects in the creation of religion, the idea that humans experience strong emotional responses below the level of linguistics – that is, these responses cannot be subjected to the normal patterns of description through speech and writing because they happen too quickly or too strongly or too subtly.
The implications are important and wide-ranging. Schaefer brings in a host of scholars from both science and religion, making much-needed corrections to the insufferably overbroad claims of the humanities' "linguistic turn" and the natural selection fundamentalists in the New Atheism camp. Evolution and religion, Schaefer argues, are powered by affect at least as much as by language or adaptation, and to the extent affect powers religion, it connects religion to power. If we assume everything about religion operates on the level of words, we miss important ways in which power is established through much more primal means.
Overall, while not a breezy read, it's not overly difficult, and Schaefer's arguments strike me as incredibly important for developing a more nuanced view of both evolution and religion, two subjects often placed in conflict but which need each other more than ever.
January 4, 2023
This was my first text to read on affect theory. Getting into it as a second year in undergrad was grueling. Much of the vocabulary is hard to grasp. However, I found that as I went through it I was able to understand it better.
Schaefer has been much-quoted by newer articles in religious studies that work with affect theory, although most researchers quote his earlier chapters about intransigence.
Basically, Schaefer presents a particular kind of affect theory: a materialist phenomenology grounded in the animalist turn. It is materialist because the approach concerns itself with lived religion, more specifically how religion feels to bodies. It is phenomenological in that it considers what happens to itself be political, and that what bodies feel and experience is enmeshed with power. It is animalist because Schaefer is interested in viewing not only the religiosity of animals, but how human religion is also animal.
Affects themselves are quite vague, but from what I gathered, they are deeper than (but including) emotions. They are the dispositions, reactions, feelings, attachments that our bodies have to other bodies and to the world. Some are hard to change, and our bodies have an affective preset. But affects also change when we enter new spaces or go through new experiences. Affects draw us to do their bidding, and even the beliefs we hold and the ways we speak are determined by what - on a foundational level - our bodies feel. All of this can't quite be rationalized. The way in which we've come to embody (or be shaped by) long, tumultuous evolutionary histories has been accidental. We just so happen to be how we are right now. There is not always a reason we act, even if after the fact we might see some method to our madness.
The book didn't focus as much on the vertical relationship between humans and the divine as it should have. Schaefer largely focused on bodies and their entanglements with each other and to their environment. It is still in that respect grounded in secularist rationalizations of religiosity. It would be interesting to see what affect theory might look like from a scholar who is religiously interested in religious studies.
Schaefer has been much-quoted by newer articles in religious studies that work with affect theory, although most researchers quote his earlier chapters about intransigence.
Basically, Schaefer presents a particular kind of affect theory: a materialist phenomenology grounded in the animalist turn. It is materialist because the approach concerns itself with lived religion, more specifically how religion feels to bodies. It is phenomenological in that it considers what happens to itself be political, and that what bodies feel and experience is enmeshed with power. It is animalist because Schaefer is interested in viewing not only the religiosity of animals, but how human religion is also animal.
Affects themselves are quite vague, but from what I gathered, they are deeper than (but including) emotions. They are the dispositions, reactions, feelings, attachments that our bodies have to other bodies and to the world. Some are hard to change, and our bodies have an affective preset. But affects also change when we enter new spaces or go through new experiences. Affects draw us to do their bidding, and even the beliefs we hold and the ways we speak are determined by what - on a foundational level - our bodies feel. All of this can't quite be rationalized. The way in which we've come to embody (or be shaped by) long, tumultuous evolutionary histories has been accidental. We just so happen to be how we are right now. There is not always a reason we act, even if after the fact we might see some method to our madness.
The book didn't focus as much on the vertical relationship between humans and the divine as it should have. Schaefer largely focused on bodies and their entanglements with each other and to their environment. It is still in that respect grounded in secularist rationalizations of religiosity. It would be interesting to see what affect theory might look like from a scholar who is religiously interested in religious studies.
September 9, 2017
In Religious Affects, Schaefer presents us with two images:
1) Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees who do a startling waterfall rain dance, swinging through the spray on hanging vines, lifting up and hurling rocks and branches, and rhythmically stamping their feet in the water as if in primate heaven.
2) Jesus Camp children, in a 2006 documentary, with white American evangelical children worshiping in religious ecstasy.
Is religion of ape or of man? Schaefer uses developments in affect theory to claim both, while echoing Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (2008). He takes the beyond-mere-survival approach to evolution, which he terms postfoundational Darwinism, in line with the approach of Tielhard de Chardin.
Schaefer traces the philosophical linguistic turn exemplified by Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, who emphasize the embodied, empowered, enactive and affective domains of lived experience. Everything is political--products of power--even religion. And power is embodied through affect(s). There is a dual theory of “affect(s),” where affects means Schaefer’s concept of phenomenological theory where there are multiple (n>2) affects which play out in life, versus affect (n-1) ascribed to Deleuze as a singular reduction of affect to a metaphysically restricted “becoming” beneath emotions (a Derridian interpretation of Deleuze). Schaefer insists that bodies are not pure becoming, but intransigent and consistent, though metastable and semistable.
Thus Schaefer tracks the phenomenological affective turn which stands opposed to the linguistic fallacy which has resulted from the Enlightenment fantasy of rationalistic personal autonomy. He also presents the shift to a materialist phenomenology which embodies histories in deep time, and exemplifies the heterogenous multiplicity of animal bodies.
He examines religion as therefore an outcome of a body’s affective response to power in the world. Religion is embodied in the animalistic—a dance in response to certain affective rhythms in the world which are also transferred through cultural and political means, and with global implications.
What are we to make of Schaefer’s genealogy of religion? What he does not say is impressive. Left out are religious or political propositions of deontological truth claims. He does however imply that given adequate awareness of our condition, perhaps we can circumvent historical abuses of power through cultural means such as religion, and replace examples of political or religious tribalism such as Islamophobia (and now Americanophobia) with measured responses of wonder and awe at the pluralism in the world, whether dancing is by waterfalls themselves, by chimpanzees, by children or by a divine collective united in solidarity.
1) Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees who do a startling waterfall rain dance, swinging through the spray on hanging vines, lifting up and hurling rocks and branches, and rhythmically stamping their feet in the water as if in primate heaven.
2) Jesus Camp children, in a 2006 documentary, with white American evangelical children worshiping in religious ecstasy.
Is religion of ape or of man? Schaefer uses developments in affect theory to claim both, while echoing Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (2008). He takes the beyond-mere-survival approach to evolution, which he terms postfoundational Darwinism, in line with the approach of Tielhard de Chardin.
Schaefer traces the philosophical linguistic turn exemplified by Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, who emphasize the embodied, empowered, enactive and affective domains of lived experience. Everything is political--products of power--even religion. And power is embodied through affect(s). There is a dual theory of “affect(s),” where affects means Schaefer’s concept of phenomenological theory where there are multiple (n>2) affects which play out in life, versus affect (n-1) ascribed to Deleuze as a singular reduction of affect to a metaphysically restricted “becoming” beneath emotions (a Derridian interpretation of Deleuze). Schaefer insists that bodies are not pure becoming, but intransigent and consistent, though metastable and semistable.
Thus Schaefer tracks the phenomenological affective turn which stands opposed to the linguistic fallacy which has resulted from the Enlightenment fantasy of rationalistic personal autonomy. He also presents the shift to a materialist phenomenology which embodies histories in deep time, and exemplifies the heterogenous multiplicity of animal bodies.
He examines religion as therefore an outcome of a body’s affective response to power in the world. Religion is embodied in the animalistic—a dance in response to certain affective rhythms in the world which are also transferred through cultural and political means, and with global implications.
What are we to make of Schaefer’s genealogy of religion? What he does not say is impressive. Left out are religious or political propositions of deontological truth claims. He does however imply that given adequate awareness of our condition, perhaps we can circumvent historical abuses of power through cultural means such as religion, and replace examples of political or religious tribalism such as Islamophobia (and now Americanophobia) with measured responses of wonder and awe at the pluralism in the world, whether dancing is by waterfalls themselves, by chimpanzees, by children or by a divine collective united in solidarity.
September 17, 2017
I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing. It does get significantly better with the Islamophobia chapter. Schaefer cites all the right people but it ultimately feels like more of a literature review and praising of affect theory discourse rather than offering anything theoretically substantive about religion in either human or animal form. The reading of Levinas's anthropocentrism is a bit over-simplified too. It is certainly a good topic and Schaefer brings a lot of important voices together.
December 12, 2022
OK, I'm only at page 9, but the two outstanding qualities of this book so far are the sheer tonnage of critical-theory jargon and the absence of any sign that it will discuss topics I'd have thought were relevant to "religion's animality" -- (a) the neurological basis of religous experience and (b) Neolithic and Paleolithic religion. I suspect I won't be enjoying this one.
As far as I can tell, the serious study of religion, unlike what goes on in U.S. departments of "religious studies," isn't about combat between grim, WASP-y Protestants and devotees of queer/feminist/postcolonial theory, a feud that's the main preoccupation of this book. Come on, Donovan O. Schaefer, read David Lewis-Williams -- or, if you'd like something fringier but popular, Julian Jaynes. In the battle of theologians with formal credos vs. the "It's something people *feel,* you know?" school to explain religion's roots, you can rest easy. The latter group won decades ago. It's now a question of how the central nervous system produces that numinous sensation we know and love, and how its workings can be seen in prehistory.
*****
UPDATE! Abandoned on page 12. As someone may have said following what our author is pleased to call the concretization of religion as a linguistic system, life's too short.
*****
P.S. I read those 12 soul-searing pages because Schaefer's starting point is an account by Jane Goodall of repeated, seemingly ritualistic behavior by chimpanzees that gather at a waterfall in Gombe, Tanzania. Symbolic acts? Primitive hominid stirrings of what became religion in humans? I was desperate to read more about this after seeing it mentioned in an Atlantic article (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/a...), but Schaefer, after citing Goodall briefly, does nothing with it. If I was a scholar of religion, or even a professor of "religious studies," I'd be grabbing my malaria pills and heading out the door.
As far as I can tell, the serious study of religion, unlike what goes on in U.S. departments of "religious studies," isn't about combat between grim, WASP-y Protestants and devotees of queer/feminist/postcolonial theory, a feud that's the main preoccupation of this book. Come on, Donovan O. Schaefer, read David Lewis-Williams -- or, if you'd like something fringier but popular, Julian Jaynes. In the battle of theologians with formal credos vs. the "It's something people *feel,* you know?" school to explain religion's roots, you can rest easy. The latter group won decades ago. It's now a question of how the central nervous system produces that numinous sensation we know and love, and how its workings can be seen in prehistory.
*****
UPDATE! Abandoned on page 12. As someone may have said following what our author is pleased to call the concretization of religion as a linguistic system, life's too short.
*****
P.S. I read those 12 soul-searing pages because Schaefer's starting point is an account by Jane Goodall of repeated, seemingly ritualistic behavior by chimpanzees that gather at a waterfall in Gombe, Tanzania. Symbolic acts? Primitive hominid stirrings of what became religion in humans? I was desperate to read more about this after seeing it mentioned in an Atlantic article (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/a...), but Schaefer, after citing Goodall briefly, does nothing with it. If I was a scholar of religion, or even a professor of "religious studies," I'd be grabbing my malaria pills and heading out the door.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews