Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power

by Donovan O Schaefer

Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822359906
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/13/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Donovan O. Schaefer is Departmental Lecturer in Science and Religion at the University of Oxford.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction. Species, Religious Studies, and the Affective Turn  1

1. Religion, Language, and Affect  19

2. Intransigence: Power, Embodiment, and the Two Types of Affect Theory  36

3. Teaching Religion, Emotion, and Global Cinema  60

4. Compulsion: Affect, Desire, and Materiality  92

5. Savages: Ideology, Primatology, and Islamophobia  120

6. Accident: Animalism, Evolution, and Affective Economies  147

7. A Theory of the Waterfall Dance: On Accident, Language, and Animal Religion  178

Conclusion. Under the Rose  206

Notes  219

Bibliography  261

Index  281

What People are Saying About This

More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion - Manuel A. Vásquez

"Blending seamlessly the most fecund insights of affect theory, evolutionary biology, and critical animal studies, as well as feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of materiality and embodiment, this bold and trenchant challenge to the ideology of human exceptionalism and its accompanying linguistic fallacy—the refusal to analyze religion and power outside of language and texts—offers a revolutionary and more capacious approach to religion that recovers its visceral intensity and animal generativity."
 

More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion - Manuel A. Vásquez

"Blending seamlessly the most fecund insights of affect theory, evolutionary biology, and critical animal studies, as well as feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of materiality and embodiment, this bold and trenchant challenge to the ideology of human exceptionalism and its accompanying linguistic fallacy—the refusal to analyze religion and power outside of language and texts—offers a revolutionary and more capacious approach to religion that recovers its visceral intensity and animal generativity."
 

Editorial Reviews

"For all its breadth in Religious Affects Schaefer develops a well-crafted argument and clarion call:the study of religion must include,at its very core, the study of affect.... Schaefer's project is timely in an urgent sense."

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory - Jonathan Russell

"Religious Affects offers a new way to use affect theory to understand religion that better accounts for its connections with politics, globalization, and power."

Affectsphere - Staci Poston Conner

"Religious Affects represents a challenge to decenter our anthropocentric presuppositions more broadly, and, by appealing to human animality, provides a provocative angle for imagining affect over and above the all-toohuman parameters that usually characterize religious studies.... [M]any scholars will find Schaefer’s animal religion and his strategies for affective readings of religious phenomena both theoretically exciting and critically useful."
 

Journal of the American Academy of Religion - Abigail Kluchin

"Religious Affects is an important book, rendering helpful therapy for some of the myopic methodological tendencies that can afflict the field of religious studies."

Syndicate - Jason N. Blum

"Writing on the side of apes, awesome animality, and the creaturely dimensions of human religious experience, Donovan O. Schaefer powerfully and persuasively shows how much religious studies has to benefit from its encounter with affect theory and critical animal studies. Religious Affects is urgent, necessary, and utterly compelling reading."

Ann Pellegrini

"Religious Affects comfortably belongs on the bookshelves of those who work with affect theory or in critical animal studies. For religious scholars, or anyone interested in affect theory or critical animal studies, it serves as a concise and valuable introduction to these theories, providing explanations, histories, applications, and paving ways for future scholarship."--Alexander Cox-Twardowski "Journal of Religion and Popular Culture" (7/1/2019 12:00:00 AM)

"Religious Affects is an important book, rendering helpful therapy for some of the myopic methodological tendencies that can afflict the field of religious studies."--Jason N. Blum "Syndicate" (10/30/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"Religious Affects is an original and challenging argument for the discipline, especially to social-constructionist approaches, as it aims to radically reconfigure how we think about religion as a phenomenon grounded in feelings and emotions (affects) that humans share with the animal world."--Matt Sheedy "Religious Studies Review" (6/1/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Religious Affects offers a new way to use affect theory to understand religion that better accounts for its connections with politics, globalization, and power."--Staci Poston Conner "Affectsphere" (5/12/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Religious Affects represents a challenge to decenter our anthropocentric presuppositions more broadly, and, by appealing to human animality, provides a provocative angle for imagining affect over and above the all-toohuman parameters that usually characterize religious studies.... [M]any scholars will find Schaefer's animal religion and his strategies for affective readings of religious phenomena both theoretically exciting and critically useful." --Abigail Kluchin "Journal of the American Academy of Religion" (6/1/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"[Schaefer's] approach to reading affect theory through the lens of animality will enrich critical engagement with the concept of religion as a theoretical tool and as a word of power in the world."--Pamela Klassen "Syndicate" (11/27/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"For all its breadth in Religious Affects Schaefer develops a well-crafted argument and clarion call: the study of religion must include, at its very core, the study of affect.... Schaefer's project is timely in an urgent sense."--Jonathan Russell "Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory" (6/3/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Schaefer . . . is blazing a trail in religious studies."--Jonathan Benthall "TLS" (6/17/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"Schaefer's book is fascinating, mind-expanding, and entirely worth a read."--Barbara J. King "Atlantic" (3/29/2016 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher

"Religious Affects is an original and challenging argument for the discipline, especially to social-constructionist approaches, as it aims to radically reconfigure how we think about religion as a phenomenon grounded in feelings and emotions (affects) that humans share with the animal world."

Religious Studies Review - Matt Sheedy

"Religious Affects comfortably belongs on the bookshelves of those who work with affect theory or in critical animal studies. For religious scholars, or anyone interested in affect theory or critical animal studies, it serves as a concise and valuable introduction to these theories, providing explanations, histories, applications, and paving ways for future scholarship."

Alexander Cox-Twardowski and Popular Culture

"Religious Affects is an original and challenging argument for the discipline, especially to social-constructionist approaches, as it aims to radically reconfigure how we think about religion as a phenomenon grounded in feelings and emotions (affects) that humans share with the animal world."

Matt Sheedy

"Schaefer . . . is blazing a trail in religious studies."

TLS - Jonathan Benthall

"Schaefer’s book is fascinating, mind-expanding, and entirely worth a read."

Atlantic - Barbara J. King

"[Schaefer's] approach to reading affect theory through the lens of animality will enrich critical engagement with the concept of religion as a theoretical tool and as a word of power in the world."

Syndicate - Pamela Klassen

"Religious Affects comfortably belongs on the bookshelves of those who work with affect theory or in critical animal studies. For religious scholars, or anyone interested in affect theory or critical animal studies, it serves as a concise and valuable introduction to these theories, providing explanations, histories, applications, and paving ways for future scholarship."

Journal of Religion and Popular Culture - Alexander Cox-Twardowski