Hi Nort,

Away for the weekend and returned late yesterday. Very interesting to read about John Calvin's theology. We have an entirely different take on him in the social sciences with his ideas coming to us via Weber. Calvin's understanding of the Law would fit in nicely with my theory. I would add here that my field of affect has a spatial structure to it, as well, which we can call "cosmology". A good example of this cosmology is what I mentioned in my last post, i.e., the ancestor pole. I first read about the ancestor pole among the Ndyuka, a group of runaway slaves in French Guiana and Republic of Suriname in South America. I am sure you can find it among West African societies, too. According to the Dutch ethnographer Thoden van Velzen, the pole is used to establish village status. He refers to it as a "flagpole" and it no doubt acts in a similar way as a symbol of group identity. It also acts as a stake to lay a claim to the surrounding territory. It is a physical marker connecting the lineage to the land. This connection is apparent in the Tiv word tar, which has been translated as "land," "ground," and "country". According to the anthropologists Paul and Laura Bohannan, tar is the spatial dimension of the lineage, but is also the term used to refer to the lineage. The territorial and social segment are considered one and indivisible. There is a political dimension, too, as the welfare of the tar is an important preoccupation of segment leaders whose prestige depends on their efficacy in "repairing the tar." Tar is a perfect word for my concept of a field of affect with its spatial, social, and political dimensions, as well as, emotional and mystical ones. To go back to the ancestor pole of the Nyduka, I see the pole acting as an antenna channeling affect from the supernatural realm of the ancestors to the community. In Durkheim's understanding of religion, the pole would be a symbol of the group, but it is more than that--and this is where I diverge from Durkheim's theory and the reductionism one finds in social science, in general, which is blind to the realm of affect. The pole is a source of feeling. Victor Turner gets at this with his idea of the ontological pole of a symbol. However for Turner the symbol acts to connect the cognitive with the emotional realm. I would argue that symbols have a generative effect. They create an emotional bond and realm, which is so very important for social life. Affect is a legitimate and autonomous realm in its own right and it is time social scientists recognize this. Any attempt to explain social behavior without seriously considering feelings is reductive, meaningless, and I have to say, ignorant!

Tad