Hi Nort,

Perhaps you are right. I have set myself an impossible task of trying to find a unified field theory of the social sciences matching the two realms of feeling and reason--the subjective and objective--your fire and rose. They may never meet, except in us. Perhaps then we are the unifying theory and only in love do we ever enter that unified realm! If anthropologists were true to their call, they would go native and become a person of the culture they study, only then would they truly come to know that culture. It is our personhood that counts. That is the fullest expression of our culture and humanity, you would say God. It is time to speak in parables and rhyme!

Tad

Hi Tad,
I detect a conundrum! We both agree that feelings are an important and necessary component of social life, but hard to "capture" and measure. They lack the substance of the material world. How then do you make your case? How do you develop a science of feelings? Do you want to even try? It would seem you would have to start afresh every time to reinvigorate words. It is a similar problem with biblical interpretation which tries to enthuse the text and a challenge to any preacher who tries to open up scripture and bring life to the text. Perhaps you should be a preacher or poet instead of a scientist. I cannot think of a way out for you at the moment! Good luck!
Nort

Hi Nort,

What is the language of feelings? How does one capture the wind? How does one describe a cataract? It is flowing water, for sure, however, it is the tumbling, splashing, bubbling, whirling, sparkling motion that invokes feeling and which is almost impossible to capture in words. What is captured in invariably something else, something peculiar to the page and limitations of writing, which, grant you, are feelings nonetheless. Scripture gives voice to the Holy Spirit; Poetry to our emotions. In both cases our imagination must engage the text to produce the effect. We need a new language of science to capture these feelings, if it is possible. Science which tries to draw hard lines around phenomena is unable to capture the intangible, fluid-by-nature, come-and-go quality of our feelings. We need a new analytical language. Is their a place for poetry in the sciences? Otherwise we continue to recycle the same reductive, materialist, and ideological theories that are removed from the feeling of actual lived experience.

Tad

Hi Tad,

What you wrote about the Dogon and their ideas of emotions that move like wind and breathed into the body does remind me of our Christian understanding of the Trinity: God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The latter is emitted from the breath of both the Father and Son. The Holy Ghost, or Spirit, is the root of understanding, the means by which we know the world. One could argue that it is the emotional valence of knowing. John called it the Paraclete, "to call alongside." It is translated from the Greek as "Comforter," "Advocate," "Supporter," and "Helper." It gives as strength and courage to carry out God's work. Also, it is the means by which we come to know and embody what we know. It too is fluid, moving within us, between us and between us and God. It is how we know the truth, which in most cases is beyond rational, scientific explanations.

Nort

Hi Nort,

I would agree that our emotions and thoughts connect us to the world and should not be conceived of either originating within or without the body. The point I am trying to make, however, is that each culture conceptualizes the world differently in terms of emotions and it should affect how people in that culture relate to the world and each other. It is the cultural understanding that counts. For example, the Dogon, who live on the Bandiagara Cliffs in the Niger Bend of Mali, do see the body as a kind of antenna that attracts spiritual principles that exist outside the body. The body is also connected to the world through the four elements of water, fire, earth and air which constitute both world and body. This connection is evident in the exchange between the body and worldly elements through the food one eats, water one drinks, and air one breaths. Another way the body is connected to the world according to the Dogon is by its souls (kikinu), of which there are eight in total, each associated with a different bodily organ, i.e., the brain, liver, heart, pancreas, spleen, etc. The souls are also associated with different emotional states: joy, anger, dread, etc. Although the souls reside in the bodily organs, they have their origin outside the body, where they are held in reserve. The kikinu move about in the form of the wind and are taken into the body through the breath. It's a complicated, but intriguing mapping together of anatomy, physiology, psychology and cosmology. The take away from this Dogon cosmology of affect is the fluid interconnection among the different realms. The modern male tendency is to take, appropriate, consume, and hoard. We should have a choice of how we conceptualize our emotional life!

Tad

Hi Tad,


What is the location of consciousness? The brain is situated in the body. I think one has to start there. However, consciousness does reflect the world around us and in that way connects us to the world. In spite of my initial enthusiasm for your thesis, I would argue that the emotions are also located in the body, too, but are affected by the outside world and our thoughts of the world. For example, there is both our fight or flight responses and the emotional valence of symbols and signs. Our emotions are the mercury in the thermometer, rising and falling with the outside temperature. Our emotions allow for a personal engagement with the world. This is what I think is most important. It is all personal! To be human is to have that personal connection to the world and others. This is one meaning of the Incarnation. There is both a divine and human aspect to our consciousness and feelings.

Nort

Hi Nort,

Thanks for the encouragement. I do feel that I am on the right track. It is not that people have not thought about the extrasomatic origins of emotions. You find it throughout the ethnographic literature, where it is considered a premodern construct, almost a quaint ethnopsychology that has no relevance to our understanding of the modern psyche. However, I hope to make a more emphatic case for ethnopsychology, in order to explode the notion of the atomized, individual self which the modern West is so tied to and cannot let go of. Part of this modern conceptual fallacy lies in equating the mind with the brain. Whereas the later is located in the body, the former is a creation of culture and language, or in other words, has an extrasomatic origin. The mind is superorganic to use Kroeber's term. Animism is the mind mapped onto the world at large. Our consciousness of the world is the world. It is as if you took Freud's tripartite construct of the psyche and mapped it onto the universe, with the superego and id having locations outside the body. It represents a different labelling of the mind, but it is a labelling nevertheless that still can be understood and possibly managed.

Tad

Hi Tad,

You caught me at my desk. I want to respond right away to your last email. First, I just want to encourage you. You are onto something. Finally I see a testable thesis developing in your ideas, this notion of the extrasomatic origin of emotions. This thesis is certainly reflected in Christian theology, which understands love to have its origin in God. God loves us freely and abundantly. Love is both the highest emotion and the umbrella of all emotions, which are Love's myriad refractions. Christianity and the Reformation had much to do with birthing the modern world. However once born, this world ultimately turned its back on God. We became self-centered, cutting ourselves off from the world. The modern psyche is trapped within its body, which is the source for many of its ailments. Whether or not it has actual medical repercussions is an intriguing idea. Good luck with your research!

Nort

Cosomology of Affect and the Extrasomatic Origin of Feelings

Hi Nort,

I have not read Charles Long, but will now. He seems to be pointing in the right direction. Currently, I am researching cross-cultural material on the origin of emotions. What is the ideology of feelings? Where do people believe feelings come from? I mentioned kinship as a realm of affect and cosmology of affect that ascribes feelings to a supernatural realm. In so-called premodern societies, gods and demons are the faces of our emotions. By labeling them as such is one means to manage them. If so it reflects an ontology wherein emotions are thought to originate outside the self. This is contrary to modern Western ideas of emotions having a biological and psychological origin within the body. The belief that emotions reside within us is does not necessarily provide a better way to manage our emotions. Rather if gives us a false notion that we can manage feelings by repressing them within us. "Lock them down," so to speak! We wage war with ourselves. To believe in an extrasomatic origin of feelings represented by a cosmology of supernatural figures creates a very different framework for social organization and interaction. It might have implications for our health, too.

Tad

Hi Tad,

Have you read the work of Charles Long? He is a religious historian who critiques the whole "science of religion" methodology shaped by Western ideals of rationality and objectivity, which he feels blinds us from appreciating our humanity in all its fullness and diversity. We would both agree that science is tone deaf to feelings, which are a major component of religion. Science is ultimately reductive, flattening life to the one dimension of the rational. The holy is not something you can know rationally, but only know as feeling! Long asks where is the human center, that locus of revealed knowledge and reality? Before the modern era that locus was the ceremonial center of the city. In the modern era it was the self-centered consciousness. In the postmodern era, he suggests looking at every and each instance of the sacred experience, no matter how peripheral or slight. I would say that the sacred is God centered, which is everywhere. There is no privileged place, whether in the world or in the human consciousness. We navigate the realm of the sacred by our feelings and it is only something we can do in community, in relationship with others. God is in the relationship. There is a tripartite relationship between self, other and God. Without a belief in the Sacred, there can be no full appreciation of our humanity.

Nort