Introduction: on Material and Embodied Power Dynamics and Religion

Abstract

As human beings we are impacted on, limited, and enabled—physically and psychologically, physiologically and neurologically—by the exchange and interaction with our material environment, and the societal discourses and practices, by the knowledge, we are embedded in. We are provided with explicit and implicit (and always embodied) ways to behave, think, and perceive; with ways to live and to frame our existence. We are a part of the power dynamics that define who we are, what we are, how we are, and if we are: For some human beings, society’s power dynamics, such as colonial and imperial, become a question of life and death; of existence or extinction. While every thought and action are the result of our social and cultural embeddedness, our collective and individual ability to resist might lie in identifying the nature of our interrelatedness. The crux is that much of the limiting and enabling happened and continues to happen at the level of the body; the subjectification of human beings occurs subtly. We are affected via our senses in our material totality as human bodies—a fact that, being researchers of material and lived religion, we are aware of, though we sometimes need a reminder that we are created by power dynamics ourselves. Religious institutions, narratives, settings, and practices establish and maintain power dynamics multi-materially on body-level, while they function as multi-material dispositif for embodied power dynamics. In my research, I have focused on the sensory and affective stimulation of individuals in the context of religious and cultural practicing. First, I set out to research the attractiveness and social impact of the neo-spiritual Israeli dance improvisation practice Gaga. Contrary to my expectation, I found that neither were those who participated distinctively able to influence what kind of bodily effect practicing caused with them, nor was it the obvious and explicit practice design which impacted bodies. Participants came with embodied preconditions due to their individual and collective background which defined their ability to perceive and to conceptualize the perceived. I found embodied simulation the most important ritual component in terms of a perceived ritual effect: practitioners unconsciously and implicitly bodily simulated movements and emotional states of others present in the practice space, who, to them, owned agency; along verbally instructed movement and metaphors they audio perceived. These observations gained further importance in the postcolonial research setting of global Hawaiian hula practice. Here, Native Hawaiian kumu hula, hula teachers, have started their teaching of non-Native Hawaiian hula students worldwide to amplify the audience and significance of Hawaiian cultural knowledge (see Figure 1) and, more, to underline a claim for Hawaiian sovereignty. Regardless of this explicit attempt of the Hawaiian kumu hula shared by many of their foreign students, the embodied effect and the experience of hula, of dancing it, of listening to the drumbeats or the Hawaiian chants, for non-Native Hawaiians seemed intrinsically linked to the aesthetics of embodied discourses of colonial heritage, such as an exoticization and othering of Native Hawaii, but also e.g. neoliberal consumerist discourses, such as well-being and aesthetization of experience. Yet, to Native Hawaiians themselves observing or enacting hula unfolded an individual and collective potential of social and cultural empowerment through a feeling of belonging and pride on the backdrop of their social and cultural disempowerment. Thus, in both contexts, Gaga and Hawaiian hula, embodied power dynamics predefined how the participants perceived and, more importantly, how they emotionally framed the perceived. In Material Religion volume 19, issue 1, pp. 80–81