If you sing, you will surely feel happy: the affect-emotion gap and the efficacy of devotional song in Bali

ABSTRACT This essay examines the social efficacy of musically mediated religious feeling, drawing on fieldwork conducted with a community of Balinese Hindus who have become devotees of ISKCON, the international devotional movement popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. Through analysis of my conversations and musical interactions with members of this community, I argue that ISKCON’s narratives and practices of feeling render the affective stirrings that people experience while singing into knowable signs of spiritual progress while at the same time generating the bodily sensibilities that enable participants to experience those affects with greater levels of intensity. Bringing these ethnographic insights into conversation with an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that theorizes a productive ‘gap’ between affective intensity and discursive qualification, this essay proposes that, rather than affect giving way to emotion through a linear process of discursive capture, the two remain in a continual, mutually sustaining interplay. Extending the concept of the affect-emotion gap to the domain of music, the essay offers ethnographic and theoretical insight into the processes by which music’s affective affordances become efficacious in social life.