A Moment with Christ: The Importance of Feelings in the Analysis of Belief

Jon P. Mitchell

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 3, No. 1. (Mar., 1997), pp. 79-94.

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A MOMENT W T H CHRIST THE IMPORTANCE O F FEELINGS IN THE ANALYSIS O F BELIEF

JON P. MITCHELL

University College London

This article considers an uncanny feeling experienced during fieldwork in Malta, and examines indigenous explanations of this and other similar feelings. In Malta, explanations of such strange or uncanny experiences vary, but religious explanations present themselves as particularly con- vincing. The religious indoctrination process involves the creation of powerful feelings, which are sedimented as memories in the body of the believer and serve as a reference point for subsequent strange experiences. I therefore argue that feelings are both produced by and give meaning, to religious belief: It has become de rigeur to criticize the 'logocentrism' of anthropology and to favour an anthropology of the body I suggest that such an approach should also incorporate the anthropology of feelings, but that this need not entail a shift in ethnographic writing.

Experiencing ethnography It has often been suggested that one of the benefits of studying 'other cultures' is that such studies help us to understand ourselves. If this is so, the converse must also be true. Examining the ways in which we experience the world can help us to understand the ways in which others experience it (Cohen 1992: 221-2). Clifford has characterized ethnographic research as a kind of dialectical process between the anthropologist as outsider and the insiders with whom he or she conducts the research (Clifford 1988: 34). The ethnographic text is a product of this dialectic, comprising a written account of a particular cultural context based on the experience of an individual ethnographer. This article examines the nature of this dialectic, and makes suggestions concerning how ethnographers should engage in it.

I focus on the ways in which experiences we might describe as strange or uncanny are interpreted and explained. By examining my informants' explana- tions of an experience I had during fieldwork in the city of Valletta, Malta, I hope to show how the Maltese find alternative explanations of peculiar experi- ences more or less convincing. Thus, while the starting point of the article is my own subjectivity, my intention is to use a particular experience to give a more general account of the ways in which such experiences are explained by the Maltese.

Judgements about the validity of explanations relate to the question of belief Belief, in turn, is dependent on the types of knowledge, and modes of cognition, involved in the process of believing. I argue that belief is based upon three differ- ent, but related, modes of cognition: the semiotic, which relates to language, or

J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.)3, 79-94

80 JON P.MITCHELL

to language-like phenomena; the practical, which relates to forms of embodied knowledge; and the emotional, which relates to people's fee1ing.l

It has become de rigarr in recent years to criticize 'logocentrist', or over-linguistic, approaches to belief (Bloch 1991: 184; Bourdieu 1990: 17; Connerton 1989: 103). The move away from semiotic approaches, which focus on language, has led to the pursuit of anthropologies of embodiment and practice (Bourdieu 1990; Csordas 1989). I propose a third category of knowledge, or mode of cognition, in the process of belief Articulated to the semiotic and the practical, this is the emotional.

Anthropologists pursuing practice-oriented research have been keen to col- lapse the Cartesian duality of mind and body. But they have been less willing to interrogate a similar duality between cognition and emotion. I argue here that emotional knowledge, created through feelings - a term chosen to invoke the sense of an integrated mindbody experience - are cognitive events ofthe same order as semiotic and practical cognitions. In order to account for the process of belief, itself the backbone of explanations of uncanny events, we must examine all three types of cognition.

Central to my analysis is the concept of social memory Fentress and Wickham (1992: 5) argue that social memory should be seen as an active process. Rather than a kind of 'filling' for the containers of our minds, memory is an engage- ment with the world around us, in which experience is perceived, interpreted, and accommodated in a continual process. Social memory can therefore be conceived not as a body of knowledge, but as a set of cultural competencies or dispositions that enable people to live in a social setting; as part of the 'durably installed generative principle[s]' (Bourdieu 1977: 78), of the non-determinate features of sociality that Bourdieu refers to as habitus. In other words, social memory is the particular cultural style with which we engage and act within the world.

Seen as a set of durable dispositions, social memory is the process through which interpretations of the collective past are framed. But in framing collective interpretations of the past, social memory also actively creates the experience of commonality (Tonkin 1992: 111-12). Such interpretations tend to gloss over the specificity of individual experience. They are framed with reference to social memory but the choice of interpretation is not necessarily determinate. Just as personal cognitive idiosyncrasies can interact with the apprehension of cultural structures as a whole (Toren 1990: 16), so memories of individual experiences interact with the interpretative framework of social memory Interpretation, if you will, lies at the cusp of the dialectic between individual experience and social memory

I argue that the interpretation of personal experience is mediated by feelings, and that the interpretation of feelings involves social memory. Although feelings seem entirely personal, they are always experienced in, and hence framed by social conditions (Fentress & Wickham 1992: 7). We experience feelings and interpret them as encultured beings, not as isolated individuals (Rosaldo 1984: 143). For example, a particular type of romantic love has been seen as a product of the cultural conditions prevailing in early nineteenth-century Europe (Campbell 1987; see also Bourdieu 1984). But the cultural context not only gives rise to particular explanations of feelings, it actually triggers those feelings

81 JON P.MITCHELL

in the first place. Thus, in nineteenth-century Europe it was not just the expla- nations of certain feelings that underwent a paradigm shift, turning them into romantic love. The paradigm of feeling itself shifted, and a new way of feeling emerged. Cultural context, therefore, both generates feelings and provides a framework for their interpretation.

While my argument concerns strange or supernatural experiences in Malta, and their explanation through belief; I wish to avoid implying any causal link between experience, explanation and belief: Each of these three elements in- forms the others, such that belief is dependent on particular explanations of experiences, experiences depend on belief in particular explanations, and expla- nations depend on belief and experience.

Malta is an intensely Catholic country Ninety-eight per cent. of the popula- tion are members of the Catholic church and, of these, eighty-five per cent. practise their faith at least once a week Fieldwork in Valletta was carried out with a wide variety of people, but the material on which this article is based came mainly from a group of men associated with a religious confraternity dedicated to the Sacred Crucifur. Religion was a vital part of the articulation of their personal and communal identity and I spent many months discussing religion, belief and the importance of the church with this group of men. Their views of the world were very much informed by their religious beliefs, which they used to understand the relationship between the spiritual world and the material. I shall explore these beliefs, and the ways in which they contributed to the explanation of particular experiences, both theirs and mine.

To explain feelings is to classify them and make decisions about how they originated. As in much of the Judaeo-Christian world, a fundamental dichot- omy is drawn in Malta between attribution based on natural cause (tan-natura) and that based on the supernatural (is-sopranatural). When explaining a feeling, a choice is made between natural or supernatural attribution. The distinction is a function of the dichotomizing tendency of Catholic belief; which divides the world into Heaven and Earth, Sacred and Profane, Spirit and Body The ability to choose comes from the indeterminate nature of the cultural framing device - the central set of durable dispositions. But the persuasiveness of supernatural - and particularly religious - explanations comes from the structure of religious belief itself; and the ways in which such belief works. I argue that religious belief is particularly convincing as an explanation for unusual experiences be- cause it not only provides a doctrinal context within which attribution can be made, but also creates experiences which are explained a priori. These experi- ences present the believer with ready-made memories that are already explained, and are part and parcel of the process of religious indoctrination. These structured experiences act as a blueprint or reference-point for people's subsequent experiences.

Catholicism in Malta has the appearance of being a very 'bookish' type of religion. Hence one would imagine it to be based on the learning of cultural categories through a semiotic process. But it became clear to me, after I had been in Valletta for some time, that the most important features of Maltese religion, as it was actually experienced, were 'emotional'. The ways in which people learned about religion, and the kinds of memories they had about this learning process, were emotional as much as semiotic.

82 JON P.MITCHELL

My informants often dwelt on unusual experiences they had had, and which they felt could only be explained in religious terms. However, it was not until I had investigated a similar experience of my own that I became fully aware of the significance of such feelings for religious belief, and of belief for the explanation of feelings.

When I'm cleaning windows

As a participant observer in Malta I regularly attended Sunday Mass and in- volved myself in other church activities. O n one occasion I entered a church when members of the local confraternity were cleaning the niche that housed their statue of Christ crucified. It is a particularly grisly statue, standing life-size and emaciated behind a large pane of glass. It is said to be miraculous, first, because of the manner of its creation. It is accredited to a seventeenth-century monk, who carved the legs and torso without incident. But when he came to the head he fell into a trance, waking to find the head complete: the work of angels. Secondly, the crucifix is believed to have miraculous powers of healing. During the annual niche-cleaning, cotton wadding is dabbed on Christ's bleed- ing wounds and kept for circulation among the sick.

I turned up as my friends were performing this operation, and was asked if I wanted to climb up into the niche and help them clean the glass. To them, it seemed a good idea. They said that this close contact with the miraculous statue would help me after I left Malta to write my thesis. So I agreed, and climbed up next to the bleeding, writhing Christ, my eyes just level with the oozing chest wound. I was handed a damp cloth, and the glass was rolled back into place. I was trapped.

It was hot and humid; there was very little air, and a strong musty smell mixed with that of the cleaning solution on the cloth. As I started to wipe the glass, I became increasingly aware of the figure behind me. An intense feeling of excitement came over me, one that I am sure went beyond simple claustro- phobia. My stomach tightened and I began to shake. My heart pounded, and although I did not faint, I did feel light-headed.

For Sartre (1962), such feelings are caused by a transformation in conscious- ness. Sartre argues persuasively against the Freudian assumption that feelings relate to the unconscious. For him, feelings are caused by a superabundance of consciousness, but a form of consciousness different from the everyday His view mirrors the psychological observations of Laird, whom I discuss below Both Laird and Sartre are critical of Aristotelian divisions between cognition and affect, and between thoughts and feelings, that persist in much writing on memory and emotion. In both Laird's and Sartre's formulation, affect, emotion and feelings are simply a form of cognition, equivalent to the kinds of cognitive operations more commonly given that title. For Sartre, this hinges on the aban- donment of the opposition between unconscious and conscious, an opposition which in turn has been used to oppose emotion and rationality Rather than caused by a retreat into the unconscious, feelings are simply the product of a different kind of consciousness (Sartre 1962).

The emotional process requires a leap of consciousness which transforms the intuitive relations between physical objects into what Sartre calls magical ones. This distinction is not the same as that between Maltese conceptions of natural

83 JON P.MITCHELL

and sopranatural powers. Rather, it is between the intuitive relations we learn as human organisms trying to make our way around the physical world - the most unreflexive understanding of physical restraints such as gravity and balance, which we learn at an early age (Piaget 1977) - and states of consciousness which gratuitously contradict these relations. It would be tempting to argue that this difference in states of consciousness is one between individual experience and socially-derived knowledge. This distinction is fallacious. As Toren (1990: 4) has argued, no knowledge is ever achieved in an asocial situation, so that all knowl- edge is both individual and social simultaneously. Hence there can be no differencn in kind between knowledge of the physical relations between objects and humans, and knowledge of the magical ones. Consequently there is no difference in lund between our feelings and our explanations of particular expe- riences.

In feelings, consciousness traps us, defeating all attempts to respond to emo- tional situations. When faced with the unpleasant situation of being trapped alone in a confined space with a gruesome statue, therefore, I wanted to annihi- late the experience. This meant annihilating consciousness, and explains my feeling of faintness; fainting is one of the most efficient ways of denying one's consciousness (Sartre 1962: 66). Of course, we can never fully achieve annihi- lation, because being conscious of a situation is itself premissed on the presence of consciousness. Because we cannot negate the experience, we get frustrated and this consolidates our feelings.

When I became scared of being in the niche, I had contradicted the physical relations I knew existed between myself and the carved piece of wood, and created a threat by projecting magical powers onto the statue. But this was not necessarily a leap in my mode of cognition. Rather, it was a shift in conscious- ness based on my overall knowledge of the world. It was partly due to the nature of participant observation, for when we engage in this type of fieldwork, we become involved in a process of cultural mimesis. By taking part in particu-lar cultural practices, we hope to make them explicable. But adoption of local practices can also take one beyond simple mimesis, and into the realm of felt experience. This type of experience should not be ignored. Rather, it can give us further, deeper insights into the practices that provoke them, and into the interpretations that are made of them.

Bloch (1991) has suggested that carrying out ethnography is much the same as social learning. We arrive in the field as relatively incompetent agents, and then learn the necessary conditions of sociality in that specific setting. But this learning process is related more to our physical senses than to the semantic or cognitive categories I have glossed as semiotic. We learn more in the field through doing than through talking (Bloch 1991: 194-5). If fieldwork is like social learning, it is because it involves learning new forms of cognition in order to make sense of the field environment. This involves not only a semiotic process but also a practical one.

As a fieldworker in Malta, I learned the sets of behaviour appropriate to representations of the crucifurion, in the hope that this would help me under- stand their significance. I learned how to bow my head in reverence to their saintly gaze, and to avoid turning my back on them. Whether it was reverence to such representationsper se, or deference to others' belief in them, I could not

84 JON P.MITCHELL

say, but I soon began to see them as precious objects charged with some sort of power.2 Through learning the appropriate modes of behaviour, I began to adopt an appropriate mode of cognition. This was no doubt consolidated by my own upbringing in a Christian family: the crucifur was already a culturally meaning- ful - or, at least, not alien - object.

But there is a third dimension to social learning and social memory besides the semiotic and the practical; this, which I have termed the emotional, relates to feelings. As Laird (1989) has argued, emotions affect memory because feel- ings are cognitions. Like Sartre, Laird calls into question the Freudian approach to emotion and to the relationship between emotion and memory. The Freu- dian approach sees emotion as the product of suppressed memory Laird investigated the possibility that memory and emotion are causally linked in the opposite direction, with emotion affecting memory rather than memory affect- ing emotion. He based his argument on a series of experiments in which students were asked to remember two different passages of emotion-provoking text: either anger-provoking newspaper editorials or humorous selections by Woody Allen. In each case, the students were asked to recall the passages whilst adopting the expression of a smile or a frown. He found that recall was signifi- cantly higher when the tone of the passage and the expression adopted matched up; that is, when the humorous passage was remembered with a smile, and the editorial was remembered with a frown. Laird concluded that rather than emo- tion being affected by memory as in the Freudian formulation, memory is affected by emotion (Laird et al. 1982). What is remembered is as much the mood that a passage evokes as the passage itself: Laird's findings suggest that emotion does not only affect memory but that emotion actually is memory.

This conclusion comes from a long tradition of cognitive psychology that relates feelings to cognition, and hence to memory Emotional events are di- vided by Laird into six different components: the eliciting event, its appraisal by a person, the person's autonomic response, resultant expressive behaviour, ac- tion, and emotional feeling. He argues that the received view of the relationship between these components is that an eliciting event leads to a feeling, which in turn produces expressive behaviour, autonomic response, and then instrumen- tal action (see fig. 1). However, following James's (1968) observation that emotional feelings can be elicited by types of behaviour, Laird argues that the relationship is one in which the eliciting event and appraisal lead directly to expressive behaviour, autonomic responses and instrumental actions. These emotional actions are then experienced as feelings (see fig. 2). Thus, when we have an emotional feeling, what it constitutes is an awareness of the bodily mechanisms elicited by a particular event. As in Sartre's formulation, the emo- tion, rather than being a deficit in consciousness, is a heightened consciousness of oneself as a physical organism. This conclusion is supported by experiments such as the one described above; the physical manipulation of the body in such a way that an individual adopts the expression of a particular emotion and can actually elicit an experience of that emotion. For example, forcing somebody to smile can actually make them happy (Laird 1989: 35). This suggests that feel- ings are caused by the practical mechanics of the body's response to particular situations.

85 JON P.MITCHELL

expressive behaviour

eliciting feeling autonomic event response

\ :;;;mental

FIGURE1. Common-sense formulation of how an emotion works.

eliciting expressive ____) feelingeventi

appraisal III)behaviour

\ in:n;mentaI

FIGURE2. Laird's formulation (after James) of how an emotion works.

The implications for a phenomenology of emotion are not insignificant in that they once more threaten the Cartesian distinction of mind and body, sug- gesting that emotions are at once bodily feelings and mental states. Moreover, they threaten the distinction between what we would normally think of as cognition as opposed to emotion. Laird's conclusion is that rather than there being an intrinsic difference between cognition and emotion, 'there seems to be one kind of knowing and, basically, only one kind of thing that is known: action and its context' (1989: 36). Where the object of that knowledge is outside the self; we have been used to calling that kind of mechanism cognitive. Where the object of that knowledge is the body itself; we have been used to calling it emotional. But there is no essential difference, and hence no essential hierarchy, between these two types of knowledge. We therefore learn through feelings as

86 JON P.MITCHELL

much as through cognition. In my formulation, emotional knowledge is as important as semiotic and practical knowledge in the process of social memory

Explanation and choice

I should now like to examine the significance of these three components of social memory in the reproduction of religious belief in Malta. Not only do Maltese learn to believe through words, they also do so through their engage- ments with physical objects such as statues and their emotional experiences of these engagements. In order adequately to render this learning process, we must take equal note of all three aspects of social memory

As well as being full of Bibles, Malta is full of statues. Physical embodiments of holy persons, they pack the churches and line the streets. As babes-in-arms, Maltese are taken around to engage with these embodiments, recognizing the differences between the saints and mimicking their poses. The statues become the physical media through which young children learn about the presence of the spiritual world. Children smell burning candles and incense, see their par- ents worshipping the saints and hear the bells and fireworks that herald the arrival of particular ritual occasions. All of these are sensory mechanisms of practical knowledge through which a child understands the presence of the spiritual. But learning the spiritual is not purely practical, it is also emotional. It gives way to feelings that are not merely responses to cognitive processes, but are part of those processes themselves.

O n one occasion, I was discussing the various Catholic rites of passage with a g~oup of male informants in their late twenties. The subject turned to confir- mation. This ihthe annual ritual at which ten- and eleven-year-olds from Valletta are accepted as adults into the church. The Archbishop of Malta per- forms the liturgy, of which the most memorable part, for my informants, was the moment when he laid his hand on their forehead.

They could vividly remember the day; how they were dressed (in brand new suits); who their adult sponsors were; who was in front and behind them in the line to receive the blessing. But when it came to describing the moment itself, it was to the feeling that they referred; a kind of shock, or tingling, that ema- nated from the Archbishop's hand and filtered down into their whole body They would never forget it.

It is significant here that their descriptions of the feeling were very similar. Presumably, they had no way of judging whether their own feelings were the same as other people's. Yet there was agreement about what it felt like to be confirmed. The individual memory of a particular feeling was collectivized, in the process of establishing a common explanation of what each individual had felt.

Such feelings bridge not only the dichotomy between the individual and the collective, but also the Cartesian divide between mind and body, as they simul- taneously involve a transformation in consciousness and modification of physiology. We experience the physical symptoms of feeling, which in turn convince the consciousness of the verity of the (magical) relations it has created. In my own example, frustration at not being able to deny consciousness led to shaking, sweating and tingling; physical symptoms which made it impossible to deny that I had felt something peculiar in the niche. But although I could not

87 JON P.MITCHELL

argue with the fact of feeling something, what remained indeterminate was the particular explanation I gave to these symptoms.

I felt that there must be some rational explanation for my feelings in the niche. As a non-believer it seemed absurd to say that I had felt the power of God. But I felt equally sure that my informants would interpret the event as a religious experience. I could not deny what I had felt, but neither could I accept that I had been touched by Christ. In explaining their feelings at confirmation, however, my Maltese informants were less troubled. The presence of the Holy Spirit, by its very nature mysterious, was explanation enough.

Emotions involve the appraisal of experience (Arnold 1968: 318). When we are faced with a situation in which we have a peculiar feeling, we draw on our memories of previous situations in order to give an appropriate explanation. If there are similarities between this new situation and a previous one, we will normally give the same explanation; hence routine feelings are felt relatively unreflexively The process of appraisal is relatively seamless in such cases, be- cause those types of feelings are familiar.

But feelings that are out of the ordinary draw attention to themselves. They have no reference point in the stock of emotional memories we carry around with us, and so demand fresh interpretation. In effect, whenever something is experienced as uncanny or contrary to one's expectations, we have a choice as to which explanation we accept. In the Maltese context, this is a choice between knowledge about the way the natural world works and knowledge about the sopranatural. Because God created nature, the sopranatural precedes the natural, but although the sopranatural perpetually surrounds in-natura it only periodically disturbs it. Knowledge (gheff- from the stem gharaf - to recognize or identiG) requires, for its mastery a certain expertise. Experts draw a distinction between il$oni tan-natura (the forces of nature), and two contrasting domains of gherf sopranatural classified as it-tajeb ul-hzin (good and evil), ta'Alla u tax-Xitan (God's and the Devil's), or mirakuluz u seher (miraculous and witchcraft). The two domains of supernatural knowledge have their own experts - the qassis (priest) and the sahharala (wizard/witch or fortune-teller), who are each 'in the know' (iafu certa hwejeg). But for the normal citizen it is enough simply to know that these opposed forms of supernatural knowledge exist. The principal dis- tinction is that betweengherfnatural andgherfsopranatural; natural knowledge and supernatural knowledge.

When faced with my own new experience, I wanted overwhelmingly to ex- plain the feelings with reference to my rationalist knowledge about the natural world. In a sense, this is what I have subsequently done, through appeals to psychology and phenomenology But at the time I felt sure that those around me would use their knowledge of the sopranatural to explain my experience. Later on that same day I discussed my peculiar experience with a number of informants. It became clear that I had felt some of the symptoms common to devotional experiences. But my informants' opinions were divided. Some were sure that I had been touched by Christ. Others remained sceptical: it was the cleaning solution; it was the humidity I was relieved, but surprised at this inconclusiveness, having assumed that the weight of opinion would lie with a supernatural explanation. I realised that what I had thought of as an overarching belief in the omnipresence of Christ was less deterministic. A degree of choice

88 JON P.MITCHELL

in the terms of explanation existed, due to the inconclusiveness of explanations forged by a community of interpreters when compared to the personal memory of experiences. Because nobody could be absolutely sure of the type of experi- ence I had had, nobody could offer a conclusive explanation. I shall illustrate the choice involved with two further examples. Both are stories told to me during lengthy discussions with the group about the possibilities of supernatu- ral interference with the natural world. In the first, Joseph recounted a story his father, Giovanni, had told him.

He had been walking home late at night, after work. The streets were de- serted and very dark, as all that lit the streets were dim and flickering gas-lamps. As he turned the final corner of his journey, a young girl, dressed in the charac- teristic mock wedding-dress of first communion, darted out of a dark alley, across the street and into another. What was a young girl doing out on her own at this time of night? In any case, the first communion celebrations were not for several months. He felt a cold chill and froze to the spot: he was sure he had seen a ghost. The next day, when he recounted the story to his wife it seemed utterly implausible. Although he remembered vividly the feeling that came over him, he agreed with her that he had probably been tricked by the flickering gas-lights. Anyway, he had been very tired, and had drunk one or two whiskies.

In the second story Anton told me about a similar early-morning experience. He had been working all night and arrived back at the Valletta bus terminus at six o'clock in the morning. To get into the city one has carefully to cross the various bus lanes and enter through City Gate, but Anton wanted to buy some cigarettes. He absent-mindedly stepped out in front of a bus that was speeding off to begin its rounds. As he moved, he caught sight of a small girl standing beside the cigarette kiosk, who shouted 'Look out!'. Luckily, he managed to step back just in time to let the bus pass by The small girl had saved his life, so he wanted to thank her. But when he safely crossed, she had disappeared. A feeling of total calm came over him, and he was then sure that the girl who saved him was an angel.

These two stories illustrate the choices available when one has a peculiar or uncanny experience. One choice is sceptical, referring to knowledge about the natural world and what is possible late at night when one is tired. In the alternative explanation, however, the experience is referred to the corpus of religious knowledge about the supernatural world. Anton believed that angels can, and do, appear. Hence, rather than holding to natural explanations, he appealed to supernatural knowledge as a better account of his experience.

These stories were well known among one group of informants. To them, the stories were eminently plausible, both for the facts of the men's experiences, and for the explanations put forward to account for them. Some individuals were more prone to scepticism than others, but all recognized the validity of each explanation.

A supernatural explanation for such experiences, then, was only one option. But we still need to discover why people can be convinced of such an explana- tion in the first place. A simple answer might be that my Maltese informants believed in Catholic doctrine. But why is belief so persuasive, when other, more prosaic, explanations of peculiar experiences are equally acceptable? The answer lies in the nature of supernatural knowledge.

89 JON P.MITCHELL

Belief in Malta Maltese supernatural knowledge, like similar knowledge elsewhere, is complex in nature. It involves both semiotic and practical representations. Connerton refers to this distinction as one between inscribing practices and incorporating practices of social memory (1989: 72-3). Inscription involves long-term storage of knowledge in a form that enables it to last longer than the human organism; in encyclopaedias, photographs, computers and so forth. Incorporation, on the other hand, involves the human body internalizing knowledge so that social memory is 'sedimented in the body' (1989: 72).

Bodily knowledge is habitually referred to without drawing attention to itself or to its origins. Consequently, what begins as social memory becomes incorpo- rated as personal memory In contrast to the self-consciousness of reading a book, for example, social memory gained through incorporating practices be- comes naturalized as personal memory, unselfconsciously recollected.

Catholic supernatural knowledge is based on the assumption of the shared history of the church, and a shared memory of Christ's passion. At the centre of its liturgy is the commemoration of this passion, a commemoration in which the celebration of holy communion becomes a celebration of the sacrifice:

Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you ... Do this in memory of me.

These words come from the Catholic Mass Book, and paraphrase the gospels; the textual inscription of the Catholic remembrance. In Malta, great emphasis is placed upon the textual, semiotic dimension of religious knowledge. From the age of four, most children attend doctrine lessons organised by the national doctrine organization (MUSEUM) or the local parish. They continue these lessons, at least once a week but often daily until they have been confirmed at the age of eleven or even after. In the lessons, children learn the texts of relig- ious doctrine verbatim; the predominant pedagogic technique is to learn by rote.

Through repetition, the attempt is made to internalize the content of the inscribed memory as if it were incorporated. Doing so draws attention away from the content of the inscription, and emphasizes its form. The repeated words become almost forgotten; their meaning is taken as read. What becomes significant is the fact that they are written, and hence physically present in the Bible, which is an artefact of social memory Content apart, the Bible becomes a conduit for direct contact with God. This process constitutes a kind of funda- mentalism that makes the inscribed remembrance an object beyond interpretation.3 As I was frequently told during fieldwork, reading the Bible incorrectly can lead to confusion; it is better not to bother. Eschewing the product of inscription in this way highlights the inscribing practice itself. Through this process, the Bible is transformed from a representation of mem- ory into its actual physical re-creation or embodiment. More than just an inscribed memory it becomes memory itself

The Bible is not the only inscribed commemoration of the Passion. Just as significant are the ubiquitous crucifures such as that which I helped to clean. Along with paintings of the various stages of the Passion, these stand as physical inscriptions of the remembered moments. As such, they can be read according to their symbolic content, and frequently are. But to read them in this purely

90 JON P.MITCHELL

textual, semiotic manner is to succumb to the linguistic preoccupation for which anthropology has frequently been criticized.

Like the Bible, other physical representations of Christ's Passion - statues, reliefs, icons - are much more than simple signifiers. Because they occupy physical space they become physical media through which the Passion is under- stood. Unlike the book, they draw attention away from the fact of their inscription. Because they embody the very thing which they are trying to rep- resent, their inscription becomes unimaginable. This explains the Maltese belief in the miraculous creation of the Valletta crucifur.

When Maltese engage with physical inscriptions of the crucifur, they do so in a way that involves internalizing not only what the inscriptions represent, but also what they are. When a crucifur is worn around the neck as a spiritual protector, kissed for good fortune, or acknowledged by a bow of the head, more is being done than simply explaining its meaning. The crucifur is actively being imbued with meaning. Maltese know that the crucifur is a representation of the Passion, but they also know that it is a crucifur and as such it may have special powers. The healing powers attributed to the miraculous crucifur serve as an example. The crucifur is not only what is learnt about Christ, it is also the medium of its learning. It re-creates, as much as represents, his P a ~ s i o n . ~

Inscriptions, therefore, can also involve incorporations, to the extent that people physically engage with them. Part of the engagement with both book and statue involves adopting the correct mode of physical behaviour. But there is a further incorporation in commemorating the Passion. As well as the words cited above, the central liturgy of the Catholic Mass contains a significant ritual: the ingestion of the host in Holy Communion. This practice is so significant that, for a Catholic, the words of the Mass are relatively unimportant. As a Maltese priest said to me: 'If you don't take the Host, you may as well not come to Mass'.

Taking the Host is a bodily practice on two counts. First, it is a routinized mode of behaviour. In their doctrine lessons, children are taught the appropri- ate physical posture for engaging with the Host. They must lower their eyes in humility and reach out towards the administering priest, either with their mouths open or with crossed palms. After taking the Host into their mouths they must not bite it; to do so is to bite Jesus himself Finally, after ingestion, they must bow at the knees to show their deference, and avoid acknowledging the presence of others until they have finished the prayer of thanks. The prac- tice is repeated at least weekly for the rest of their lives, and becomes fully incorporated into the bodily repertoire of the practising Catholic.

But there is a second bodily element of the Catholic Holy Communion. This relates to the ingestion of the Host. As with the physical inscriptions of the Passion, the Host itself is an embodiment of Christ, not his mere repre-sentation. The Host must be deferred to at all times and has a chapel set aside for it in all churches. In the Host, Christ lives on and, consequently, as the Host is ingested it lives on in the person.

Many informants said that they felt a tingling sensation, or feeling of warmth, as they ingested the Host and internalized Christ. This feeling is formally the same as my own next to Christ: a modification of consciousness and a jump into the realm of magical relations. But unlike my feeling, it is not so open to

91 JON P.MITCHELL

choice of explanation. The feeling is explained a prion' as supernatural experi- ence, because the l o p by which it is felt in the first place depends on anticipation of supernatural intervention. Even before it is felt, it is explained as a religious experience.

Taking the Host is the ultimate act of incorporation. The memory of Christ's Passion, as embodied in the small piece of wafer, is ingested and becomes one with the believer. The act mediates between the social memory of the Passion as inscribed in the Bible and embodied in the Host, and the personal memory of experiencing a peculiar feeling as the practice is performed. When faced with subsequent peculiar experiences, the Maltese believer therefore has a ready- made personal memory of similar feelings with which to make his or her interpretation. Thus, although there is a choice of how to interpret subsequent experiences, a supernatural interpretation always suggests itself as a most plau- sible option.

When faced with a peculiar feeling at their confirmation, normally four years after their first Holy Communion, Maltese Catholics can employ the memory of the feeling evoked by the ingestion of the Host to gauge the new feeling of the Archbishop's hand on their forehead. The memory of bodily experience, therefore, becomes part of the means by which explanation is assured.

Ethnography, representation and emotion

I have argued that such feelings are physiologically similar the world over. What differs is the explanations given to those feelings. Examining my own experi- ence of a moment with Christ can therefore in principle show how feelings in general are created and perpetuated. But by analysing my informants' explana- tions of my experience and of cognate experiences they have had themselves, I have shown specifically how such feelings are produced by, and give meaning to, religious belief in Malta.

New feelings are inherently difficult to explain, and explanations are always limited by the circumstances in which we are living. Limitations stem from the form of the knowledge used in the explanation. Those types of knowledge which become secreted in the body as personal memory are inherently more convincing than others. This is the case with Maltese Catholic knowledge of religious experience.

My own knowledge, however, is based on a different legitimacy. Faced with an extraordinary experience in the field, I have drawn upon my knowledge of the human sciences for explanation. In a sense, there was little else I could do. I have referred to the process of ethnographic fieldwork as social learning, and argued that this also leaves a space in our analysis for the examination of our own fieldwork experiences. But anthropologists are not just learners. We are also rememberers. We talk to people, watch them and make notes - elaborating our notes later on, on the basis of our memories. Even ifwe record our inform- ants on audio or video tape, we still rely on our memories for context. Our memories, or 'head notes', as Ottenberg (1990: 144) first called them, give us the overall feel for the ethnographic situation that leads us, almost instinctively, to 'make sense' of what we experience in the field. They are the raw materials with which we make our interpretations of particular situations, and from

92 JON P.MITCHELL

which we create our representations of those interpretations: the ethnographic text.

But the memories of fieldwork do not exist in a social vacuum. Because we learn in a social setting, our memories of that setting are also social. Our memo- ries as ethnographers are bound up in the memories of our informants, whose semiotic, practical and emotional knowledge is bound up in ours. When we write about those memories we must therefore acknowledge the collectivity from which they come.

As argued above, all social practices are organized around certain durable dispositions which tend, without being determinate, to structure social action. As anthropologists, our disposition, our habitus, if you like, is to pick out certain terms, categories or symbols as privileged data. It is a legacy of the persisting assumption that culture is like language. We have tended to privilege a semiotic model of social transmission, prioritizing data gained by talking and reading over those gained by sensing and feeling. When dealing with religion, then, we are encouraged to look at priests' sermons, the content of doctrine lessons and people's verbal accounts ofwhat religion means to them. But these accounts are often confused, because the real nature of this meaning is gained through prac- tical and emotional knowledge, not through semiotic knowledge.= If I think about what happened to me in the glass-fronted niche, I can remember vividly the sensation that came over me. The difficult task is to put this sensation into words. Similarly, informants expressed discontent at their narrative glossing of the experiences of both Holy Communion and confirmation. Words were not enough to describe the feelings. Indeed, this is precisely where the power of such knowledge lies.

However, if presenting certain types of knowledge is inherently difficult, this does not mean that we should retreat into different writing genres, as some anthropologists have suggested.6 We can use our own experiences, but these should not be the beginning and end of ethnography. Rather, they should be used only inasmuch as they shed light on particular ethnographic situations or sociocultural phenomena.

I assume that in the writing of ethnography, there is a certain political respon- sibility to those with whom we have worked, and this derives from the observation that ethnography is an inscription of social memory A corollary of viewing social memory as operating at the interface of the social and the individual is that when we deal with our own memories, we are also dealing with other people's. Active, remembering subjects become moral persons, with a responsi- bility for the memories they bear (Tonkin 1992: 118), especially if those active subjects write their memories down, as anthropologists do.

As ethnographers, we represent our memories of the fieldwork context. But in doing so we also represent the memories of others. These memories are constructed through the processes not only of semiotic and practical knowl- edge, but also of emotional knowledge. To take account of all three elements is to give a fuller picture of the way people live their lives, and of the way we conduct our research.

93 JON P.MITCHELL

NOTES

The research on which this article is based was supported by ESRC research grant number R00429134203. My thanks go to them and to Jeremy Boissevain, Tony Cohen, Robert Gibb, Iris Jean-Klein, Robert Jones and Judith Okely. They all helped by reading and commenting on earlier drafts. Thanks also to the participants of the ESRC seminars on Memory and Social Transmission held at Queen's University, Belfast, in 1994 and 1995, particularly Tim Ingold, Elizabeth Tonkin and Harvev Whitehouse.

1 Much psychology of emotion is preoccupied with determining causal links between cogni- tion and psychology (Strongman 1987). I use the term 'feelings' rather than 'emotion' to resist causal arguments and convey the sense of integrated mind/body process. This choice of termi- nology I owe to Tim Ingold.

2 As early as the 1880s, James (1968) argued that behaving in certain ways can prompt emo- tional responses. His argument suggests the integration of physiological and cognitive processes in emotion.

3 Carruthen (1990: 12) distinguishes between fundamentalist and textualist attitudes towards inscription. In the former, an inscription stands for itself as self-evident, whereas the latter sees the significance of the book in its interpretation.

4 I am alluding to the process examined by Bourdieu (1977: 89), who saw the Kabyle House as both the content and the form of social knowledge.

5 Luhrmann has made a similar observation about the nature of witchcrafi in late twentieth- century Britain. If we assume that witchcraft conforms to a coherent doctrine, it seems nonsen- sical. Only by recognizing the significance of experience can a full understanding be made (Luhrmann 1989: 345-56).

6 For example Tyler (1986) who proposes an anthropological poetics to account for the emo- tional content of social life.

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Un moment avec le Christ: l'importance des sentiments pour l'analyse de la croyance

RhumC Cet article considere un sentiment bizarre vtcu pendant un travail sur le terrain 2 Malte. I1 examine les explications indigenes de ce sentiment et d'autres sentiments similaires. I1 y a une variCtt d'explications de ce genre d'exptrience ttrange ou bizarre 2 Malte, mais les explications religieuses apparaissent particulierement convaincantes. L'indoctrination reli- gieuse comporte la creation de sentiments forts et profonds dont la mtmoire est stdimentte dans le corps du croyant et sert de source de rtftrence pour d'kentuelles exptriences ttranges. Je soutiens que les sentiments sont ila fois produits par la croyance religieuse et lui donnent sens. I1 est maintenant de rigueur de critiquer le 'logocentrisme' de I'anthro- pologie et de privilCgier une anthropologie du corps. Je suggtre que cette approche doit aussi incorporer l'anthropologie des sentiments, sans qu'un changement d'tcriture ethno- graphique soit pour autant ntcessaire.

Depattment ofAnthropology, University College, London, Gower Street, London WClE 6BII;U.K.

History, Power, and Identity Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992 Edited by Jonathan D. Hill

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