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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.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Brian Bond, Anaar Desai-Stephens and Andrew McGraw for their valuable feedback on early drafts of this essay, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, who generously completed their reviews at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, and whose comments were immensely helpful. A postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provided time for focused work on this essay. I would also like to thank all of my co-contributors in the Musical Feelings and Affective Politics special issue, who have so deeply enriched my thinking about the feelingful aspects of music.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I have used pseudonyms in place of personal names for all research participants. All translations from Indonesian are my own.
2 This seems to be an Indonesian translation of the phrase ‘Chant and be happy,’ which is the title of a book by ISKCON founder Srila Prabhupada.
3 In referring to feelings as ‘musical’ in this essay, I am claiming that they arise during, or as a result of, participation in music. This does not necessarily mean that they are the result of specifically ‘musical’ features of an event (e.g. melody, rhythm, timbre, tempo, genre, style, etc.). Indeed, in the case of kirtan, it is the song text (the Mahamantra) that is seen by devotees as particularly efficacious in producing feelings of ‘spiritual happiness.’ This text can produce these feelings even when recited privately, in a seemingly non-musical manner, as in the practice of japa (silent repetition of the Mahamantra using tulsi beads to assist with counting). However, as my discussion below illustrates, singing that does not involve the Mahamantra can also produce feelings that Balinese ISKCON devotees understand as ‘spiritual,’ so musical activity – especially the activity of singing – is not incidental to generating the feelings that I will be analysing here. Thus, in highlighting ‘musical feelings,’ I am interested in how the embodied and sonic materialities of musical participation combine with ISKCON’s narratives about feeling and spirituality to produce intense feelings that are both musical and spiritual.
4 Following White’s adaptation of Sianne Ngai’s theorisation of affect, I understand affect and emotion as the opposite ends of a continuum that ranges from embodied, non-conscious ‘capacities to feel’ to the richly narrativized feelings that appear in discourse (Ngai Citation2005, White Citation2011). I use the term ‘feeling’ to capture the entirety of this continuum, and I understand musical feelings as an inclusive term for ways of responding to music (broadly defined), which encompasses non-conscious affects, narrativized emotions and everything in between.
5 Throughout this essay I use the term ‘spiritual’ as a translation of the Indonesian word rohani, which devotees use to differentiate what they consider to be reality – the spiritual world (dunia rohani) and the practices that reconnect individuals with it – from the mundane, illusory material world (dunia material) and the lifestyles that attach people to it, i.e. ‘material life (kehidupan material).’ For the Balinese ISKCON devotees with whom I worked, ISKCON’s spiritual practices are central to their religious identity as Hindus. Thus, spirituality is not opposed to religion in this usage.
6 While I make frequent reference to ‘ISKCON doctrine’ throughout this essay, it should be understood that many of ISKCON’s teachings, including its teachings about feeling and music that I explore here, are shared with the broader Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition and therefore not unique to ISKCON. On the similarities and differences in musical philosophies and practices across various forms of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, including ISKCON, see Sarbadhikary Citation2015: 179-213.
7 The true number of current ISKCON devotees is difficult to estimate. For more on ISKCON’s history and antecedents, see Haddon Citation2014.
9 What I call mainstream Balinese Hinduism in this essay is a syncretic religion that combines aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism with indigenous traditions of ancestor worship, and which centres on the performance of elaborate communal rituals to propitiate deities and spirits.
10 There are several styles of kirtan associated with the Gaudiya Vaishnava religious tradition (Graves Citation2014, Sarbadhikary Citation2015). My use of the term here refers solely to the style of kirtan performed within the Balinese ISKCON community, which is known in South Asia as nām-kīrtan or ‘kirtan of the name.’
11 Both men and women participated as lead vocalists and instrumentalists, but men predominated in both of these roles.
12 For a discussion of the musical structure of pepaosan performance, see Shumacher Citation1995.
13 Darshan is a spiritual practice of gazing at images of deities. Like other forms of devotional practice within ISKCON, it is a method for ‘purifying the senses.’
14 In analysing my own feelings in this essay, I join Sarbadhikary (Citation2015) in thinking that ‘if an anthropological study of others helps understand the self, then an attentive disposition to one’s own body also helps understand others’ affective temperaments’ (188). On engaging with one’s own feelings as a method in the anthropological study of affect, see White Citation2018.
15 In the BGMA, Krishna is referred to by many names, of which Govinda is one.
16 The passages I’ve cited from the Buku Saku appear to be fragments (in Indonesian translation) of the Śikṣāṣṭakam, a set of eight Sanskrit verses written by Caitanya Mahaprabhu, which is included in ISKCON founder Srila Prabhupada’s book Teachings of Lord Caitanya.
17 On musical pleasure as a form of unveiling in Gaudiya Vaishnava thought and experience, see Sarbadhikary Citation2015.
18 Following Garcia, I see affective attunement as a phenomenon that ‘emerges out of not only shared sensory experience, synchronized gesture, and joint attention, but also through “shared exposure to cultural knowledge in norms, beliefs, and values,” (Witek 2019)’ including the forms of cultural knowledge that devotees are exposed to through their involvement with ISKCON (Garcia Citation2020: 14). I see ISKCON’s effectiveness in generating this kind of common ground of feeling among potential converts in a relatively short period of time as a key reason why the movement has been able to attract followers in a place like Bali, where the aesthetic and feelingful dimensions of the dominant local form of Hinduism are so starkly different from those of Gaudiya Vaishnavism.
19 Conversations I’ve had with other Balinese musicians suggest that taksu is often registered as an affective charge, which can be experienced by performers themselves (as a spontaneous feeling of enhanced ability) or transmitted from performers to their audience (as chills).
20 On Massumi’s theorisation of the affect/emotion distinction and critical responses to it, see Desai-Stephens and Reisnour (Citation2020).
21 One key source for this linear chronology of affect is Massumi’s (Citation1995) discussion of a study that claimed to demonstrate a ‘half-second delay’ between the initiation of an action in the brain and the subject’s awareness of initiating the action, which Massumi presents as evidence to support his theory of affect as a register of perception that shapes people’s actions independently of their conscious awareness. I would hasten to add, however, that elsewhere in his 1995 essay, Massumi seems to posit a circular relationship between affect and emotion, closer to what I present here. Nevertheless, the notion that consciousness and language arrive ‘too late’ to influence or account for affect, since the latter precedes conscious awareness, has been a prevalent theme in scholarly conversations on Massumi’s theorisation of affect (e.g. Leys Citation2011, Mazzarella Citation2009, Newell Citation2018, Wetherell Citation2013). For an example of a work that employs a linear chronology of affect, see Goodman Citation2010. For critiques of this framing, see Eisenlohr Citation2018, Hofman Citation2015 and Kane Citation2015.
22 For just a few examples, see Ahmed Citation2015, Hofman Citation2015, Mazzarella Citation2009, Navaro-Yashin Citation2012, Newell Citation2018, Ngai Citation2005.
23 Kane (Citation2015) and Wetherell (Citation2013) offer similar critiques of the linear chronology of affect.
24 In using the term ‘gesture’ here, I build on Charles Hirschkind’s writing on the performative aspects of cassette sermon listening among Egyptian Muslims, in which he uses ‘gesture’ broadly to refer to patterned bodily responses, both internal and external (Hirschkind Citation2001). The feelingful gestures that I’m referring to here include the tears, chills, and faltering voice mentioned in ISKCON texts, as well as the affective shifts discussed by my interlocutors, including shifts in mood, feelings of ‘energy’ or ‘radiance,’ as well as the vague notion of ‘feeling something.’
25 Following Webb Keane’s (Citation2003, Citation2007) and Alfred Gell’s (Citation1998) interpretations of Peircian semiotics, I use the term ‘index’ to refer to signs that relate to their objects by virtue of a real (often causal) connection, as when smoke functions as a sign (index) of fire (Keane Citation2007: 22, see also Massumi Citation2010). Auratic indexicality refers to indexes that function as points of contact and commingling with an otherwise imperceptible presence (Krishna, in this case) (Strassler Citation2014).
26 Ahmed describes this as a kind of ‘fetishism’ (in the Marxian sense), and while I think this is a useful comparison, I want to stress that my purpose here is not to demystify devotees’ beliefs about the divine causes of their feelings by substituting a secularized explanation. While attributions of fetishism have historically functioned as a means of othering directed at the religious practices of colonized subjects (Keane Citation2007), following Ahmed, I see this particular fetishism as a ubiquitous mechanism of power that is equally effective in secular contexts.
27 See McGraw Citation2020.
28 Indeed, Ahmed seems to be pointing to such a causal gap when she writes of a ‘gap in the determination of feeling,’ where pain is simultaneously ‘felt’ by the body and ‘read’ as being a consequence of contact with a (presumed-to-be) ‘harmful’ object (6).
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Nicole Reisnour
Nicole Reisnour is an ethnomusicologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her current book project focuses on oral literary performance, Hindu subjectivities, and the sensory politics of religious pluralism in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Research for this project has been supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and a CAORC Research Grant from the American Institute for Indonesian Studies. Additional research interests include Indonesian Islamic popular music and the digital circulation of religious ways of listening and feeling. She has taught at Reed College, Binghamton University, and Cornell University.