Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR) supplied two of the four articles shortlisted for the major international refereed journal Sociological Review 2011 article of the year prize.
Charlotte Faircloth’s ”It feels right in my heart’: affective accountability in narratives of attachment’ makes a contribution to discussions around ‘affect’ in the social sciences and is based on a research project involving a network of mothers – in London – who breastfeed their children to ‘full term’. Typically, this would be up to the age of three or four, though ranged, in this case, to between one and eight years old. For many women, the most fundamental reasoning in their decision to breastfeed to ‘full term’ is that it simply ‘feels right.’ The article explores anthropological approaches to the ‘feelings’ that embodied experiences generate, as revealed in the accounts and practices of the people we work with (whether at the physiological, emotional or moral levels). It considers various means of describing the feelings experienced by women during of long-term breastfeeding – such as ‘hormones’, ‘instinct’ and ‘intuition’– but ultimately argues for a theoretical framework of ‘affect’ to incorporate best the combined physiological and moral aspects of ‘doing what feels right in my heart,’ so critical to women’s perceptions of themselves as mothers.
Chris Shilling’s and Philip A. Mellor’s ‘Retheorising Emile Durkheim on society and religion: embodiment, intoxication and collective life’ develops a new theory, based on the work of Emile Durkheim, of society and religion as forms of embodied intoxication. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. The paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim’s theory – including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes – as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It then develops an original analysis of how modernity has stimulated a rise in ‘abnormal’ forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrates the utility of this analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism.