In Word and Deed: Embodied Cognition as a Resource for the Study of Religious Experience

• In Event: 3184 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 01. Culture, Cognition, and the Body

Abstract

Contemporary social scientists have tended to approach the phenomenon of religious experience from one of two broad perspectives: 1) a discursive approach that analyzes how actors’ attribute religious significance to experience through language and 2) a phenomenological/aesthetic perspective that emphasizes how religious experiences are (at least in part) constituted at the pre-discursive levels of bodily perception, sensation, and emotion. While both perspectives have made important conceptual advances, the two camps’ insights have largely remained separate and have yet to be integrated into a more holistic framework. This paper shows how interdisciplinary insights from the paradigm of “embodied cognition” can help bridge the divides between discursive and phenomenological approaches. It also lays out a method of inquiry that focuses attention on the coupling of somatic and semantic meanings in the construction of religiously significant experience.

Author

• Daniel A. Winchester, Purdue University