Viratha: Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency Dr.

Susan McNaughton
Abstract Through the context of fieldwork will be among diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus in Toronto, ON this paper explores the ways female involvement in Hindu religious practices affects conceptions of self, moral agency and politics that in turn underpin commitments to such practices. One of my questions is whether other traditions, namely Indian discursive religious practices, might have their own resources for imagining an ethic that respects dissent and honours the right to adhere to different religious or non-religious convictions? (Mahmood 2003). What if the separation of modernity into a material realm, on the one hand, and an ideological realm is not so simple to perform at any given moment, let alone to stabilize and sustain?
Graudate of Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto, ON

his paper addresses the ways that female involvement in Hindu religious practices affects conceptions of self, moral agency and politics that in turn underpin commitments to such practices. I would like to re-visit the notions of affect and emotion that inform the bhakti or devotion of female temple participants through the lens of Spinozist ethics to open up the ways in which modes of subjectivation stick to and are constitutive of a field in which religious representations acquire their identity and truthfulness. Female participation in Hindu deity worship embodies values that affirm an ethos of ethical self-sustainability and virtuous self-cultivation which poses a challenge to the valourization of secular liberal individualism (Mahmood 2006, Deeb 2006). Normative assumptions about human nature hold that faithcentred movements constrain individual self-expression in a number of ways. First, autonomy, it is claimed, is a matter of intentionality - all human beings have an innate desire for freedom and will seek to assert autonomy when allowed to do so and also that human agency may embody actions that challenge normative social conventions and not necessarily uphold them. From this perspective to evoke ideas of piety or virtue is to evoke a view of individual autonomy which adheres to these signs through past forms of association. I argue that it is important to question the history by which we have come to make such assumptions and the effect of such histories between bodies, objects and signs that emphasize secular notions of resistance, autonomy, and self-fulfillment. The context of my fieldwork will be among diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus here in Toronto many of whom have been either directly or indirectly affected by the civil war in Sri Lanka. One of the main effects of this war has been a massive displacement of the Tamil population to Canada and Toronto in particular. The war came to a military but not political end in May 2009 leaving many in the diaspora of Toronto in distress as to the fate of family and friends. Ongoing human rights violations against Sri Lankan Tamil civilians continues to reverberate throughout the Tamil population in Toronto who are dismayed and disillusioned to see Canada stand idly by on this issue which affects so many Canadian citizens. There is an increasing public perception that safe havens no longer exist and that peace-time violence may be as debilitating as that of war (Das 2008). The Tamil problem is

Keywords Agency, religion, Hindus, affect, emotion, the self

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 being cast as one of potential terrorist activity in Canada with little consideration given to the problematic social and cultural effects for the diaspora community. The important point is that is this conflict has not been only a domestic matter. While civil war in Sri Lanka technically occurred within the borders of the state, transnational ties generated by asylum seekers and other migrants are part and parcel of the current conflict (Cheran 2000, Tambiah 1986). In the face of human rights violations it is striking that the normative claims of liberal conceptions such as tolerance are taken at face value and no attention is paid to the struggles, contradictions, and problems that these ideas actually embody. Given this fraught history one of my questions is whether other traditions, namely Indian discursive religious practices, might have their own resources for imagining an ethic that respects dissent and honours the right to adhere to different religious or nonreligious convictions? (Mahmood 2003). What if the separation of modernity into a material realm, on the one hand, and an ideological realm is not so simple to perform at any given moment, let alone to stabilize and sustain? And to what extent does such an account continue to cast religious revival solely within the terms of Western modernity, now globalized and hinder a view of the emergence of new formations and ontologies? An alternative perspective would be to move away from attempts to characterize particular movements and towards a more epistemological line of inquiry that investigates the theoretical lenses through which religious movements are viewed (Bracke 2008). How might one start by acknowledging the insight that modes of knowing imply specific ways of being? Feminist critiques take aim at conceptions of autonomy and agency that value the ideas of self-governance and a deeply ingrained ideology of individualism in which individualism is to be achieved by erecting a wall of rights between the individual and those around him (Armstrong 2009:46). Post-secular theorists such as Sarah Bracke (2008), Rosi Braidotti (1991) and Lara Deeb (2006) regard the relational approaches to autonomy found in forms of religious-belonging demonstrate, on the contrary, the notion that agency can be conveyed through and supported by religious piety. Such agency is also a form of political subjectivity that interacts dynamically and continuously with dominant norms and values, multiple forms of accountability as well as bodily modes of becoming. Discursive religious practices such as Hindu worship rituals are bodily activities that are written in movement. Such practices are capable of reversing the reactive status of the body, of enhancing the bodys capacities, enlarging its powers of becoming, intensifying the bodys sensations, returning power and force to the body from which it is derived. Knowledge has its genealogy in corporeality that cannot grasp anything in its totality; the body itself is a multiplicity of competing and conflicting forces (Grosz 1994: 128). It is here that we can think through the body in terms of becoming, assemblages, and relational connections of non-ordered organisms. This is to think about the body in such a way that reconfigures the relationship between self and other, that emphasizes the productive aspect of difference and whereby bodily boundaries are blurred. While the self may have a genealogy, or a story of how it came to the present, there is no necessity that the structures of the present subject will persist or must be such a way at the present. A critical ontology of ourselves, through historical analysis can help us to examine our limits and experiment with moving beyond them. Efforts to rethink autonomy on the basis of the social conception of selves also requires a reconfiguration of the dichotomy of individuality and agency on one hand, and sociability and the collectivity on the other. Liberalisms unique contribution is to link the notion of self-realization with individual autonomy so that the process of self-realization becomes equated with the ability to realize the desires of ones true will. By this account, in order for an individual to be free her actions must be the consequence of her own desire, rather than of custom, tradition or social coercion. It is here that Spinozas definition of the individual in terms of ones condition of interaction with others, that is to say, ones power to affect and be affected holds a powerful alternative to a tradition of

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 abstract individualism conflating autonomy with atomic isolation (Armstrong, 2009:45). Heidi Ravven (2009) writes that the misconception of autonomy goes back to the ongoing and barely challenged hold of the Augustinian notion of freewill upon our standard conceptions of the human. Her critique points to the hegemony of a Christian ethics which derives its moral absolutes from a notion that following scriptural injunctions is a means of fulfilling moral law. The problem that becomes immediately apparent here is how and who is to interpret? This is a perspective she argues that shows traces of the (Latin) Christian theological tradition which still plagues not only theology but in a secularized version also anthropology and our standard and pervasive common understandings about ethics even today. The philosophy of Spinoza opens up another perspective one which provides a powerful insight into ethics and in turn how this might influence discourses of emotion and affect (Deleuze 1978). Deleuzes reading of Spinoza points to paradoxical ontologies. On one hand affect exists in the virtual and relates to bodily responses which are in excess of conscious states of perception and point to a kind of embodied visceral perception that precedes perception (Massumi 2002: 9). On the other, Rosi Braidotti speaks of affect as bodily-material causes which are themselves products of a pure flow of becoming (2006: 140). Affect enables the desire for in depth transformations of the kinds of subjects we have become. In other words, affect is either, the infinite field of virtuality as an immaterial effect of interacting bodies or the bodies themselves emerge and actualize themselves from this field of virtuality (Zizek 2008:366). But how can we acknowledge affect in a way that is not outside social meaning but provides a form of critical engagement with the nature of the social? (Hemmings 2005: 565). Lawrence Grossberg (1992) links affect and emotion closely together and views affect through what could be called energetic investments that encompass a range of ideas that link passion, volition and commitment. There is a reciprocal quality to affective engagements that involves the generation of energy and possibility. For him affect identifies the strength of the investment of emotional energy which anchors people in particular practices, meanings, and identities as well as a means of directing peoples investments in and into the world (Grossberg 1992: 82). But perhaps affect also introduces a necessary pause, a hesitancy in the way in which we habitually dwell among our concepts of culture, of everyday life or of the inner (Das 1998: 172). Pausing also allows for a closer examination of the ways that both affect and emotion relate first to an ontology that Braidotti calls nomadic subjectivity, a pragmatic philosophy of engagement as well as self-sustainability; secondly to think from the perspective of the ways in which negative emotions such as shame, guilt, pain can act as major incentives to, and not only obstacles, to change. Finally the value of these discourses might also allow for alternative ways to negotiate the everpresent and thorny issues of representation and agency, which have important methodological and epistemological implications. Spinoza had an understanding of the body which he regarded neither as a locus of a conscious subject nor as an organically determined object. His radical observation was that the state of the individuality in any particular moment is a function of its own constitution as well as external factors such as other bodies both animate and inanimate. Against essentialist notions of being Spinoza views individualities as historical, social and cultural weavings of biology. Thus affect in this sense refers to the individuals capability to maximize its potentialities and possibilities (Grosz 1994:12). He is committed to a notion of the body (and indeed the subject) as total and holistic engaged in processes of growth and transformation. The body is defined by what it could do, the transformations it could undergo, what or who it can link with and how it can proliferate its capacities - in other words flow, movement and force. By this account the affective body cannot be reduced to the mere cultivation of good habits but instead concerns the cultivation of a particular type of sociality. This view represents an important departure from

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 Descartes who believed that the single fact of diversity among states suffices to assure us that some states are imperfect (Armstrong 2009). Spinoza on the contrary offers a perspective from which to think through difference and embodiment in terms which imply a more historically and culturally viable conception. Saba Mahmoods work on an orthodox Muslim womens piety movement in Egypt concerns the way women apprentice to certain virtues such as patience and humility as forms of emotional resources that would enable them to inhabit the structure of patriarchal norms. She describes how women in the mosque movement use different modalities of agency, for example, affectivity and responsibility in realizing their desire to develop piety. Practices that involve painful emotions, self-disempowerment, and the conscious induction of shame or fear indicate the existence of agency of a different kind. Modes of subjectivity in this sense are governed by a different habitus at work in which practices of modesty and femininity do not signify abjectness of the feminine within Islamic discourse but convey a positive and immanent discourse of being in the world and specific processes of rationalization, and bodily performances related to them (Mahmood 2006, Asad 2003). This particular reading of habitus engages the discourses of affect and emotion in ways that might enable an understanding of how autonomy and sociability are related. Such practices enable a subject to transforms herself in order to achieve a particular state of being as well as increase a bodys ability to affect and be affected. Particular emotional reactions provide the opportunity for thinking about ourselves in a certain way that enables an ethics of sustainable becoming. The ways in which affect begins to provide a forms of critical engagement with the nature of the social is precisely in the idea that autonomy is constitutively relational; in other words a social process that requires the maintenance of certain sorts of ongoing relationships with others. In rethinking the body in terms of becoming, assemblages, and relational connections of non-ordered organisms, we begin the work of imagining livable worlds. A genealogy of the philosophical influences of Spinoza on affect and emotion makes it is possible to consider religious sensibility in light of his notion of relational individuality. The model of human nature to which Spinoza refers excludes any individual perfection which isolates and on the contrary regards autonomy as a process that requires the maintenance of a closer association or friendship with other individuals. The implication is that knowledge is not something we can possess but something we are or become lending support to recent feminist attempts to develop a constitutively relational account of autonomy and affect.

References Armstrong, Aurelia 2009 Autonomy and the Relational Individual. In Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Moira Gatens (ed.)Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Asad, Talal 1993 Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Bracke, S. 2008 Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency. Theory, Culture and Society 25(6):51-67. Braidotti. Rosi 2006 The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible. In Deleuze and Philosophy. C. Boundas (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pp.133159. Cheran, Rudhramoorthy 2000 Changing Formations: Tamil Nationalism and National Liberation in Sri Lanka and the Diaspora. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Sociology York University. Das, Veena 1998. Wittgenstein and Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 171-96.

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Deeb, Lara 2006 An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shii Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton UP. Deleuze, Gilles 1978 Spinoza. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Cours Vincennes: 24/01/1978. http://www.webdeleuze. com/php/sommaire.html Grossberg, Lawrence 1992 Mapping Popular Culture. In We Gotta Get Out of This Place. New York: Routledge. Grosz, Elizabeth 1994 Volatile Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hemmings, Claire 2005 Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn. Cultural Studies 19(5): 548-567. Mahmood, Saba 2006 Politics of Piety. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Massumi, Brian 2002 The Autonomy of Affect. In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Ravven, Heidi Morrison 2009 What Spinoza Can Teach Us About Embodying and Naturalizing Ethics. In Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Moira Gatens (ed.) Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tambiah, Stanley 1986 Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Zizek, Slavoj 2008 In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.