Enthusiasm

Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany
Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-886359-5
Verlag: Oxford University Press (UK)

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 237 mm, Gewicht: 544 g

Reihe: Emotions in History

Enthusiasm seeks to contribute to a culturally and historically nuanced understanding of how emotions secure and ratify the truth of convictions. More than just pure affective intensity, enthusiasm is about something: a certainty, clarity, or truth. Neither as clearly negative as fanaticism nor as general as passion, enthusiasm specifically entails belief. For this reason, the book takes its starting point in religion, the social arena in which the concept
was first debated and to which the term still gestures. Empirically based in modern German Protestantism, where religious emotion is intensely cultivated but also subject to vigorous scrutiny, it combines historical and ethnographic methods to show how enthusiasm has been negotiated and honed as a practice in
Protestant denominations ranging from liberal to charismatic. The nexus of religion and emotion and how it relates to central concepts of modernity such as rationality, knowledge, interiority, and sincerity are key to understanding why moderns are so ambivalent about enthusiasm. Grounded in practice theory, Enthusiasm assumes that emotions are not an affective state we 'have' but mind-body activations we 'do', having learned to perform them in culturally specific ways. When understood
as an emotional practice, enthusiasm has different styles, inflected by historical traditions, social milieus, and knowledge (even ideologies) about emotions and how they work. Enthusiasm also provides insight into how this feeling works in secular humanism as well as in politics, and why it is so contested
as a practice in any context.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scheer, Monique

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Über Autor(innen)

Monique Scheer is Professor of Historical and Cultural Anthropology (Empirische Kulturwissenschaft) at the University of Tübingen, where she also serves as Vice-Rector for International Affairs. Most recently, she has co-edited Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2019) with Nadia Fadil and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen and The Public Work of Christmas: Difference and Belonging in Multicultural
Societies (McGill-Queens UP, 2019) with Pamela E. Klassen. She is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Ethnologia Europaea and on the editorial board of Geschichte and Gesellschaft.