Book contents
- Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism
- Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism
- Part I Jewish Emotional Resistance to Gentile Power-Over in the Greco-Roman Diaspora
- Part II Jewish Emotion Discourse in Response to Divine Power-Over
- Part III The Dead Sea Sect As Emotional Community
- 6 Feeling Rules in the Construction of Communal Identity
- 7 The Power of Fear
- 8 Sectarian Ritual and the Cultivation of an Emotional Habitus
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Primary Source Index
- Modern Author Index
- Subject Index
8 - Sectarian Ritual and the Cultivation of an Emotional Habitus
from Part III - The Dead Sea Sect As Emotional Community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 June 2021
- Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism
- Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism
- Part I Jewish Emotional Resistance to Gentile Power-Over in the Greco-Roman Diaspora
- Part II Jewish Emotion Discourse in Response to Divine Power-Over
- Part III The Dead Sea Sect As Emotional Community
- 6 Feeling Rules in the Construction of Communal Identity
- 7 The Power of Fear
- 8 Sectarian Ritual and the Cultivation of an Emotional Habitus
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Primary Source Index
- Modern Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
Among the most effective tools available to emotional communities for provoking, shaping, and maintaining their constituents’ emotions are ritual practices. The sociologist Émile Durkheim is often credited with the observation that rituals serve to facilitate collective emotion, or, in his terms, collective effervescence. The ritual life among the Yaḥad was remarkably rich, making ritual a promising data set for further exploring the relationship between power and emotion in this emotional community. In this chapter, I consider two rituals, the annual covenant renewal ceremony and ritual ablutions, which served to generate and shape the emotions of ritual actors in the Yaḥad. Ritual seems to play an important role in linking power and emotion; the analysis in this chapter will attempt to explicate precisely how ritual, power, and emotion intersect and how ritual channels emotion discourse, cultivates emotional experience, and structures power relations in emotional communities.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Power and Emotion in Ancient JudaismCommunity and Identity in Formation, pp. 221 - 257Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021