Enthusiasm

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 conceptwas 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 inProtestant 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 understoodas 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 contestedas a practice in any context.

I highly recommend this book not only to readers with a particular focus on emotions, religious studies and social sciences, but also to those who have a broader interest in the role of emotions in the wide field of cultural history, media studies and the arts., In plain, beautiful prose Scheer cuts through much of the noise of recent theorizing about emotion in history to brilliantly demonstrate how taking enthusiasm as emotional practice clarifies analysis of both religious belief and unbelief. This is a rigorous, deeply sourced, and welcome provocation to the history of emotions and a major statement about the study of religion and emotion., This book has much to teach us — about Protestant Christianity and feeling, yes, but also about bodies and practices, about modernity and enchantment, about politics and the nature of conviction. Scheer has produced a stunning, truly multidisciplinary study, poised to establish itself as a centerpiece of conversation in a broad range of humanistic fields., In this remarkable study, Monique Scheer bridges the gap between anthropology and history by combining archival research and field work to examine two centuries of emotional practices among German Protestants. Her treatment of emotion as "embodied thought" (Michelle Rosaldo's memorable term) and of enthusiasm as that which mediates between conviction and practice will be of great interest to a broad audience. Her grasp of a wide range of theoretical and philosophical literature is impressive. The revealing testimony of her informants is memorable. Every page is packed with insightful remarks. Readers will learn, for example, that charismatic and mainline Protestants have more in common than they think, and that many atheists, for that matter, rely on a similar framework of self-understanding., In addition to being written with both clarity and mastery, Monique Scheer's Enthusiasm makes an important intervention that calls us to think about the naturalized status of German theory in the study of religion. Scheer doesn't just take Kant's or Schleiermacher's or Weber's word for it. Instead, she shows how the long German tradition of thinking about religion and emotion together has shaped the study of religion as a discipline, as well as the things and the people that we study as religion or religious. Read this book!

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 MulticulturalSocieties (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.