Feeling the kneeling: power of bodily positions
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In different religious rituals we may observe involvement of different, sometimes specific, bodily postures. In contemporary cognitive psychology, accentuating the importance of embodiedness and extendedness of cognitive system, those postures could be seen as crucial elements for understanding how the rituals are perceived and processed by their participants. The importance of embodied cognition could be emphasized not only on symbolic level of rituals, but also on physiological level. In current study of ritual, those two levels are usually studied as interconnected. Body posture and body processes influencing emotional reactions are in psychology underlined as early as in work of Charles Darwin and William James. Since then, there is growing evidence supporting the facial feedback hypothesis (at least at its weak version) – the assumption of an emotional facial expression can change the persons emotions. The same or similar process seems to work while assuming specific body posture. Body posture in particular influences subjective experience of emotion. Individuals induced to assume postures characteristic of certain emotions report feelings that correspond to those postures; those who slumped tended to feel sad, and those who sat more forward with clenched fists tended to feel anger. My research is based on those notions. The main field of interest is the body posture used in religious ritual. The usage of certain specific postures may imply specific functions of such postures in ritual behavior and perception of ritual. More generally, I am interested in exploring whether and how bodily positions influence feelings, emotional states and self- perceptions. The first bodily position to be examined is kneeling. This posture is used in many variations in different rituals, but in other contexts it is linked with subordination, humility and submission. |
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