DISKUS

Introduction

This theme of memory and remembrance embraces many cultural contexts within the study of religion, especially those focused on ancestors, funerary rites, myth-transmission, sacred scriptures and learning. Within Judeo-Christian traditions the interplay of the Passover, the Last Supper, and the liturgical anamnesis of the Mass or Eucharist, furnishes a prime example of an act of remembering that brings the past into the ritual present where values-aligned emotions may be intensified. [2] In contemporary British terms, the role of the ritual period around Remembrance Day also exemplifies the religious framing of memory and the cultivation of emotion deemed appropriate in the present day, highlighting the way in which the past may be remade in the present as a vehicle for current cultural purposes. Indeed, the festivals of many religious traditions follow this sense of a remembrance of things past, whether mythical or historical, remade in the present as a factor fostering today’s identity. Individual human existence, grounded in socialization, is fundamentally rooted in a past now activated by contemporary emotional processes, with much depending upon a social world’s depth within previous eras. One of the characteristic differences between social groups and the identities they produce depends upon the relative emphasis placed upon traditional or innovative modes of knowing and being. This is reflected in the labeling procedures of traditional, modern, and post-modern life-styles as well as in emotional tones deemed appropriate to each. The complexity of such attitudes to the past in the organization of the present and in the orientation to the future is evident in hundreds of life-schemes, and is particularly relevant in what we often call religions where tradition has frequently been deemed a sacred deposit of revealed truth that is changed only at the peril of one‘s ultimate identity, itself another way of describing salvation. By contrast, the discovery procedures of science typically acknowledge the import of previous knowledge but deem it provisional as new perspectives in the future are sought. Presented in the starkest of terms, religion and science are essentially different because of the role they accorded to memory: in one it is sacred, in the other provisional. The emotional tones or moods allied with these differences easily contribute to friction whether in the individual whose identity partakes in both or in the debates of formal spokespersons of each. [3]

Given that memory and remembrance can almost be synonymous with individuality and human being, and that religion is a similarly huge domain, the potential scope for over-simplicity in a single paper is immense and hazardous and yet may serve as a valuable resource for analysis. Accordingly, this paper selects some theoretical-issues to help explore memory and remembrance within religious frames of reference, paying particular attention to the current interest in the place of emotions in the study of religion, an interest of direct relevance to memory.

Memory

Studies of memory, its definition and exploration are complex and pervade many disciplines. Joseph Blenkinsopp’s rather specifically focused essay on ‘Memory, Tradition and the Constitution of the Past in Ancient Israel’, for example, speaks of ‘remembering’ as ‘a sine qua non of survival’, [4] a perspective appropriate to the context of his analysis of Jewish history and ritual, not least of the Exodus and the Passover. [5] Much broader and from a sociological perspective Maurice Halbwachs’ innovative studies explored the nature of collective memory as the basis for cultural cohesion and the ongoing life of groups, especially religious institutions, and marks an importance perspective on how religious groups ponder the past and regenerate themselves in relation to it. This is a valuable addition to the Durkheimian tendency to stress the present nature of a society’s activity. [6] In much more recent sociology of religion Danièle Hervieu-Léger has made much of the notion of religion as a ‘chain of memory’, pondering broken links related to secularization while considering the ‘failing memory of the continuity of belief’ in relation to ‘emotional remembrance’ in secularizing contexts. She doubts, for example, the success of new links sought through the top-down Catholic hierarchical fostering of youth pilgrimages in Europe . [7] Rather than pursue those society-focused issues it would be equally possible to take a more individual focus and develop our opening comments on memory and identity in relation to personal aging and the cumulative sense of relations with the living and the dead. To age is to enter increasingly wide nets of relations with the living and dead, and to engage with the narratives of ‘memorable-relations’ that frame them. The phases of life and relationships through which we live, and the ways different societies classify them, are often linked with patterns of change of emotions. At the heart of a great deal of this change lie our responses to death, a domain often framed by ideas and rites identified as religious, itself a contentious term, but one that has to do with behaviour covering the management of emotions of loss, as well as with the tracing and ritual formatting of the life course. While this management of emotions at the collective and individual level is directly related to the core values of a group, whether in a Catholic Requiem Mass or a Humanist Funeral, the variety of values present in contemporary societies pose many problems for ritual events. Religion is now joined by other social processes in the management of emotion-laden values.

Emotions

In recent years the issue of emotions and the study of religion has, quite properly, gained some considerable interest as evident, for example in Corrigan or Dixon’s work. [8] As Corrigan indicated, ’the study of religion and emotion is in an early stage’ of development, and will need to ‘generate classifications’ of emotion whilst avoiding ‘doctrinaire taxonomies’. [9] This lecture is neither the right place to discuss such classifications or taxonomies, nor to explore notions of how biological feelings might relate to the social cultivation of preferred emotions or, indeed, to argue the merits of universal emotions versus the cultural relativity of defined feelings. Neither is it the place to rehearse the extremely extensive theological literatures on religious experience. My goal, rather, is to indicate an interest in emotions as a primary and not a secondary factor of analysis. In this my descriptive intention is to explore a variety of phenomena in a kaleidoscopic fashion, drawing largely from aspects of my own research in the hope that they will resonate with the work of many others. In terms of subject matter, I have spent much of the last thirty years working on Mormonism, death and funerary rites, and aspects of Anglicanism, as well as on more theoretical concerns in religious studies dealing with the overlap between social anthropology and Christian theology. Throughout this work I have been interested in the notion of embodiment and its attendant emotional moods currently pursued through an AHRC funded project on Emotions, Religion and Religious Communities based at Durham .

Identity

As for emotions and memory, they have their point of integration within the composite nature of personal and group identity, something that becomes most obvious if a person suffers a dramatic loss of memory, something Ninian Smart dwelt upon some time ago for religious studies when commenting on the importance of how memory of a collective past helped conferred identity upon a group, as upon an individual. [10] Recollections, often changing and developing recollections of past people and places, help create an ongoing narrative of self capable of being pervaded by emotions through recall or association of ideas. Such recollection of feeling is important as the basis by which mood-memories arise to suffuse our sense of today’s identity. Just as Dan Sperber once explored the sense of smell as our most immediate form of contact with the world around us, bringing the chemistry of substances rapidly to the brain and triggering that pervasive experience we once had, so do mood-memories bring our own embodied past to us in the present. [11] Just as Sperber also reminded us of the relative absence of cultural classifications of smell compared with the classification of colour so, too, perhaps with mood-memories that are, as it were, interior smells of our past; we do not name them, we simply have them. This may be one way of understanding the often reported ineffability of experiences identified as religious. Like smell, they may possess us, and prompt positive or negative physiological responses in the process.

It was in relation to the anthropological shift to interests in embodiment, with early roots in Gregory Bateson, Godfrey Lienhardt and Mary Douglas that I first pondered the issue of ‘moods of embodiment’. [12] Later, with Sperber in mind, I considered the issue of a ‘mood memory’ as ‘the combined affective and emotional aspects of symbolic knowledge’. [13] Certainly, in death and Mormon studies, as in my recent Anglican researches with my colleague Mathew Guest on church leaders, issues of recalled experience have also become important in relation to the process of narrative construction. [14] Indeed, to speak of recollections and of mood is, immediately, to realize the importance of narrative as the medium within which we know and set ourselves, even if it is not the narrative we may choose to construct for others. Indeed, the interplay of our private mood-memories with the more ‘official’ accounts of ourselves, or with the preferred emotional schemes of religious traditions, affords a fruitful area of complex research. Certainly, the importance of narrative, as of oral history, in human studies will be familiar to us all as it takes its many forms of myth, religious testimonies, parables, preached stories, hymns, sacred dramas and liturgies, as well as in the writing of history. And it is to some examples of the interplay of narratives and associated mood-memories that I now turn.

Paradigmatic scenes

I do so by taking up the notion of a paradigmatic scene, a concept I first encountered through Rodney Needham whose sophisticated anthropological work on religion has often been insufficiently appreciated. [15] Others to express similar ideas include the textual scholar Robert Alter who developed classicist Walter Arend’s notion of ‘type-scene’. [16] In this notion of a paradigmatic scene, we have both a good example of interdisciplinary development appropriate within religious studies and a valuable tool for use in the study of religious phenomena. Such a paradigmatic scene consists of a narrative picture of some event that becomes foundational for the core values of a tradition. Phenomena such as the Jewish Passover, the Crucifixion of Jesus, Imam Husain’s martyrdom, or Guru Gobind Singh’s creation of the Khalsa afford good examples. [17] Alongside their traditional textual depictions, their verbal picturing of an event enshrining core beliefs of a group, they evoke emotions in and through contemporary ritual behaviour. To understand a religious tradition or, indeed, of a society at large, is to know something of their paradigmatic scenes and to sense how they inform contemporary life. One might even view such scenes as the narrative form of what, sociologically, we might be tempted to describe as ‘ideal types’, but types capable of eliciting an emotional response. They have particular power in focusing the commitments of a group though just how they relate to formal doctrinal formulations will need careful study.

Mormon scenes

Take the case of Mormonism which, I reckon, possesses at least three paradigmatic scenes without which the Latter-day Saint tradition would not cohere as it does. One scene tells of a pre-mortal Council of the Gods discussing how to cope with the future disobedience of people on earth, how — in other words — to arrive at a Plan of Salvation. Lucifer, a noble presence in the heavenly council has his suggestion turned down by the heavenly father because it looks as though it would involve the coercion of humanity, while the salvation option brought by Jesus, that wins the day, would leave human agency free even if it exacted suffering on the part of Christ himself. Crest-fallen Lucifer and his fellow rebels are cast from heaven and remain today to tempt the faithful. This scene enshrines ideas of free agency, obedience and self-sacrifice. The second scene is of Jesus in Gethsemane , where his self-sacrificial obedience, anticipated in the Heavenly Council, is now realized as he so engages inwardly, in his mind, with the evils of the whole world to make atonement for its sins, that he sweats great drops of blood. For much of Latter-day Saint history this ‘Gethsemane Experience’ has competed with, and at times overshadowed the crucifixion as the prime salvation-engendering event. I have considered all this elsewhere in terms of a pro-active Christ of Gethsemane as opposed to a passive Christ of Calvary, idioms that reflect the Mormon preference for self-actualization and underlie the Mormon ethics of self-controlled obedience to God. [18] The third paradigmatic scene takes us to the First Vision, a strongly edited and developed narrative telling of the religiously confused and sin-aware teenager, Joseph Smith, going into the woods to ask God which was the true church within his Protestant revivalist environment. As he prays he feels engulfed by a tangible presence of evil and just when all seems lost a final prayer is followed by the emergence of a pillar of light above his head. It frames the personages of the divine heavenly Father and Jesus his Son. This saves Joseph from the evil force and he is told that all churches were wrong and that future revelations will disclose the true way ahead for him.

These three scenes echo throughout many aspects of Mormon thought and piety, they comprise much of its folk-belief: they engage with the negative presence of evil and positive power of obedience and, as narrative forms, are easy to appropriate. Interestingly, however, there is an absence in these scenes of one factor that is radically important for understanding how Mormons talk about their own religious experience, viz., the Holy Ghost. It is as though the Mormon world possesses a gap between the figures in its paradigmatic narrative scenes and the discourse on experience that relates to the rituals of laying on of hands for the coffering of the Holy Ghost after baptism, to the rite of patriarchal blessing and to descriptions of feelings of support and guidance in daily life. This I, think, may well be because, in Mormonism, we observe a new religious movement in the process of development at a stage when the scenes that drive piety are, practically, related to the Holy Ghost who moves individuals emotionally as they ponder those scenes, but do not, doctrinally, give that Spirit an immediate part to play in their narrative form. This is an intriguing issue at a time when Church leaders have encouraged engagement with mainstream Christians, something that often focuses on the Holy Trinity emerges as a key point of discussion.

Paradigmatic scenes, then, foster and intensify preferred emotions, helping to constitute the memorable relations of believers with their past. This is evident when today’s LDS missionaries ask prospective converts to read the Book of Mormon and pray to God for a confirmation that this is the true source of faith, a request that mirrors the confused Joseph asking God for guidance over the nature of the true church.

War Memorials

Paradigmatic scenes are also capable of creative extension as when that image of Christ’s self-sacrificial death in crucifixion was extended to embrace the death of ordinary soldiers in modern world wars. The twentieth century growth of war memorials in Britain, for example, has been astutely analyzed by Jon Davies within the concept of Euro-Christianity grounded in theological ideas of the self-sacrifice of soldiers for their homeland interpreted through the biblical notion of John’s Gospel of the ‘greater love’ motif. [19] This complex motif presents its own form of paradigmatic scene in which the crucifixion of Jesus combines with the battlefield death of soldiers. The rituals of Remembrance Day, now slightly more rather than less popular that some years ago, often elaborate this theme and foster cultural solemn emotions of grateful memory aligned with the sympathy of the loss of life or of loved ones. But the memorable relations depicted at Remembrance are still far from open to mutual acknowledgement even in the modern nation states of Europe . Paradigmatic scenes of warfare, victory and defeat, and of the atrocities of an Auschwitz are still capable of creating an embarrassed silence. The illegal nature of the raised-arm Nazi salute in modern Germany is its own symbol of the emotional power of ritual to embody the past, as was the decline in the popularity of cremation in parts of Protestant Germany after the Second War. The role of culturally fashioned emotions of how to feel about the past remains dramatically important as do creative explorations over ‘wounds not healed by time’, as Solomen Schimmel’s book on the ‘the power of repentance and forgiveness’ puts it. [20] New events are often understood through re-combination of pre-existing motifs as in the paradigmatic scene of New York ’s twin towers, images of terrorism, and genocide. All evoke and sustain emotions of many sorts and the ways in which these are ritualized, fostered or changed remains a crucial factor in national and international relationships. To speak of international paradigmatic scenes, it is interesting to consider the place of sport, not least the Olympics, in creating images of achievement aligned with emotion. The motif of the Olympic torch and its overarching flame offers a curious challenge to theories of ironic post-modern individualism, as shared emotions attended much of the games, with the very word ‘passion’ , for example, being amongst one of the most frequent positive references to emotion associated with the recent Beijing Olympics.

The perfect day

As we move from one event to another with some rapidity I wonder, in parenthesis here, whether certain idealized situations that do not have a single mythical scene at its source may, nevertheless, emerge within a society or religious tradition to function as paradigmatic scenes. Is this the case, perhaps, for the contemporary British wedding as caught in the phrase, a ‘perfect day’. Certainly this is worthy of analysis as a social rite around whose religious pivot exists a complex interplay of kinship, friendship, solemnity, festivity, economic expense and aesthetic mobilization. One of our postgraduates, Sarah Farrimond, is currently exploring this realm where many industries service the perfect day, making, hiring and selling dresses and suits, cakes, cars and venues. At the very time secularized ritual options have emerged the Church of England, for example, has begun revitalizing its attitude to wedding provision through national market research while, yesterday, August 31^st 2008, for the first time ever, the BBC devoted its Radio Four morning slot on worship to broadcasting an actual wedding from St Andrews Parish Church in Rugby. I wonder whether the very fact that a radio program could broadcast such an event presupposes the normative presence of the paradigmatic marriage scene in the mind of hearers? In broad terms the case of religious marriage offers much scope for analysis. Where is the prime scene, is it the whole day itself that furnishes the paradigmatic scene, or one of the many constitutive elements in the bride coming down the aisle; the cutting of a cake; the speeches; first dance; departure and so on? And what of secondary paradigmatic scenes in Stag Night or Hen Party? Certainly, weddings bring many social values to bear on a select nucleus of persons and evoke emotions of hope and excitement as well as of anticipations of faithfulness and family life. It is not surprising that the issues of gay partnership blessing has emerged as a candidates for inclusion in the ‘perfect day’ paradigm, for here is a complex series of interlinked activities that foster preferred emotions of relationship, belonging, social acknowledgement and individual worth where participants can be expected to cry, to be proud, grateful and so on. The role of video and photography in capturing many such perfect days offers a clear recall of memorable relations. Indeed, something similar could be explored for funerals, photography apart, if we asked whether the expression, ‘a good send-off’, symbolically echoed ‘a perfect day’. Here memorable relationships come to emotional expression as part of group behaviour amidst numerous acts of embodiment and of personal expression of emotion through individually chosen music and readings. Funerals, too, of course, have their memorials, not generally in the photograph album but in gravestones, the chosen place for privately placed cremated remains, or the new woodland burial sites currently being studied both through Sheffield and Durham Universities, as Hannah Rumble’s paper in this conference will show.

The Two Modes Theory

Returning from that extended parenthesis to more central theoretical issues of memory and ritual I now want to draw attention to one debate within contemporary anthropology that offers scope for religious studies in direct relation to theories of memory and kinds of knowing advocated by Harvey Whitehouse^{^[21]} now of Oxford‘s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He speaks of two modes of religion, one he calls ’semantic’ and the other ’episodic’ or autobiographical’. These are related to what he reckons to be ‘two distinct mechanisms of long-term memory’. [22]

Semantic memory: doctrinal mode

The semantic mode of acquiring religious knowledge and experience involves learning set pieces of information and leads Whitehouse to speak of a ‘doctrinal’ form of religion, one we learn in a formal fashion, often grounded in an orthodoxy. It is ongoing and cumulative in effect and resembles Dan Sperber’s encyclopaedic form of knowledge. It results in ‘sober, organized, and verbal’ forms of organization and life. People learn doctrine and, in terms of group membership, sense themselves as part of a very large number of people who have learned the same material as, typically, in classical Catholicism or Mormonism. A ‘widespread but impersonal solidarity results’, with religious leaders taking the form of teachers. It involves centralization of authority, the maintenance of orthodoxy, but the capacity to reach very many people. Associated with this mode of religion is a strong form of ‘deference’ . Deference is intrinsic to much social life and, as Maurice Bloch indicates, it often offers ‘a good feeling’, as we ‘allow ourselves to depend on others’, in times of trouble this is especially gratifying even if, ‘there is not much else we can do’. [23]

Episodic memory: imagistic mode

The second mode of religion involves experience gained through some specific event involving a great deal of personal experience, perhaps of a traumatic or dramatic kind. It is more obviously intensely emotional with ’ideas being conveyed non-verbally to a great degree’. [24] This Whitehouse called the imagistic mode of religion. He approaches it through psychological studies of ‘flashbulb memories’, often related to traumatic events. The awareness people have of traumatic emotional events may take years, or may never make sense to them; they may have no formal doctrinal expression. In terms of social organization this gives rise to small groups of closely bonded individuals who have experienced such events together. It is the event that binds. Much here is reminiscent of some survivors of the Great War and their post-war silence. There is little opportunity here for organization of ideas in any doctrinal sense; people make whatever sense they can of what has happened to them. Leadership in any structured sense is rare. These groups are not organized for expansion or evangelism.

Memory plays an important role in all of this, or rather, different forms of memory. Whitehouse makes much of “flashbulb memory”, the recall or the impinging of intense past experiences upon present life. We are most familiar with these from people having undergone trauma in catastrophes or in warfare or disaster situations. He describes them for ritual initiation contexts of Papua New Guinea in which people had similar experience: things happened to them without any explanation of a theoretical kind. They were thrown into the deep end of experience in their ritual initiation, he even speaks of their experience in terms of ‘rites of terror’ that generate a memory of their own sort. ^{^[25]} Later they would be responsible for initiating others through particular acts but not, necessarily or even probably, with any extensive ‘explanation’ of what went on. People were left with their own experience to make of it what they might. The concrete fact was that something had happened to them, usually as a group, an experience that helped bind them together.

Indeed, the key feature of this imagistic type is rooted in ‘mortal terror and physical pain’. [26] These emotional dynamics in Whitehouse’s Papua New Guinea work related to small groups of males but, James Laidlaw, for example, describes similar rites of ‘intense and traumatic’ initiation for women, too, when becoming ascetics in the Jain tradition where sporadic rites traditionally included the pulling out of the head-hair. These bald ascetics, never wash, and sweep the road before them as they walk, and eat and drink with care so as not to harm any creature. He speaks of the initiation as an event that will ‘certainly give rise to episodic memories, if not to “flashbulb” memories’. The rites help produce ‘a very tightly bound small group of religious agents’. [27] Laidlaw, then, speaks of Jainism as having both of these features within it. The ascetic renouncers belong more to the imagistic while the wider Jain community is more ‘doctrinal’ in form. The renouncers occasionally reinstate severe austerities in what he describes as ‘often downright scary behaviour’ which contributes to their ‘ambiguous prestige’. He links this with the ‘revelator’ powers associated with fasting.

There is much to consider in these theories as far as kinds of memory, emotions, and kinds of ensuing religious organization are concerned. In my own fields they hold promise for analyzing the early development of Mormonism and, indeed, of certain contemporary aspects of LDS life while, in death studies, the two modes approach may have much to say regarding different forms of grief-memory and of subsequent grief-influenced living. But I cannot explore these issues today.

Private memory

It is likely, however, that growing complexity will emerge from such studies rather than any easy application of a two-modes model. This may, perhaps, be obvious if we now look, for a moment at private aspects of memory for, once we decide to pay academic attention to emotions we cannot avoid the realm of individual and, indeed, of private experience. Here I will mention three rather different examples, the first suggesting the possibilities of a private paradigmatic scene set in a dream that carries a core message for an individual, the second portraying some physical act that reminds us of the interplay of memory and personal embodiment, while the third focuses on the sensed presence of the dead. Here I appreciate that to speak of private paradigmatic scenes may be problematic if we prefer to think of such scenes as essentially social. But let me continue for now because I think that the role of such scenes, may be similar whether they be social or individual.

A paradigmatic dream scene

First, the private paradigmatic scene. Whilst all experience is individual at source much of it is socially cultivated into cultural-classifications of recognizable types of emotion. Some experiences, remain private, unshared yet individually powerful in effect. It is, perhaps, even worth speaking of some of these as paradigmatic scenes for that individual. There may be occasions when such deeply felt experience may be shared with some other person, and those occasions, themselves, are worthy of analysis. Let me exemplify from the research into Anglican bishops by Mathew Guest and myself with the case of a bishop from a strong ecclesiastical family background and Cambridge education who goes to theological college and is made a deacon in a parish almost as a matter of course. Looking back on his life he sees how he moved towards ordination on the suggestion of his college chaplain but without any distinctive sense of vocation. Attending lectures of Michael Ramsey he was greatly stimulated yet his sense of vocation remains low. Then, during his year as deacon, he has what he described as a ‘sort of dream/ fantasy/ nightmare’ in which people were queuing at the gates of heaven. They were looking at him and said’, “It was because of him that I didn’t follow Christ”. He added, ‘and that really shook me’. His experience of ordination as priest at the end of his diaconal year was something that, as he said, ‘absolutely hit me and was an antidote to what had happened’ in the dream. [28] This man went on to fulfill a very successful ministry in the liberal catholic tradition of the Church of England that resulted in his consecration as a bishop.

Experiences of this sort are not, perhaps, often discussed. Indeed, analogous ones emerged in that research when several said on something they had just spoken about, ‘and I haven’t told anyone that before’. The research context in which a person is looking back over their life and, obviously, interpreting it afresh in the light of experience, and in a strictly anonymous interview context, offers creative possibilities for people. Here one recalls David Hay’s longstanding work on religious experience in which people told things to the researcher as for the first time. [29] Such secrets have a power about them that may be lost if they are too frequently expressed.

Here, however, it is worth pondering those powerful experiences that one individual gains and which are shared and, when accepted by others become the basis for a communal paradigmatic scene with enormous subsequent effect, as in Joseph Smith’s First Vision or the inaugural visions of many a religious prophet or founder. Whilst such scenes may be constructed from pre-existing elements of religious tradition in a form of prophetic bricolage, to echo Lévi-Strauss’s once familiar image of mythological thought, successful and enduring cases come to have a new life of their own. After all, angels and divine visitors, or the power of sacred texts, and of the devil, all existed before Joseph Smith or Mohammed, for example, received their tradition-engendering experiences.

Memorable behaviour

My second type of private memory concerns a memorable relation grounded in the awareness of personal embodiment. It is exemplified in Catherine Young’s important article ‘The Memory of the Flesh’ concerning that experience which is more likely to be gained by older than by younger people, occurring when they are old enough to see in themselves something they once saw in their parents when they were still alive. [30] In a real sense their own personal embodiment produces a living memory of the dead. They speak, or move in a particular way. Again, it is difficult to give public expression to this yet it emerges, in part, when an adult comments on being aware that they are now saying to their children what their parents had said to them. This generational repetition plays a significant part in many people’s lives and yet is seldom the focus of study. Just how this relates to religious behaviour awaits much further research. It is also likely to be significant in traditions where teacher-disciple relations are strong. Again, in the bishops’ study this issue of religious leaders seeing in their own life and ministry a strong echo of the life of their fathers was evident. One spoke of this embodied-memory very clearly as something that came to him when he sat down to write. He thought that he wrote as his father wrote. In that sense the past and present came to cohere in his life experience as he sat at his desk.

In this case a memory is enshrined in one’s own behavioural similarity to that of one’s dead relative, but memory can also be carried in one’s own body as in the case of piercing and tattoos. Here I allude to Daniel Miller’s fascinating ethnography of thirty people and their homes in a randomly selected London street. Its dense description of the diversity of life and the meanings constructed by people from things, acts, beliefs, memories and their own bodies carries its own important theoretical critique of notions of postmodernity. Importantly, it is study of what Miller describes as ‘a configuration of human values, feelings and experiences’ as the basis by which ‘people judge the world and themselves’. [31] It is a study of the emotions allied with material culture, of what he sees as an ‘aesthetic‘, an order created out of things and changing processes of life that can be ‘almost entirely religious‘ or ’demonstrate an integrity’ of their own of other sorts. [32] Not least important in this are the ways people treat their bodies, and those of their living companions, including their pets. He explores the case of Charlotte and her many piercings and tattoos for whom, ’every single piercing or tattoo represents a highly specific memory she can look at to remind herself of its origin’. [33] And this includes photographs of what is tattooed on her back and would be otherwise unseen by her. All these may serve, he thinks, as a good way ‘of controlling memory’, for she only has tattoos in relation to ‘good’ and not ‘bad’ experienced events.

Sensing the dead

Sometimes, however, the memory seems not to be controlled, at least from the analytical perspective as my third example of private memory indicates. In what was one of the largest in-depth studies of death-related phenomena conducted by myself with Alastair Shaw as research assistant, in a project initially facilitated by Dr Julie Rugg of York University , some 1,600 people were interviewed in their own homes in four parts of Great Britain . One of the themes explored was whether people had sensed the presence of a dead person sometime after their death. The results were that approximately 35% of this very large and representative sample reckoned on at least one such experience. [34] In a quite different survey conducted along with Charles Watkins and Michael Winter as part of the Archbishops’ Commission on Rural Areas, and published in 1991 we found that amongst Anglicans regularly r at the Holy Communion service some 36% of men and 38% of women reckoned the event gave them a ‘sense of dead loved ones’. [35] Just how one might interpret such results will depend on many factors, but they make it clear that an active memory of the dead, if I may so call a sense of the presence of the dead, plays a significant part in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Britons. The Eucharistic Liturgy, with its focus on the death of Christ, and often with prayers for the dying and dead, affords a ready matrix for such active memory. Here, if anywhere, a grammar of discourse of the eternally living dead provides an opportunity for individuals to participate in that mythical communion of saints. Something similar could be said about Mormon temple ritual involving the baptism of the dead, one of the most extensive forms of ‘memorable relation’ that religious studies might have to offer. Its extensive genealogical research serves as a prelude to the rite of actually taking the name and, in a sense, assuming the identity, of the dead for the purpose of the rite. It is not uncommon for living Saints to allude to their sense of the presence of the ones for whom they are doing the work. The idiom is often of the veil between this world and the next being thin at such times, times that are aligned with a strong emotional sentiment. In relation to such contexts one is reminded of both Sir James Frazer and Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and their developmental theories of a sense of the divine emerging from a sense of the dead.

Oblivion or forgetfulness

Having spent so much time on memory and remembrance let me not forget the complementary note of forgetfulness. Amongst Miller’s London street ethnography just mentioned lie rich seams on memory and relationships that also touch forgetfulness. In one house he contrasts Daniel who ‘owns almost nothing from his childhood, simply because he had practically nothing of his own as a child’, and his ten year old daughter Grace who ‘has loads of everything’, she even alternates her many soft toys between their home and her aunt‘s where she stores many of them. She does this so that none of the toys ‘should feel neglected’. [36] The father reminds us, in a sense, of Marc Augé’s fascinating anthropological essay on Oblivion, and its analysis of the way remembrance is shaped by what we have forgotten. Particularly interesting are Augé’s considerations of the relation between memory and narrative and what he calls the ‘paradox of religion’, the way in which religion ‘would like its narrative developments to suppress its mythical origin’. [37] One of the points of tension between religious studies and theology arises here with this ‘paradox of religion’ since learning how to live in myth, understood as such, is seldom high on the syllabus of religious formation in many traditions. One intriguing case in Miller’s study concerns a Greek woman and her memorable relationships with her dead. During her cemetery visits she avoided prayers thinking that they ‘would get in the way of’ her personal relationships with the dead to whom she wishes to speak, and from whom she finds a degree of strength for living. [38]

Concluding with Nostalgia

This woman lives in a complex world, not simply of eastern orthodox religion with its emphasis on future resurrection, but of a present in which the dead can be engaged best without the barrier of prayer. That almost sounds paradoxical, but it bespeaks perhaps the way different actions facilitate or hinder particular emotions. Doris Francis, Leonie Kellehear and Georgina Neophytou have provided us with a wonderful ethnography and analysis of similar issues in their study The Secret Cemetery, especially of the way in which ‘memory works in the dynamic space between the figure of the one who has died and the life disfigured by death’. They have also described how cemetery landscapes and domestic places ‘generate complementary resources for emotional processes’. [39] With this double dynamic of past and present I conclude by invoking one of the great figures in religious studies, the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) who, in one of his chapters reminds us of that distinctive form of remembrance, that of nostalgia. In his ‘Nostalgia for Paradise’ he typifies Christianity as being ‘ruled by the longing for Paradise ’. [40] I am sure that were he still alive he would have included some reference to new-found interests in woodland burial as some kind of outworking of that longing. Doubtless, his reference to St Ambrose’s utterance that ‘Christ is the Tree of Life’, would have found some application. That theme of nostalgia remains potent in many religious traditions, not least in times of social change, though it may take quite dramatically different forms. One of my postgraduates, Paul Witts, is currently exploring this for some contemporary Christian congregations in the UK , exploring the positive potential in what many so often define as a negative emotion. Certainly there is some useful sociological work done on the sociology of nostalgia in religious and secular contexts. [41] One of the most interesting phenomena that could be analyzed in this way, one that would, I am sure, have also intrigued Eliade, and perhaps surprised him in the religious turn in North American religious life over the last two decades, concerns rapture belief. In a frame shared by millions of more conservative believers this speaks of Christ’s imminent return when the living Christian will be raptured, be caught up into the air and transformed without a resurrection from the dead, whilst unbelievers will be left behind in a world overcome with evil for a period of time. This strong eschatological hope has developed a strong paradigmatic scene evident in book and film formats from only a few verses in the New Testament. I conclude with this rather un-British expectation because, all comparisons with cargo-cults apart, it illustrates a ‘nostalgia for paradise’ of a very distinctive kind in which a backward commitment to the early Christian community is partnered by emotions for another time and another place in the anticipation of perfection ahead. Had we pursued this lecture from a more philosophical perspective this case might, appropriately, have been considered as one of Ernst Bloch’s ‘hopeful images against death’, a possibility that gives us a firm reminder of false boundaries within religious studies given Bloch’s deep significance on the theme of hope in religion. [42] In conclusion, I simply indicate the opportunity presented within the study of religion as an interdisciplinary venture for exploring human identity through the many avenues that emotional dynamics have and will, doubtless, open in the future. With an eye to the power of social worlds to classify experience in types of emotion, as well as the variety of options through which the body presents itself as a creative force for action and reflection, it is clear that much remains to be done across the several mutual disciplines that comprise the study of religion.