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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

Ari Mermelstein
Affiliation:
Yeshiva University, New York
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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.

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Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism
Community and Identity in Formation
, pp. 221 - 257
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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