Attracting the Heart: Social Relations and the Aesthetics of Emotion in Sri Lankan Monastic CultureAn idealized view of the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk might be described according to the doctrinal demand for emotional detachment and, ultimately, the cessation of all desire. Yet monks are also enjoined to practice compassion, a powerful emotion and equally lofty ideal, and live with every other human feeling—love, hate, jealousy, ambition—while relating to other monks and the lay community. In this important ethnography of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Jeffrey Samuels takes an unprecedented look at how emotion determines and influences the commitments that laypeople and monastics make to each other and to the Buddhist religion in general. By focusing on "multimoment" histories, Samuels highlights specific junctures in which ideas about recruitment, vocation, patronage, and institution-building are dynamically negotiated and refined. Positing a nexus between aesthetics and affect, he illustrates not only how aesthetic responses trigger certain emotions, but also how personal and shared emotions, at the local level, shape notions of beauty. |
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... people's collective aesthetic sensibilities that are more often than not , determined by time , region , and context — that influence and even determine people's conception of monastic purity . In his article " Jainism and Buddhism as ...
... people's future actions . Discussing with me the relationship that he saw between emotion , cognition , and volition , Sumedha said , That was an opportunity to please the people's heart . By seeing the young monastics , the children ...
... people's ideas about what attracts the heart is also affected by the emotional bonds that people form with monastics . Although it is quite true that people's ideas of ideal monastic behavior are not solely dependent upon the bonds that ...
Contents
Affective Bonds and the Making of a Social | 1 |
AestheticAffective Social Networks | 43 |
4 | 63 |
Copyright | |
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Attracting the Heart: Social Relations and the Aesthetics of Emotion in Sri ... Jeffrey Samuels No preview available - 2010 |