Graduate Student, The Humanities Center
Thesis Title: Animal Religion: Evolution, Affect, and Radical Embodiment
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John D. Caputo
M. Gail Hamner |
About
My research brings together poststructuralism, feminism, and the life sciences to look at a variety of theoretical and methodological questions in the study of religion. I am especially interested in the relationship between religion, embodiment, and emotions.
In my dissertation, "Animal Religion: Evolution, Affect, and Radical Embodiment," I used decolonial, poststructuralist, and feminist theory to suggest that religion is best understand as a network of affect-dense bodily practices, rather than a booklet of cognitively determined beliefs. To this end, I brought together evolutionary biology and contemporary affect theory to sketch out a model of bodies as primarily affective--as first and foremost motivated by emotion rather than reason--in a word, animal. I argued that human expressions of religion and evidence, reported by cognitive ethologists, of animals exhibiting religious behaviors can be situated within a non-eliminativist evolutionary frame by taking the affective approach.
My next major research project will look at atheism after Darwin through the lenses of affect theory and Foucault's analytics of power. Rather than conceiving of post-Darwinian atheisms as rationally delineated philosophical frames, I situate them in terms of the suite of emotions that they evoke through embodied practices such as reading, writing, and believing.
Contact Information
| Address: | Department of Religion |
| Telephone: |
315-426-2612 |
