Culture and Religion

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Haptics of the heart: The sense of touch in

American religion and culture

David Chidester

To cite this article: David Chidester (2000) Haptics of the heart: The sense of touch in American
religion and culture, Culture and Religion, 1:1, 61-84, DOI: 10.1080/01438300008567140

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Article

Haptics of the Heart: the

Sense of Touch in American
Religion and Culture
David Chidester
University of Cape Town, South Africa

This essay undertakes a tactile exploration of the sense of touch in

contemporary American culture and religion. After briefly recalling the
denigration of tactility in Western thought, I consider the usefulness of the
work of two theorists, Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin, in
recovering the sense of touch—the intimate caress, the violent shock—as
deep background for tracking basic modes of religious tactility. By paying
attention to sensory media and metaphors, I hope to suggest some features
of religious tactility that are not necessarily seen or heard but nevertheless
pervade contemporary religion and culture. Schematically, I proceed from
cutaneous binding and burning, through kinaesthetic moving, to haptic
handling in order to enter this field of tactile meaning and power. Along
the way, I touch on specific cases of religious tactility—sometimes
caressing, more often striking—that include US President Bill Clinton,
firewalking, flag burning, alien abduction, global capitalism, and cellular
microbiology. Although this exploratory essay replicates a tactile
experience by renouncing visual mapping and verbal argumentation, it
points to the presence of a tactile politics of perception that operates at the
intersections between human subjectivity and the social collectivity.
KEYWORDS: religion, America, body, senses, touch, popular culture

•Religion is about a certain about. What religion is about, however,

remains obscure for it is never quite there—nor is it exactly not there.
Religion is about what is always slipping away. It is, therefore,
impossible to grasp what religion is about—unless, perhaps, what we
grasp is the impossibility of grasping.' Mark C. Taylor, About Religion:
Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture

'The tasks which face the human apparatus at the turning points of history
cannot be solved by optical means, that is, By contemplation alone. They
are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile

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appropriation... The distracted person, too, can form habits.' Walter
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'

'I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of
flesh' (Ezek. 36:26).
Robert Bellah, et al, 'Introduction to the Updated Edition: The House
Divided*, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in
American Life
Like other academic disciplines devoted to the study of culture, the study of
religion has discovered the body as a crucial location for analysis. As material
site, malleable substance, and shifting field of relations, the body has situated a
range of analytical interests in the production and consumption of culture. For
the study of religion, as William R. LaFleur observes in the recent handbook,
Critical Terms for Religious Studies, '"body" has become a critical term for
religious studies whereas "mysticism", for instance, has largely dropped out'
(1998:26). Displacing earlier concerns with religious beliefs and doctrines, with
inner experience and spirituality, this academic interest in the body signals a new
engagement with materiality—perhaps a new materialism—in the study of
religion. Certainly, academic interest in mysticism persists, an interest
witnessed by the annual appearance of at least one article on the topic in the
Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Likewise, a certain mystification
persists in thinking about religion that risks eliding its embodied, material
dynamics. Introducing a series of essays, About Religion, Mark C. Taylor
observes—poetically, enigmatically—that religion is 'about a certain about' that
inevitably eludes our conceptual grasp. According to Taylor, it is 'impossible to
grasp what religion is about—unless, perhaps, what we grasp is the
impossibility of grasping'. Neither quite there nor exactly not there, religion is
'always slipping away* (1999:1). However, even this slippage that signals the
impossibility of touching, holding, or grasping religion forces us back to the
body, to its sensory media and metaphors, and the kinds of knowledge that can
only be gained by the body. Given the centrality of the body in recent research,
we might ask: What do the hands know about grasping that scholars of religion
and culture do not know? In this essay, I intend only a preliminary testing of the
sense of touch as an avenue for entering the embodied, visceral, and material
field of religion.1
According to our experts in such matters, the psychology of the human sense
of touch includes three things: the sensitivity of the entire cutaneous field of the
body; the sensations involved in the kinaesthetic movement of the body; and
haptics, the perceptual information gained through both cutaneous and
kinaesthetic manipulation of objects in the body's environment (Heller 1991:1).
Haptics refers to the work of the hands—handling, caressing, grasping,
manipulating, hitting, striking, and so on—as instruments of knowledge. Not
limited to the hands, haptics includes the work of the elbows and shoulders, the

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 Chidester: Haptics of the Heart

feet and toes, the lips and tongue, and all of the other extensions of the body,
and, as far as I can tell, it also includes the kind of acute awareness of the
environment that can only be gained by bumping into sharp and solid objects in
the dark. For the study of religion, attention to all these aspects of the sense of
touch—the cutaneous, the kinaesthetic, and the haptic—provides an extremely
wide perceptual field, perhaps as extensive as the body itself. Heat and cold,
pleasure and pain, pressure and release, the wet and the dry, the rough and the
smooth, and all the movements and manipulations of physical embodiment are
embraced by the sense of touch.
How can we narrow this perceptual field for the purposes of a discussion?
After briefly touching on the denigration of tactility in Western thought, I point
to the contributions of two theorists, Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin,
in recovering the sense of touch, whether as the intimate caress or the violent
shock, as a way of knowing and being in the world. The heart of my discussion,
however, is devoted to tracking modes of religious tactility in modern American
religion and culture. By paying attention to sensory media and metaphors, and
particularly to tactile practices, postures, and pressures, I hope to suggest some
basic features of religious tactility that are not necessarily seen or heard but
nevertheless pervade contemporary religion and culture. Schematically, I proceed
from cutaneous binding and burning, through kinaesthetic moving, to haptic
handling in order to enter this field of tactile meaning and power. Although this
exploratory essay replicates a tactile experience by renouncing visual mapping
and verbal argumentation, I believe it points to the presence of a tactile politics
of perception that might help us understand one of the most vexed questions of
critical theory: How do we account for the intersections between human
subjectivity and the social collectivity?

Caress and Shock

A long tradition of Western philosophical reflection on the senses has identified
touch as the lowest sense, the most animal, servile, and unconscious of the
resources of the human sensorium. The sense of touch, as Aristotle insisted, is
metaphysically and morally inferior to all other senses (Synnott 1991:63).
Although they generally regarded touch as the lowest of the senses, ancient
Greek philosophers of perception nevertheless tended to explain the higher
senses of sight and hearing in terms of tactility. Vision was thought to work
like touch—the arm of vision, the stick of vision—to establish immediate and
continuous contact. Hearing was explained as the result of a blow that strikes
the air, travels over a distance, and impacts the ear. Based on ancient Greek
science of the senses, therefore, both sight and hearing—sight as tactile contact,
hearing as tactile concussion—could be glossed as species of a more fundamental
tactility upon which all sense perception depended (Chidester 1992.-2-8).2
In the formation of Greco-Roman Christian religious discourse, this
underlying tactility of perception was never explicitly thematised. Certainly, the

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New Testament displayed an ambivalence about touch. As the patron saint of

Christian tactility, the apostle Thomas is presented in the Gospel of John as
demonstrating that touching is believing, while Mary, the patron saint of a kind
of anti-tactility is told, 'Do not touch' (John 20:24-29; 20:17). More than a
contradiction, this calculus of touching and not touching has been central to the
practice of Christianity. Laying on hands, anointing with oils, washing feet,
holy kissing, swearing oaths on the Bible, taking up snakes, and so on, are all
forms of religious tactility that both signify and enact a direct, powerful, and
even intimate contact with the sacred. At the same time, the sacred is inevitably
surrounded by prohibitions on illicit contact, with those restrictions implicitly
or explicitly backed up by force or the threat of force, as in the case of the
Israelites before Mount Sinai who were warned that 'whosoever touches the
mount shall surely be put to death' (Exod. 19:12). For early Christian theorists,
this dialectic of touch was generally submerged under the transcendent demands
of sight and hearing. Adopting the Greek hierarchy of the senses, Augustine of
Hippo, for example, might have employed the tactile metaphor of the 'embrace
of truth', but he was clear that 'the objects that we touch, taste, and smell are
less like truth than the things we see and hear' (1964:2.14.147). By paying
attention to the sense of touch, however, religious discourse and practice can be
situated in this dialectic of contact and concussion, embracing and striking, that
defines the basic character of religious tactility.
During the twentieth century, two theorists of tactility, Emmanuel Lcvinas
and Walter Benjamin, have expanded our understanding of contact and
concussion—the intimate caress, the violent shock—in the perceptual dynamics
of the sense of touch. Both explicitly addressed the tactility of religion. On the
one hand, Emmanuel Levinas was a theorist of the embrace, finding in the sense
of touch the basic engagement of the self in a world and the underlying unity of
the senses. Levinas proposed that the flesh implicated the self in a world of
contact, proximity, and intimacy (1989a:79). In this approach, the world is
experienced because it is intimately touched, rendering tactility, in the process,
more than merely a sense. As a metaphor for embracing the world of experience
as a whole, touch represented for Levinas the basis for all sensory experience.
According to Levinas, 'One sees and hears like one touches' (1987:118).3
This insistence on the tactile basis of the senses bore at least two
implications. First, sensory perception entailed an intimate tactile embrace of
the world that is derived not only by grasping objects but most importantly by
caressing the other. As Levinas observed,
The caress is a mode of the subject's being, where the subject who is in
contact with another goes beyond this contact... The seeking of the caress
constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it
seeks. This 'not knowing', this fundamental disorder, is the essential.
(1989b:51)
This unconscious tactility of the caress, embracing the fundamental disorder of

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 Chidester: Haptics of the Heart

'not knowing', goes beyond conscious sensory contact, which Levinas located in
the visual domain of light, to open the self to an intimate, self-involving
engagement with the world.
Second, for the study of religion, the primacy of touch entailed a shift in
analysis from religious belief or doctrine to religious action or practice.
According to Levinas, touch provided the phenomenological ground for religious
ritual, a ground laid by a kind of doing that was prior to the auditory reception of
ethical commands or the visual contemplation of doctrinal propositions (Jay
1993:558). Like the caress, we might assume, religious ritual also 'does not
know what it seeks*. With no practical objective, no instrumental goal, no
usefulness whatsoever in the world, this type of activity provides the religious
equivalent of the intimate embrace that suggested for Levinas both the essential
character and the fundamental disorder of tactility. The work of Emmanuel
Levinas, therefore, developed one side of the dialectic of touch, the side of
immediate contact and intimate embrace, however unconscious or unknowing, as
a way of situating human subjectivity in the world.
On the other hand, Walter Benjamin was a theorist of the shock, finding in
tactile concussion both the underlying unity of the senses and the basic
organisation of art, religion, and politics in modernity. As developed in
Benjamin's influential essay on 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction', the sense of touch had been reorganised by recent technological
developments—chromolithography, photography, and cinematography—that
gave aesthetics a new tactile character.4 What Benjamin called the 'tactile
appropriation' of aesthetic objects bears at least three significant implications for
a consideration of the role of tactility in modern religion.
First, these arts of mechanical reproduction assumed their tactile character by
striking the audience, by producing what Benjamin called 'shock effects'. From
Dada to cinema, Benjamin found that aesthetics had become 'an instrument of
ballistics', with images and words, styles and techniques, deployed in ways that
'hit the spectator like a bullet... thus acquiring a tactile quality*. What Benjamin
called the 'shock effect of the film' had nothing to do with subject matter.
Rather, the basic techniques used in the production and reproduction of film
produced shocks by hitting, striking, and distracting the audience—through
techniques of cutting, panning, zooming, and so on—in ways that created an
essentially tactile aesthetic experience.
Second, by identifying the characteristically modern aesthetic experience as
tactile, Benjamin developed a basic analytical opposition between visual
concentration and tactile distraction. Like the experience of motion pictures, the
experience of moving through a modern city was guided not by visual
contemplation but by a 'tactile appropriation' that was 'accomplished not so
much by attention as by habit'. The challenges of negotiating a modem city,
Benjamin observed, 'cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by
contemplation alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of
tactile appropriation.' As the 'polar opposite' of visual attention, habitual

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distraction represented the characteristically tactile mode of human sense

perception that had come to prominence under the historical conditions of
modernity.
Third, with the historical shift from visual attention to the tactile distractions
of the arts of mechanical reproduction, the work of art had been alienated from
its traditional location. Tradition, as that which is 'handed down', anchored
objects in place, signifying precisely where and when they might be touched,
thereby certifying the 'aura' of their originality and authenticity. Under the
impact of mechanical reproduction, however, art underwent 'a tremendous
shattering of tradition'. Previously grounded in ritual, the work of art was
liberated from tradition, only to be recaptured, however, by another social
formation. 'Instead of being based on ritual,' Benjamin observed, 'it begins to be
based on another practice—politics.' What kind of a politics of perception, we
might ask, operates in the tactility—the intimate caresses, the violent shocks—
of contemporary American religion?

Binding
If we gave credence to etymology—and if we accepted that religio has its root in
religare, 'to bind'—then we would have a tactile basis for the very notion of
religion.5 From its ancient origins, according to this rendering, religion has been
about binding relations, either among humans or between humans and gods, that
have constituted the fabrics and textures, the links and connections, the contracts
and covenants of religion. In this respect, although religious discourse might
very well point beyond all that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched, it
points with a hand that is religiously bound. Tactility, therefore, is the
fundamental bond of religion.
For the history of religion in America, however, we need to pay attention to
a more contingent and complex sense of the religious dynamics of 'binding' in
the 'contact zone' (Pratt 1992), in the bondage of slavery (Long 1995:141-214),
or in the binding terms and conditions of a new covenant. Rhetorically, the
seventeenth-century Puritan settlers in North America proceeded hand-in-hand
with their God. Invoking the paradigmatic biblical narrative of oppression and
resistance, in all its symbolic tactility, John Winthrop insisted that his Puritans
had been liberated from the 'spiritual bondage of Egypt", led across the sea by
God's 'own immediate good hand', to undertake in America the 'great work in
hand' (Morgan 1958:40; Bercovitch 1975:117-19).
While this tactile imagery culminated in the central symbol of covenant, the
sacred bond between God and a 'peculiar people', it carried at least three
implications that are worth noting. First, the tactile bond of the covenant was a
bondage not only of pleasure but also of pain. As Increase Mather put it, the
covenant entailed 'sanctified afflictions', the painful suffering that Mather
understood to be both punitive and purifying (1675:7).
Second, the bond of the covenant entailed violence against the indigenous

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inhabitants of America, a violence represented in explicitly tactile terms by the

Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth, who celebrated God's 'furious flail' and
'fatal broom' that had been deployed against Native Americans 'to make my
people elbow room' (1963:2:611-16). In these potently tactile terms, the
covenant disclosed the inherent violence of tactility as concussion, as the blow
that was struck by the violent hand of God in the forceful extension of body
space—the 'elbow room'—over a territory.
Third, the covenant community was consolidated by economic relations that
wererepresented(and mystified) as a process of gift giving, from hand to hand,
that fulfilled the religious bond with God precisely because of the inherent
inequalities of wealth, status, and power upon which those covenantal relations
depended. As John Winthrop declared in his sermon on charity, God was
glorified more 'in dispensing his gifts to man by man, then if he did it by his
own immediate hand' (1961:1:195). In the Puritan covenant, God's gifts had to
be handled by an elite class of middlemen in the exchange relations between God
and the world.
During the first half of the 1990s, US President Bill Clinton invoked the
powerful imagery of the covenant—the 'New Covenant"—as his central political
slogan. Although many have probably forgotten this initiative, distracted by
more recent preoccupations with a different register of tactility that was found in
the insistent investigation into precisely when and where the president might
have touched a White House intern, it was enshrined in 1992 in the very title of
the national platform of the Democratic Party, 'A New Covenant with the
American People', a covenant that promised to repair 'the damaged bond*
between Americans and their government In his acceptance speech, Clinton
countered the vision of his political opponent, explicitly deriding 'the vision
thing' of George Bush, with the tactile symbolism of the covenant, stressing in
particular the relations of giving and receiving. 'I call this approach a New
Covenant,' Clinton proclaimed, 'a solemn agreement between the people and the
government, based not simply on what each of us can take, but on what all of
us must give to our nation' (1992:21-30; see Van der Silk and Schwark 1998).
As the defining terms of this covenant, Clinton declared, 'Opportunity and
responsibility go hand-in-hand.' Opening and enclosing, empowering and
constraining, liberating and binding—the terms and conditions of the 'New
Covenant* were certainly vague yet somehow compelling in their inherent
tactility. Here was a 'political theology', as one analyst has observed, that
merged 'the stern rhetoric of conservatism with the generosity of liberalism'
(Waldman 1996:5). Yet this slogan and its rhetorical elaboration could hardly be
called a theology, political or otherwise, since the basic tactility of the 'New
Covenant' pointed to binding relations that could only be sensed. As Levinas
might have observed, this covenant was a binding tactility that 'does not know
what it seeks'. It was guided not by the light of vision but by the 'not knowing'
of the caress, the embrace, the intimate relations of exchange that bind self and
other as an 'us'. By invoking the bond of the gift, the new opportunities for

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receiving and the new responsibilities for giving, 'hand-in-hand', this New
Covenant rhetorically configured an America bound together by a compact in
which, as Clinton declared in his 1992 acceptance speech, 'there is no them;
there is only us'. After 1995, perhaps partly in response to the vigorous
publicity attending the Republican 'Contract with America', Clinton dropped the
slogan, 'New Covenant', for representing the bond that unified America.
Increasingly, he began to use the phrase 'a bridge to the twenty-first century' to
capture the common interests that should be shared by Americans in embracing a
global future. Towards the end of his administration, however, Clinton was also
distracted by impeachment, a term that incidentally is derived not from an
etymology of verbal accusation but from the tactile root of impedicare—to
fetter, to snare, to tie the feet together, in other words, to bind—which suggests,
at the very least, that not all bonds create an 'us' in which there is no 'them' to
be excluded.

Burning
While tactile metaphors can configure religious bonds, indicating the adhesive
character of religion as a 'unified systems of beliefs and practices', following the
classic Durkheimian formula, 'which unite into one single moral community...
all those who adhere to them' (1965:62), such binding social adhesion is only
one feature of religious tactility. In addition to the apparently stable terms of
religious adherence, a different range of tactility, its thermal register, generates
heat. As an important dimension of Rudolf Otto's classical formulation of the
mysterium tremendum, heat is found in the religious energy or urgency of
'vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement,
activity, impetus', culminating in the 'consuming fire' of mystical experience
(1923:23-24).
As a register of religious temperature, religious discourse and practice often
has had recourse to a fire that gives off much more heat than light.4 In his own
classic formula, John Wesley characterised his conversion of 1738 as an
experience of the 'heart strangely warmed'. On the basis of that experience of
religious heat, Wesley stated a strategic disinterest in the formal 'systems of
beliefs and practices' that seemed to him to divide more often than they united.
'Is thy heart herein as my heart?', was the only religious question he professed
to find relevant. 'If it be,' Wesley proposed, 'give me thy hand' (Semmel
1973:31; Sweet 1945:46-47). Hand-in-hand, in this case, did not signify a
binding social covenant but an interpersonal exchange of divine heat In
American history, an acutely developed tactile sense of sacred energy has often
been invoked as a defining feature of religion and politics. During the
revolutionary era, for example, Thomas Jefferson reported that a national holiday
of humiliation, fasting, and prayer could produce a tangible effect 'like a shock
of electricity' (Miller 1978:146). During the era of the Civil War, to cite another
example at random, Horace Bushnell could characterise Americans in his Yale

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 Chidester: Haptics of the Heart

graduation address of 1865 as 'souls alive all through in fires of high devotion'
(1971:204). Accordingly, religion has been a matter not only of binding
relations but also of burning energy—the warmth, the electricity, the sacred
fires—that could only be perceived through and engaged by a spiritual sense of
touch.
A distinctively tactile ritual of the 'sacred fire', fîrewalking, had gained a
considerable following in the United States by the end of the 1990s. Some
organisations developed an explicitly religious understanding of fîrewalking. The
'Fire Tribe' of 'Sundoor', for example, pointed to the universal religious
significance of fire. 'Because of its integral role in the survival of the human
species,' Sundoor declared, 'fire has had aspects of religious significance to all
the peoples of the Earth.' Similarly, an organisation known as 'Wings of Fire'
proclaimed that 'fîrewalking, next to prayer, is one of the oldest transformational
tools the world has ever known,' a religious method used for 'ritual purification,
healing and worship.' In the United States, however, the ritual of fîrewalking
was employed as a method of empowerment, as 'people choose to walk on fire
to overcome fear and beliefs that limit their lives.' By transcending limiting
beliefs, a belief such as 'fire burns', Wings of Fire promised that 'a whole New
World of opportunities and possibilities become reality, because, we say to
ourselves, "I WALK ON FIRE, I CAN DO ANYTHING I CHOOSE'" (http://www.
firetribe.com; http://www.firewalking.org; see Danforth 1989).
Sceptical observers, of course, could provide reasonable scientific
explanations, noting that hardwood, charcoal, and even volcanic rock are poor
conductors of heat while the soles of human feet, especially sweaty soles, are
good insulators (Leikind and McCarthy 1991). Nevertheless, even the science
editor of National Geographic, Rick Gore, found his own experience of
fîrewalking to be liberating and empowering. As promised. Gore experienced
fîrewalking as a technique for overcoming fear. 'Whenever fears surge up,' he
reported, 'I recall the fire walk.' Concluding his May 1998 account. Gore
testified, 'I have learned now to embrace the fire.' What did it mean to embrace
the fire? Gore reported that one of the leaders of his firewalk, the fortuitously
named Heather Ash, explained that the 'fire is a teacher', pointing to two basic
teachings of the fire that we might gloss here as democracy and opportunity.
First, the ritual of fîrewalking, 'an ancient practice in many cultures', had been
democratised in the United States. 'Historically,' Heather Ash said, 'this
opportunity was given only to medicine men, priests, and shamans.' As
practised in the US, however, the ritual was no longer the preserve of a ritual
elite, but was available to anyone. Therefore, fîrewalking had effectively
democratised access to spiritual power. Second, the opportunity to participate in
the ritual also expanded opportunities in life. According to Heather Ash, the fire
'teaches you to overcome your fears and do what you thought was impossible,'
thus expanding personal opportunities for love, health, success, wealth, and
prosperity. By walking on fire, therefore, anyone could achieve what Otto called
'vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement,

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activity, impetus.' According to Rick Gore, the teachings of the fire generated
'an energy that seemed almost religious'. Before taking his twelve steps across
the burning coals, Gore was given one last instruction. 'Always respect the fire,'
he was told. 'Otherwise, you're going to get burned' (Gore 1998).
The ritual of firewalking must certainly appear as a fringe phenomenon in
American religion, a marginal, new-age, self-help, human-potential, or quasi-
religious enterprise that mixes a tactile spirituality with promises of tangible
prosperity, attracting, as the Sundoor reported, both 'individuals seeking to
deepen their spiritual connection and empower themselves' and 'corporate
executives wanting to give their companies the leading edge'. As a teacher,
however, the fire conveyed lessons—democracy, opportunity, and respect—that
were central to an American imaginary, an imagined sense of America that
during the twentieth century came to be most tangibly signified by the flag of
the United States. In the 1990s, the supreme act of disrespect to the flag—
burning—became the focus of legal controversy, state legislation, and proposed
amendments to the US Constitution.
At first glance, this juxtaposition—firewalking and flag burning—must seem
arbitrary, especially in a review of religion and tactility, since the burning of a
flag is a visual display of flames, light, and colour that has been interpreted by
the US Supreme Court as the functional equivalent of free speech protected under
the First Amendment. Seeing and hearing, therefore, seem to be the relevant
senses at stake in the controversy over desecrating the flag by burning. However,
a visit to the Flag Burning website, especially the 'Flag Flames page',
demonstrates that Americans can have a tactile, tangible, and visceral
identification with the flag. For example, one correspondent, identified as 'Pissed
Off American', experienced flag desecration as a personal assault, as a kind of
ordeal by fire that touched him directly. 'When people burn the flag, if s like
touching my ass with a lit match,' he reported. 'I don't like people touching my
ass.' In another testimony to the visceral connection between flag and body,
Craig Preston asserted that 'you can burn my flag when you rip it off of my
smouldering rotting corpse.' Ultimately, the flag symbolised, as a tangible sign,
all the dead bodies sacrificed for America. According to another correspondent,
identified as *someone.who.cares', burning a flag was an act 'desecrating the
symbol of our nation, the one that my fellow servicemen have given their lives
for in the past,' a sentiment echoed by many speeches in the Congressional
Record in support of legislation against flag burning, confirming Jean Bethke
Elshtain's observation, in another context, that the modern nation has been built
on mounds of bodies, a corporeal mound, we might add, with a flag at its
summit (http://www.esquilax.com/flag/flagflames.html; Elshtain 1988:51; see
Goldstein 1996). Like the lessons of the fire, therefore, the lessons of the flag,
especially when desecrated by burning, highlighted issues of democracy,
opportunity, and respect in the visceral engagement with embodied limits and
their transcendence.

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Moving
In the kinaesthetic movements of the body, tactile information is acquired. For
the study of religion, kinaesthesia calls attention to embodied movements—
kneeling, standing, prostrating, walking, climbing, dancing, and so on—not
only as types of ritual performance but also as instruments of knowledge. As a
significant feature of the American imaginary, mobility has been a distinctively
tactile way of knowing the world, especially as the moving body has been
mediated by machines, from the bicycle to the space shuttle, that have extended
the speed, rhythm, and scope of embodied motion.7
What sort of tactile knowledge is gained through all this mobility? In a
discussion of 'democratic social space', literary critic Philip Fisher has outlined
the basic features of an American imagination of space that is uniform, open,
and familiar. In its fundamental uniformity, democratic space is defined by grids
and plots, by cells and atoms, that are in principle interchangeable units of
space, 'identical from place to place'. Open and unbounded, this democratic space
allows for free movement, a freedom of entry and exit, of immigration,
emigration, and internal mobility, that might alter the shape and size of
democratic space but has no affect on its essential uniformity. Moving through
the uniformity of democratic social space, Americans can experience a certain
familiarity, a tangible sense of place that is recognisable, intelligible,
transparent, and comfortable. According to Fisher, 'it is this feeling of
familiarity that lets us move from point to point without much effort,' engaging
even new places on familiar terms as if their 'novelty has no strangeness'. In the
uniformity, openness, and familiarity of democratic social space, 'It feels "like"
home everywhere.' As a result, Fisher has argued, democratic social space allows
for no outsiders, no critical observers, no oppositional positions external to the
fabric of society (1991:85-86). In democratic social space, to recall Clinton's
campaign promise, 'there is no them; there is only us*.
Someone, however, must be watching this American space. According to the
former 'Silicon Valley mogul' and now purveyor of 'the Truth', Joseph
Firmage, aliens from outer space have long adopted that 'observer position',
watching the earth from a distance. Firmage has promised that these alien
observers will soon 'touch down*. In response to this contact, he advises, all we
need to do is 'have the wisdom and courage to warrant an opportunity to touch
heaven* (Goodell 1989; http://www.thewordistruth.org). By anticipating this
tactile exchange—touching down, touching heaven—Firmage has joined many
enthusiasts of the extraterrestrial, not only those who report visual sightings of
UFOs, but also those who claim tangible contact, the 'close encounters of the
fourth kind', including cases of physical abduction by aliens from outer space.
As an extraordinary kind of embodied mobility, alien abduction has been defined
as the
forced removal of a person from his or her physical location to another
place. It may include an altered state of awareness for the purpose of

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physical, surgical, or psychological procedures performed by non-humans.

After the abduction, the person is returned to his or her physical location
and frequently has little or no recollection of the experience. (http://www.
abduct.com/experien.htm; see Bryan 1996; Mack 1995)
Since most abductees have no memory of the experience, a website, the Official
Alien Abduction Test-Site, provides a helpful questionnaire with 52 indicators
that will answer the question, 'Are You an Alien Abductee?' One of the
indicators, of course, is that you do not remember. But those who pass the test
are entitled to send in $4.95 for an 'official alien abduction certificate' that will
prove to their families, friends, and co-workers that they have been moved by
aliens (http://www.alien-abduction-test.com).
While some enthusiasts, such as Joseph Firmage, find these extraterrestrial
interventions to be a sign of hope, even a promise of salvation in the tactile
contact, encounter, and exchange between worlds, other abductees, perhaps most,
have characterised their experience of alien abduction as a violation of their
humanity. Katharina Wilson, for example, author of The Alien Jigsaw, who has
claimed to have undergone many experiences of alien abduction, finally came to
the conclusion in 1996 that 'the aliens have taken much more from me than
they have given.' In her many encounters with the alien 'greys', 'tans', and
'hybrids', Wilson had endured 'painful psychological and physiological
experiments* that had forced her 'to exist in a perpetual state of duress*. By
manipulating the body, instilling fear, and causing pain, she reported, aliens
from outer space were enforcing their will over human beings, using their
instruments of manipulation to produce their own desired results, operating, in
this respect, like organised religion. 'It is ironic that organized religion,' Wilson
reflected, 'has become similar to the way the aliens behave' (http://www.
alienjigsaw.com/beliefs.html). In both alien abductions and organised religion,
Kathanna Wilson found a kind of kinaesthetic tactility that was fundamentally
anti-human—not moving but being moved, not touching but being touched, not
manipulating but being manipulated—in its transformation of human beings
into objects. In these terms, alien abduction might represent the ultimate
violation of the human right to freedom of movement in democratic social
space.

Handling
Turning from kinaesthetic movement to haptic manipulation, the sense of touch
is engaged in handling the environment, acquiring sensory information by
moving and manipulating objects. As in the case of alien abduction, however,
Americans often have imagined that they are moved and manipulated by hidden
hands—the 'invisible hand' of the market, the unseen touch of contagion—that
put at risk their most basic goals of health, wealth, and prosperity. In the tactile
imagery of an economic reasoning that has become common sense, reality is

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moved and manipulated by tactile forces that cannot be seen. According to one
Guide to Economic Reasoning, 'Economic reality is controlled by three
invisible forces—the invisible hand (the price mechanism), the invisible
handshake (social and historical forces), and the invisible foot (political and legal
forces).' Although these three invisible forces—the hand, the handshake, and the
foot are supposedly responsible for the 'smooth' allocation of capital, they often
send the economy on a 'rough' ride (http://www.apu.edu/~puerdugo.html).
Like the capitalist economy, the microscopic realm of the body is also
imagined to be driven by invisible tactile forces, by invisible contacts at the
cellular level. 'Cells interact by touch,' as Bateson and Goldsby have observed,
'you might even say embrace' (1988:30). Invisible to the naked eye, healthy
cellular embraces maintain the immune system, which insures the safety and
security of the body, guaranteeing the body's sanctity, in Jacques Derrida's
terms, as the 'safe and sound' (1996:36). In violating that sanctity, however, the
invading cells of a virus enter into illicit embraces, grasping and bonding with
the cells of the immune system. As cultural analyst Marita Sturken has noted,
this religious imagery of illicit contact is frequently evoked in popular scientific
literature depicting HIV and AIDS. 'HIV is seen to enter the immune system's
most sacred space and to rescript its genetic memory,' Sturken has observed.
'HIV is constantly described as entering the "innermost sanctum" of the cell and
the "sacrosanct environment" of the body' (1997:247; see Connor and Kingman
1988:2; Dwyer 1990:39). In these highly-charged religious terms, the body is
configured as a sacred space at constant risk of desecration by the unseen contact,
the secret touch, the illicit embrace of intruders that enter its 'innermost
sanctum' only to violate.
How do people handle living in such a world—from the global economy to
the physical body—that is driven by invisible tactile forces? As anthropologists
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (1999) have argued, we are witnessing a
dramatic global increase in what they call 'occult economies', the essentially
magical manipulation of secret means for gaining health, wealth, and prosperity.
For our purposes in analysing religion and tactility, we might want to recognise
many of these ritual techniques as forms of haptic manipulation, touching
directly, so to speak, the secret, hidden, and invisible forces that animate both
the physical body and the capitalist economy.
With respect to the physical body that has come to be dominated by the
'gaze' of modern scientific medical practice, alternative forms of healing often
make use of touch, from the techniques of chiropractic, literally healing 'done by
the hands', to dramatic rituals of faith healing by 'laying on hands', to recent
innovations in pastoral counselling that employ what one advocate has called
'healing touch, the church's forgotten language' (Thomas 1994). In all of these
instances, the hands touch not only the physical body but also the unseen
forces—chiropractic's innate intelligence of the body, faith healing's Holy
Spirit, pastoral counselling's faith, hope, and love—that are imagined to be
responsible for health and well-being. Although these forms of 'body work'

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usually depend upon establishing direct physical contact, the haptic

manipulation of unseen forces can also be accomplished at a distance, as
demonstrated by the charismatic faith healer, Ernest Angely, who used to end his
televised faith-healing services by putting his open palm up to the camera, thus
projecting the image of an enormous hand into American living rooms, so that
his viewers could bring whatever parts of their bodies that might be afflicted into
contact with the screen. In the hands of Ernest Angely, television truly became a
tactile medium, a medium for establishing a kind of physical contact that
manipulated unseen powers of healing.
During the golden age of television evangelism, television also became a
religious medium for economic exchange, as incessant appeals for funds to
support the television ministries became an integral part of the evangelical
message, often motivated by promises of miraculous financial returns for the
donor. In a characteristic sermon of the 1980s, for example, the Rev Jerry
Falwell could identify four kinds of giving—systematic, spontaneous,
sacrificial, and spiritual giving—with the ultimate form of giving, the spiritual,
defined as the act of pledging money to the ministry of Christ that you do not
presently have, based on the faith that Jesus would provide. Of course, all major
credit cards were accepted. In this haptic manipulation of money, with its
implicitly tactile reference to the hand-to-hand exchange of giving and receiving,
spiritual gifts could be explicitly identified as material. In the ministry of
Reverend Ike, this equation of the spiritual and material was the whole point.
I am telling you, get out of the ghetto and get into the get-mo. Get some
money, honey. You and me, we are not interested in a harp tomorrow, we
are interested in a dollar today. We want it NOW. We want it in a big sack
or a box or a railroad car but we WANT it. Stick with me. Nothing for
free. Want to shake that money tree.
Clearly, the rhetoric of Reverend Dee's gospel of money sent potently tactile
signals—the binding promise of 'stick with me'; the burning desire to 'get-mo';
the kinaesthetic movement out of the ghetto; and the haptic shaking of the
'money tree'—that we have considered here as basic features of religious
tactility. In practical terms, all Reverend Dee asked was that people should tithe
ten percent of their monthly income to him. In return, they could expect a
miraculous ten-fold increase in their wealth, a dollar in the hand that was far
better than any promise of a harp in the future. 'I say LACK OF money is the root
of all evil,' Reverend Ike declared. 'The best thing you can do for poor folks is
not be one of them' (Proulx 1996:338). By handling the invisible forces that
produce wealth—by shaking hands with the 'invisible hand'—poor people could
hope to eradicate the root of all evil in their own lives. As an 'occult economy',
this gospel of prosperity provided religious techniques of haptic manipulation
for handling the world.

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Religion under Pressure

As Walter Benjamin proposed, the challenges need by human beings at the
turning points of history cannot be solved solely by visual contemplation.
Guided by what Benjamin called 'tactile appropriation*, people gradually and
perhaps unconsciously adjust to new situations by habit In adjusting to the new
era of sensory challenges presented by electronic media—the shocks to
sensibility, the bombardment of sensory stimuli, the risk of sensory overload,
and so on—new strategies of engagement have emerged to deal with what
Benjamin identified as the most characteristic sensory condition of modernity,
distraction. The discovery of a new and apparently pervasive medical condition,
Attention Deficit Disorder, seems to confirm this insight. Identified by one
author as 'an increasingly common brain imbalance*, this disease 'causes acute
restlessness and a propensity toward boredom and distraction* (Shenk 1997:36).
Apparently, one of the diagnostic signs indicating that someone has the medical
affliction of Attention Deficit Disorder is that the person is not aware that he or
she suffers from distraction. In this respect, the disease is like alien abduction, a
disturbance, dislocation, or disorientation that touches people unawares. We do
not know, in both these cases, not because we were not trying to pay attention
but because we were fundamentally distracted.
In religious ritual, where attention to detail is required, distraction can often
pose a serious problem. According to the catechism of the Catholic Church, for
example, distraction is a problem for the ritual of prayer. 'The habitual difficulty
in prayer,' the catechism teaches, 'is distraction.' Not only disrupting the flow
of words in verbal prayer or deflecting the concentration of the inner vision in
contemplative prayer, distraction 'can concern, more profoundly, him to whom
we are praying*. From God's perspective, 'a distraction reveals to us what we are
attached to', suggesting that a distracted person in prayer is touching the world
rather than engaging with God through the spiritual senses of sight and sound.
'Therein lies the battle,' as the catechism concludes its advise on distraction, 'the
choice of which master to serve' (http://webdesk.com/Catholic/prayers/
distraction.html). The medical diagnosis of a disease of distraction, therefore,
strangely recalls a long history of religious valorisation of strict, single-minded,
and pure attention.
At the same time, the value of distraction has been recognised in modern
medical practice as a non-pharmacological method for dealing with pain.
According to one account, 'Distraction is a strategy of focusing one's attention
on stimuli other than pain or the accompanying negative emotions' (http://
www.hivpositive.eom/f-PainHlv/Pain/LS4.3.2.html). As a strategy for dealing
with pain, even the ritual of prayer, which the Catholic catechism maintained
was threatened by distraction, could be converted to medical use as itself an
instrument not of attention but of distraction. From this perspective, therefore,
distraction is a very good thing.
The distracted person, too,' Benjamin noted, 'can form habits.' In 1985 the

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sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues who produced Habits of the Heart
proposed that the quality of American life depended upon paying careful attention
to the 'face-to-face' relations of individuals in community. In the midst of so
many distractions, however, how can individuals form habits that are not shaped
under pressure? Risking an extremely broad generalisation, we can conclude that
the habits of the heart being formed under the conditions of modernity are the
haptics of the heart, the strategies for handling distraction, pressure, and stress.*
A quick trip through any book store, even by a distracted observer, reveals the
wealth of advice for handling stress. Selecting at random, we could read any
number of the following titles: Dealing with Stress, a Biblical Approach;
Heavenly Ways to Handle Stress; Healthy and Holy Under Stress; Too Blessed
to be Stressed; How to Make Work, Stress, and Drudgery a Means to Your
Sanctity; Prayerstarters to Help You Handle Stress; What Would Jesus Do to
Rise Above Stress?; or, if we really wanted to gain a perspective on life that
might reverse the pressures of stress, we could read the book, Stressed Is
Desserts Spelled Backwards. Without reading any of these religious texts,
however, we can only conclude that they are positioned in a world under
pressure, stressed out, struggling to cope with the tactile conditions of a
modernity that Benjamin called distraction.
Distracted, we also struggle with the invisible hands, the secret embraces, the
shocking disclosures, and what Jean Baudrillard (1994) has called the 'strike of
events'. As students of culture and religion, however, our task is not to cope but
to make sense, to make sense out of the myriad discourses and practices that
operate at the intersections of human subjectivity and social relations. Without
drawing a map or advancing an argument, I have only touched upon some of the
features of religion and tactility in contemporary American culture. Rhetorically,
through an apparently random series of unexpected juxtapositions, free
associations, abrupt transitions, sudden changes in temperature, and the
occasional intellectual sleight-of-hand, I have tried to give a particularly tactile
account of religion and the sense of touch, although I realise that my
presentation has tended more towards the 'shock effect* than the caress.
Nevertheless, I do think that attention to tactility—even distracted attention—
can be suggestive about the shifting terrain of religion and culture in modernity.
In conclusion, somewhat reluctantly, since I will have to shift in these closing
remarks from a tactile to a visual mode, I will try to be clear about what I mean
about the significance of tactility for the study of religion.
First, religious tactility is binding. As historian of religions Bruce Lincoln
(1987) has observed, the study of religion is constantly confronted with the
challenge of making sense of the discourses and forces through which any first-
person plural—any 'us*—is constructed. Obviously, religious traditions generate
symbolic terms and conditions for constructing a religious body—the body of
Christ in Pauline Christianity, the body of Purusha in Vedic Hinduism, and so
on—that is also a social body which is simultaneously unified and differentiated.
Under the sign of the first-person plural, the integrated social body is inevitably

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diversified into the head, hands, thighs, and feet In the rhetoric of US President
Bill Clinton, an American first-person plural was motivated through tactile
symbolism in which there was no head or feet but only hands. There was no
'them* above or below the 'us* that stood together hand-in-hand in an egalitarian
relationship and exchanged goods hand-to-hand in a reciprocal relationship.
Although we might dismiss this imagery as merely political rhetoric, let alone
as disingenuous political posturing, the potency of tactile metaphors has
evidently been an important feature of actual, real embodiment in the world. Any
line separating real embodiment from 'mere' metaphor has always been blurred.
As a significant constellation of the 'metaphors we live by' (Lakoff and Johnson
1980), tactility—even metaphoric, symbolic, or virtual tactility—has produced
real effects in the real world.
In Clinton's tactile rhetoric of a visceral, tangible bond that forged an 'us* in
which there was no 'them', the categorical differences of race, class, and gender
were obviously elided. To refer here only to gender, we need to ask: In what
ways has religious tactility been gendered, especially when an 'us' is constituted
as a social body in which males are the head and hands and females are the thighs
and feet? Arguing that women generally prefer touch to sight. Luce Iragary
(1980) risked reinforcing this male hierarchy of the body in order to recover and
valorise a tactile sensibility. A more nuanced analysis of tactility, however,
might disclose a variety of female subject positions, from Heather Ash's
celebration of the empowering energy and unbounded freedom of the sacred fire
to Katharina Wilson's disempowering abduction and captive manipulation at the
hands of alien forces, whether extraterrestrials or organised religion, in the tactile
religious experience of women. At the same time, we have to suspect that a
particular kind of gendered tactility persists in rendering the haptic dynamics of
the unseen forces of modernity in peculiar ways so that the 'male' political
economy, with its masterful invisible hands and handshakes, is implicitly
distinguished from the 'female' passivity, vulnerability, and risk of violation by
illicit embraces of cellular microbiology. In constructing an 'us' in which there
is no 'them', we must conclude, the religious tactility of binding generates both
sacred bonds and bondage.
Second, religious tactility is burning. As energy, enthusiasm, or vital force,
religion has often been rendered as the heat that fuses subjectivity with the
collective. In Durkheim's terms, religion, and particularly religious ritual,
generates the boiling, bubbling energy of the 'collective effervescence' in which
individuals effectively melt into the social group. As we have seen, the modem,
mass-marketed ritual of firewalking has represented a particularly tactile medium
for melting not only into the exclusive community of experienced, initiated
firewalkers but also into an imaginary American collectivity of democracy,
opportunity, and respect, a collectivity also represented by the flag of the United
States, especially when that material symbol was at risk of desecration by
burning. In such a 'hof culture, we can only expect a thermal register in the
United States that is turned up to high. But why has all of this burning energy

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of sacred fires, electricity, or even individual hearts strangely wanned been

consistently interpreted by Americans in such cold, pedantic, and doctrinaire
terms? Whether defending the flag from fire at the centre or developing an
alternative ritual of fire at the periphery, the American testimonials we have
considered here seem to be struggling to translate heat into light, while failing
to capture the burning intensity of heat in words.
Beyond the geographical boundaries of the United States, the meaning of
America has been produced in ways that dramatically suggest the importance of
its thermal register. For example, during the 1920s, throughout central and
southern Africa, religious movements adopted 'America' as a symbol of the
promise of liberation from colonial oppression. In apocalyptic expectation, these
'American' movements anticipated the imminent advent of black Americans,
arriving in the most modern aircraft, armed with the most modern automatic
weapons, to destroy the colonial oppressors and liberate the indigenous people
by 'raining fire from the skies' (Chidester 1995). At the end of the twentieth
century, Americans were still hot in southern Africa, especially in Cape Town's
impoverished Coloured township of Mannenberg, which was called 'America' by
the criminal gang, the Americans, that had appropriated the US flag as its central
symbol for the secret, sacred truth of blood and money. 'In God We Trust, In
Money We Believe', the Americans affirmed, as they interpreted the white
stripes of the US flag as the organised criminal activity required to make money
and the red stripes as the violence that was required to sustain it (Chidester
2001). For better or worse, therefore, the tactile 'collective effervescence* of
opportunity, money, blood, and fire has been an 'American' reality that has
flourished outside of the United States of America.
Third, religious tactility is moving. It is kinaesthetic motion. According to a
modem ideology of progress, the movement of humanity, culture, and religion
is inexorably forward, carried by better, faster machines, as we have seen, from
the bicycle to the space shuttle, to achieve a transcendence of space and time.
Ironically, this transcendence has been accomplished in large part through
scientific discoveries of distinctively tactile limits—gravity, inertia, and
resistance—that restrict motion. But then modernity, for all its straightforward,
developmental thrust towards progress, has also been a fertile field for the
flowering of irony. For example, the modem world is supposedly a domain of
visibility, constituted by the hegemony of the gaze, governed by panoptic
surveillance (Foucault 1979), and ruled by the 'scopic regimes of modernity'
(Jay 1988). Under the predominance of vision, all modern individuals are required
to pay attention. But modernity is also tactility, distraction, and pressure. By
paying so much attention to ¿he dominance of sight in Western culture, we
forget that our principal theorists of modernity, Marx and Freud, were theorists
of tactility—capitalist oppression, psychological repression—in touch with
resistance. As we have seen, religious tactility might move, but its motions are
inevitably under pressure.
This contradiction, with all its attendant irony, between a prevailing visual

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modernity and the acutely tactile theorists of the engines of modernity demands
further exploration. In his critical analysis of the modern capitalist political
economy, Marx proposed that 'the forming of the fíve senses is a labour of the
entire history of the world down to the present* (Marx 1972:140-41). Turning
Hegel on his head, of course, meant turning the Western hierarchy of the senses
that Hegel had inherited inside out. In that Marxist turning of the senses, with
its proleptic anticipation of a materialist apocalpytic inversion of the senses in
which the first would finally be last and the last would be first, the eyes and ears
could never compete for authenticity with eating, tasting, smelling, touching,
or, above all, with working in the sensory economy of knowledge and power.
Pulling in another direction, Freud's discovery of the unconscious, with its
multiple repressions, developed an entirely different hermeneutics, energetics,
and economy of the senses that nevertheless also wrestled with the problem of
motion. How can we possibly move forward when we are bound—by
completely unconscious primal repression, by the semiconscious repression that
Freud called 'after-pressure', by the driving fixations of cathexis that bind desire
to objects, or even by the 'uncanny', often religiously rendered as the holy, the
sacred, or supernatural power, that Freud analysed casually as 'something
repressed which recurs', as 'something which is familiar and old-established in
the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of
repression' (Freud, 1953-74:17:241)? If modernity is about freedom of
movement, its tactile mobility is clearly negotiated in relation to powerful
forces of resistance, repression, and oppression.
Fourth, religious tactility is ultimately the capacity to handle the challenges
of living in the world, especially the challenges posed by what cannot be seen or
heard. Underpressure, religious resources are deployed under difficult conditions.
Adapting the distinction between strategies and tactics proposed by Michel ds
Certeau, we might understand religious strategies to be exercises within the
domain of power, as transparent uses of religion for the legitimation or
reinforcement of a political order that is 'bound by its very visibility', while we
might regard religious tactics as oppositional manoeuvres, as tactile manoeuvres
in the dark, so to speak, that defy, subvert, or otherwise interfere with an
established domain of visibility by engaging in 'the very transformation of
touch into response, a "re-turning" of the surprise expected without being
foreseen' (1984:37,88). In trying to make sense out of the intersections between
the individual and the collective, this distinction between strategies and tactics,
between the strategic domain of visibility and the tactical terrain of touch,
response, twists, turns, and surprises that defy any hegemony of vision, leads
back to what I have been calling a haptic engagement with culture and religion.
By adopting such a tactile engagement with contemporary American religion
and culture, we might begin to make sense of a religious sensibility that reveals
America, wherever it might be, in Walt Whitman's terms, as 'a kosmos,
disorderly, fleshy and sensual' (1976:48). In its contacts and concussions, its
caresses and shocks, its binding, burning, moving, and handling, America has

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remained a problem that confronts us—or distracts us—in its irrecoverable

tactility, in its capacity to be in touch with the lowest sense, the most animal,
servile, and unconscious of the resources of the human sensorium. The habits of
the heart, in this reconstitution of American culture and religion, are haptics of
the heart, the tactile strategies and tactics of binding, burning, moving, and
handling that animate being religious in America, in modernity, in the world.

Notes
1 This essay originated as a presentation to the conference, 'Religion and the
Senses', sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University,
21-23 May 1999. Knowing that I had previously done some work on seeing,
hearing, and religious discourse (Chidester 1992), the conference organiser, Leigh
Schmidt, perversely assigned me the sense of touch Although they will probably
all be surprised to see this essay in print, I thank the organiser, participants, and
sponsors of that conference for renewing my interest in religion and the senses
2 In developing the so-called 'extramission theory' of vision, Alcmaeon of Crotona
proposed that sight depended upon a visual ray that extended from eye to object
and then returned to the eye like an arm that is outstretched and then doubled back
to the shoulder As Diogenes Laertius summarised this influential extramission
theory of vision, we see an object 'by the medium of the air stretching out towards
it, as if by a stick' While the sense of hearing was thought to be initiated by the
movement of an external object rather than by the direct attention from an
internal organ of perception, hearing as well was imagined in basically tactile
terms According to Empedróles, hearing results from a blow to 'the cartilage
which is suspended within the ear, oscillating as it is struck' In the summary
provided by Diogenes Laertius, 'we hear when the air between the sonant body and
the organ of hearing suffers concussion' (Beare 1906:11,95; Diogenes Laertius
1959:2:261).
3 In arguing for the tactile basis of all sensory perception, Levinas made explicit
the subliminal tactility of Western theories of sight and hearing going back to the
ancient Greeks However, as Edith Wyschograd has observed in an essay on the
primacy of touch, Levinas actually proposed that 'touch is not a sense at all; it is
in fact a metaphor for the impingement of the world as a whole upon subjectivity '
Following Levinas, she has proposed that tactility is a disposition of intimate
engagement with the world, since 'to touch is to comport oneself not in
opposition to the given but in proximity to it' (1980:199).
4 In developing a 'particular history of the senses' for cultural anthropology,
Michael Taussig (1992; 1993) has made particularly good use of theoretical
perspectives drawn from the work of Benjamin.
5. Drawn from roots meaning either 'to bind', 'to be careful', or 'to reread', the
etymology of religio is uncertain, contested, probably undecidable, and in the end
almost completely irrelevant for determining the meaning and extensions of
'religion' in the modem world. In southern Africa, for example, the term
'religion' did not come from any ancient Indo-European or Latin root; it came
from the sea in ships, beginning in the seventeenth century, to be deployed as an
instrument of denial in the European 'discovery' of people with 'no religion'
(Chidester, 1996) Although the candidacy of the root *leig has certainly been
challenged, the mere fact that one possible etymology, religare—'to bind'—has
historically been 'the subject of considerable Christian homiletic expansion'

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(Smith 1998:269) does not necessarily eliminate 'binding' as a possible

etymological root, or as one aspect of the etymological constellation, for the
term, 'religion' (Derrida 1998:33-38,71n.22).
6. The religious significance attributed to heat is certainly a cultural variable. On the
one hand, the Tzotzil of the Chiapas highlands have maintained a 'thermal
dynamics' in which positive value is invested in religious heat (Classen 1993:23-
24). On the other hand, within the indigenous categories of southern Africa heat
has been regarded as a negative condition, like moral debt or ritual defilement,
that requires cooling (Schapera 1979; Verryn 1981).
7. The religious aura carried by machines of mobility is certainly striking. While the
'bicycle craze' of the 1890s celebrated the emergence of the first mass-produced
machine that was not a tool but a recreational vehicle (Hounshell 1984:189-216),
the Model T automobile, according to Henry Ford, was 'more than a car; it was a
calling', a mission to extend to every American 'the blessings of hours of
pleasure in God's great open spaces' (Collier and Horowitz 1987:52). According
to historian James J. Flink (1988), the American 'cult of the automobile' promis-
ed that every American could achieve the blessings of 'mass personal automobil-
ity'. In even more extravagant terms, historian Joseph J. Com has argued that the
'winged gospel' of air travel was embraced by Americans as 'an instrument of
reform, regeneration, and salvation, a substitute for politics, revolution, or even
religion' (1983:30). More recently, space travel, whether undertaken by NASA
astronauts or by alien abductees, has assumed a religious aura in transcending
spatial limits through the extraordinary movement of the body out of this world
(Curran 1985).
8. Discovered in 1936 by Dr Hans Selye, stress was initially conceived as symptom-
atic of a body deploying its energy in a disembodied way. Prepared to fight by
nature, the body expected to engage resistance, but it was not prepared to encoun-
ter the range of resistance—psychological, social, economic, environmental, and
so on—that could not be engaged physically. Transcending the body, this
complex range of invisible resistance forced the body from its disposition to
fight into what Selye called the 'exhaustion stage', which was effectively a
surrender to all the forces that could not be fought because they could not be seen.

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