Presentation Schedule
Interactional Identity Formation: Evidence from Contemporary Comparative Religious Contexts (108161)
Session Chair: Sara Elaine Neswald
Saturday, 11 July 2026 13:30
Session: Session 3
Room: UCL Torrington, G13 (Ground Floor)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
In this paper, insights from ritual and anthropology are applied to considerations of the ritual and social framework of Buddhist/Daoist practises of self-emptying and tradition-specific modes of realization of the divine, including visual actualization, rupture, and embodied intensification. Comparative ethnographic analysis of a Nepali Gelug (Tib. dge lugs) Buddhist retreat and a Formosan Daoist–Kagyu (Tib. bka’ brgyud) retreat reveals how interaction rituals are assembled, enacted, regulated, and stabilized through the coordinated deployment of bodies, discourse, authority, and cosmology. Examined practices focus on interaction rituals (IRs), emotional energy (EE) and ritual engagement through disciple education and embodied responses. In both retreats, disciple-disciple interactions arise as significant points of EE. Knowledge transfer is found to extend from the core teacher/guru, and is actively reinforced, reinterpreted and affirmed in inter-disciple IRs. While most intense EE arises solely from a disciple's direct encounter with the divine in embodied /meditation practice, all such encounters observed did entail some level legitimization and/or judgement by more senior gurus/teachers. This control of affect and encounter can be experienced by the disciple in deeply positive or negative manners, pulling some more deeply into the ritual community while pushing other individuals toward rupture with the community. These findings contribute to broader debates on interaction ritual theory, illustrating how emotional energy is both generated and actively regulated within certain intensive ritual environments; how ritual legitimacy and communal cohesion are sustained under conditions of affective excess and internal plurality; and, how these conditions manifest in two very different religious retreat environments.
Authors:
Sara Neswald, Soochow University, Taiwan
About the Presenter(s)
Professor Sara Neswald is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Soochow University in Taiwan
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