ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will focus on the figure of Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma or ‘the hugging mother’), a popular spiritual and humanitarian leader from South India, as well as her Finnish followers from a Deleuzian feminist point of view. In addition, my aim is to engage in a cross-cultural dialogue between Indian Shakti and Tantric philosophies and contemporary Deleuzian nomadic feminism. Before now I have conducted three ethnographic fieldwork trips in different transnational spiritual centres in India, each lasting for a few months.1 In my feminist ethnography, I want to blur the division between home and field (see e.g. Ranta-Tyrkkö 2005: 236), typical of the anthropological research process.2 The stages of collecting the data and the theorizing have not been separate but strongly woven together since the beginning of my research, inevitably mutually influencing each other. I do not see India merely as a source of research data. Foremost I see it as a place that can challenge one’s own perspective and help to reveal obstructed models of thinking. I will begin my analysis by looking at how the body appears ‘energetic’ in
the unique darshan of Amma (born 1953). In the Hindu tradition the Sanskrit term ‘darshan’ refers to religious seeing, or the visual perception of the sacred. Darshan is primarily conceived as a mental and ‘mystical’ contact, but the encounter with Amma is very bodily, since Amma’s darshan consists of embracing (Raj 2004: 214). When I interviewed the followers of Amma, they were often incapable of telling about their encounters with Amma using words; their experiences seemed to be reduced into affect intensity. Thus, in my analysis of the darshan of Amma, I wish to move beyond the level of representations, and look at the phenomenon through the concept of affect and its transmission as intensity between bodies. I strongly agree with Deidre Sklar (1994) about the bodily basis of spiritual experience, and I feel that from the perspective of Deleuzian feminism, which gives priority to processes of becoming and connections, and emphasizes concepts including affectivity and embodiment (Braidotti 2002: 111), I am more capable of grasping the issues belonging to the so-called spiritual sphere of my informants. The concept of affect can refer to a form of matter-energy just as well as it
can refer to emotions. Feminist research often makes use of affect as
synonymous with emotion (Kontturi and Taira 2007), emphasizing the social and corporeal nature of emotions (e.g. Ahmed 2004).3 I see affects primarily in a Deleuzian fashion as changes and becomings (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 283). Affect is body’s vitality, potential for interaction (Massumi 1996: 228). In other words, by the term ‘affect’, I not only mean emotions (or passions) such as joy or sadness, but primarily energy and intensities: the energetic events and spaces that are created when bodies come into contact with each other. In principle, everything that is can be seen as a stream of energy (with a changing intensity), which makes affects ontological in nature (see Massumi 1996: 235). I see the concept of affect as inherently radical in the sense that, being an energy that flows on the borders of material and spiritual, body and mind, inner and outer, self and other, it creates the possibility of relinquishing binary structures. Both Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz are calling for more conceptual
creativity in Western feminism in order to shake up the long-established linear habits of thought and binary schemes (Braidotti 2002: 1-9; Grosz 2005: 171-5). My research data draw strongly on India and its cultural heritage, and my interests lie in the possibilities for a creative transcultural encounter between contemporary corporeal feminist theory (e.g. Braidotti 2002, 2006, 2008; Grosz 2004, 2005, 2006) and the more traditional intellectual perspectives of Indian Shakta and Tantric philosophies. The dynamic of forces in Indian Shakta and Tantric traditions as well as in Deleuzian nomadic feminism are the focus of the second section of this chapter. I am arguing for Grosz’s (2005: 172-3) project to bring ontological questions back to feminism and I am interested in the new ontological and cosmological possibilities that this encounter might create. There are ideas and concepts in Indian traditions, which I find worthy of
exploring in the light of Deleuzian feminist theory on embodiment and affects that seeks a vision passing through the Cartesian dualistic logic. Specifically, I will discuss the Indian philosophical concept of shakti. In Indian traditions, shakti means power, feminine energy that is the primal creative principle underlying the cosmos. Thus, shakti is the source and energizing force of all things (Gnanadason 1994: 351-2).4 In life-affirmative Shakta and Tantric philosophies,5 which I am finding most fruitful when speaking about feminism, the phenomenal world of our experience is very real and pulsates with life (Bose 2001: 25). Shakti is both the process and production of creation; the entire cosmos is seen as the material form of shakti (Sherma 2002: 33). This is akin to the post-individualistic and post-secular,6 monistic Deleuzian vitalist feminist perspective, according to which all subjects partake of the same, yet multiple, essence, and which emphasizes the generative force of zoe and bios (Braidotti 2006: 186, 267). Richard King (1999: 4-5, 24-34) has been considering the ways in which
mysticism as a category has been constructed in Western thought (which has its internal history in Greek and Judaeo-Christian thought) and the ways in which this concept has been projected on to Indian culture (Orientalist
stereotype of mystical and ‘otherwordly’ traditions of India).7 In what follows, I wish not to invert the presuppositions and stereotypes of secular rationalism about the ‘mystic East’ but to transcend them (cf. ibid.: 27) and to respect Indian traditions as philosophies. My main goal is to deconstruct dualisms, particularly the binaries of the spiritual and corporeal, transcendence and immanence, and rational and mystical by working with affect and the Indian philosophical concept of shakti. Here, working with Deleuzian affect means going beyond binary structures.
