The speaking body: Metaphor and the expression of extraordinary experience

Authors

  • Jamie Barnes

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33356/temenos.60307

Keywords:

body, phenomenology, senses, Christian experience, metaphor, ontology, ‘ontological turn’, language, being, new birth, auto-ethnography

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between language, experience, and the body. Employing a phenomenological approach that takes the sensory body as its starting point, it focuses on three instances of ‘divine experience’, looking at the ways in which social actors seek to express that experience through metaphorical translation into more familiar, everyday realms. It argues that within this perceptual process – which starts in bodily experience and ends in words – both bodies and worlds are formed: bodies open to (often sensory) aspects of divine experience, and worlds that include the divine, alongside instances of divine agency. Indeed, such bodily conceptual and linguistic work is, social actors claim, the product of divine agency. At the heart of the three instances of divine experience explored here rests the issue of ‘new birth’, itself a metaphorical move employed to express a phenomenon in which the body appears to be transformed into something new, namely a habitation of divine presence. As such presence ‘bubbles up’ from within, it sometimes ‘overflows’ in words. The body speaks. Alongside exploring the metaphorical moves employed to express this type of bodily experience, this article raises the ontological question of what kind of body it is, in such cases, that is speaking, thus providing a phenomenologically inflected response to recent ‘ontological’ debates within anthropology.

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Published

2016-12-23

How to Cite

Barnes, J. (2016). The speaking body: Metaphor and the expression of extraordinary experience. Temenos - Nordic Journal for the Study of Religion, 52(2), 261–287. https://doi.org/10.33356/temenos.60307

Issue

Vol. 52 No. 2 (2016)

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2016 Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion

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