Attending to the heart is not easy, yet it may be necessary
for understanding and counteracting the tensions,
indifference, and intercultural misunderstandings that
characterize our contemporary world. Can we create more
space for the qualities of the heart within research and
teaching, scientific critique, and our engagement with the
communities and environments in which we live and work?
Might the bodily, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the
heart serve both as an object of inquiry and as a point of
departure for research?
 
In this talk, I introduce audiovisual, multimodal, and
microphenomenological methods that can help us explore these
questions by deepening our understanding of the roles of
the senses, the body, and emotions in human life. I also
invite participants to take part in a brief auto-elicitation
exercise and present examples from ongoing research on
how practitioners in Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim
traditions relate to the heart and, in diverse ways,
experience and cultivate love in their lives. Drawing on the
exercise and these examples, I hope to engage participants
in a conversation about what an anthropology of and from
the heart might look like.