Political Affect and Ethnography - Detailseite

Affects and emotions are at the core of recent political and social upheaval. They structure political fields, imaginaries, subjects and objects. Anthropologists and social theorists from Durkheim onwards have considered questions of bodies, sensations, emotion in relation to the political. This class explores a range of theories and recent debates in the political anthropology of affect and emotion, for instance around questions of ontology, relationality or the non-human. We will discuss these literatures with particular attention to the question of what they can contribute to ethnographic practice and vice-versa. How are affects entangled with daily and exceptional life? How do emotions become invested in certain projects, sites, and people? How do they accumulate authority? This course aims to bring ethnographic specificity to these questions. Reading ethnographies and engaging with (empirical) material, it encourages participants to develop their skills to critically examine the role of social, cultural and political affects, i.e. public feelings of disgust, hope, fear and love.       

Hardt, M., “What Affects are Good For,” in Clough & Halley (eds.) The Affective Turn. Durnham: Duke University Press, 2007. Ix-xii.

Gould, Deborah B. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Katz, Jack. 1999. How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Masco, Joseph. 2014. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mazzarella, William. 2017. The Mana of Mass Society. Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

———. 2012. The Make-Believe Space Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Along the Archival Grain Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wedeen, Lisa. 2019. Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria. Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.       

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There can take place exams that are evaluated by other teachers.