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Dear Anthropology Matters Subscribers,
We are looking for panelists for "Betweenn thrill and disillusion:
Ethnography, affect, and the social life of the state", a panel we are
planning to propose for this autumn's Annual Meeting of the AAA. You
will find a detailed description of the panel below, and details of the
AAA meeting can be found at:
http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Annual-Meeting-FAQs.cfm .
Please send your 250-word abstracts to [log in to unmask] AND
[log in to unmask] by THURSDAY, MARCH 10.
*Between thrill and disillusion: Ethnography, affect and the social life
of
the state*
This panel examines the state as a locus of affect and explores the
challenges of “sensing the political” (Navaro-Yashin 2002)
ethnographically.
There has been a renewed interest in recent anthropology with questions
of
politics and the political. The state, in particular, has become a
prominent topic of anthropological inquiry, its attributes of
sovereignty,
authority and territoriality increasingly brought to the foreground of
ethnographic concern. The state is now commonly understood to be an ‘as
if’
reality (Navaro-Yashin 2002), constructed and upheld through the
replication
of mundane technocratic practices, the performance of ‘rituals’, and the
production of discourse (Gupta 1995; Mitchell 1999). This open-ended
approach has enabled anthropologists to embrace the empirical diversity
of
the ‘social lives’ of the state and avoid the propensity of classic
political anthropology to “strip away whatever was distinctive and
interesting about any particular bit of politics” (Spencer 2007: 34).
However, with the proliferation of ethnographic studies of bureaucratic
practice or ideological production, the *thrill* of politics risks being
obscured. In part, we maintain, this is because of the challenge of
grasping ethnographically the realm of emotion, passion, or
affect—intuitively central to political action but often eliding the
tools
of traditional ethnography. Literature on the interrelations of the
state
and affect, although often extremely perceptive, has been scattered
(e.g.
Aretxaga 2000, 2003; Kapferer 1988; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Spencer 2007;
Stoler
2004; Taussig 1992) and anthropological discussions of the state are
often
divorced from debates within cultural theory on what Ahmed has called
“the
cultural politics of emotion” (Ahmed, 2004). The aim of this panel is to
bring a critical discussion of affect into debate with an anthropology
of
the state as a way of working towards a more coherent, ethnographically
sensitive and fine-grained approach to the role of affect in political
life.
How, we ask, does the state come to be constituted as a subjective
object
through its affective resonance: a source, often, of awe, of fear, of
thrill; of cynicism, anger, suspicion, or disillusion; but also
potentially
the object of hope or desire? What is the role of affect in sustaining
the
state as singular, as bounded, as a source of authority, as seemingly
‘over
and above’ its population? How do emotions come to be invested in
particular
sites, people, material infrastructure, projects, documents, legal
enactments? How is affect materialized, memorialized, intensified, and
transformed? We also enquire about the role of state practices or
ideologies
in fostering and sustaining particular affects. In what way does emotion
intermingle in the mundane bureaucratic work of the state? What is the
role
of particular state actors in mobilizing fear, hatred, hope, or pride,
and
with what effects? And how might attending to question of affect help
analyze moments of popular violence acted in the name of the state or
its
imagined citizenry?
*References*
Ahmed, S. 2004 *The cultural politics of emotion*. London and New
York: Routledge.
Aretxaga, B., 2000, ‘A Fictional Reality: Paramilitary Death Squads and
the
Construction of State Terror in Spain’, in: J. A. Sluka (ed.), *Death
Squad:
The Anthropology of State Terror*, pp. 46-69, Philadelphia: University
of
Pennsylvania Press.
2003, ‘Maddening States’, *Annual Review of Anthropology* 32: 392-410.
Gupta, A., 1995, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the
Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, *American Ethnologist*
22(2):
375-402.
Kapferer, B., 1988, *Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence,
Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia*,
Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Mitchell, T., 1999, ‘Society, Economy, and the State Effect’, in: G.
Steimetz (ed.), *State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural
Turn,*pp. 76-97, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
Navaro-Yashin, Y., 2002, *Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life
in
Turkey*, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Spencer, J., 2007, *Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and
Violence in South Asia*, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stoler, A. L., 2004, ‘Affective States’, in: D. Nugent and J. Vincent
(eds.), *A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics*, pp. 4-20, Malden,
MA:
Blackwell.
Taussig, M., 1992, *The Nervous System*, New York and London: Routledge.
Best regards,
Mateusz Laszczkowski
PhD Candidate
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
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