Anthropology 367: Affect and Emotion

Affect is notoriously difficult to define. Often associated with bodily intensities, potentials, sensations, and capacities, the concept of affect contrasts with cognition and rationality, and challenges formal structures of meaning and representation. Emotions, on the other hand, are culturally meaningful feelings, with regularized patterns and normative expressions. In this course, we bring these two concepts together by exploring how both affect and emotion shape our social world. How are political commitments viscerally felt? What sensations attach people to religious beliefs? How are emotions (like anger or grief) strategically mobilized in social movements? More broadly, we ask: how do experiences of affect, emotion, passion, and sensation inform how people navigate the world? Focusing on scholars of the “affective turn” in anthropology and religious studies, this course introduces students to theoretical and ethnographic scholarship that bring attention to how feelings, sensations, and embodied energies reside in and transform the world, as well as how feelings become meaningful in different cultural and religious contexts. Topics include the role of affect in political and religious movements; the cultural significance of emotions (and the limits of representation); collective effervescence and spiritual ecstasy; eco-anxiety and the embodied atmospherics of climate catastrophe; the circulation of “bad feelings” in mass media; and other examples of the affective dimensions of social life. Classes will be discussion-centered, with assignments a mixture of short written responses, analytical essays, and a culminating research-driven assignment. May be elected as Religion 367.