Affect as Cultural Critique: Methods for Anthropological Discovery

Affect as Cultural Critique assembles leading anthropologists, affect theorists, and artist-activist scholars to ask, what if the most constructive response to moments of ethnographic puzzlement was not the formulation of an answer but the cultivation of a feeling? What if understanding the powerful effects of discourses requires somatic rather than semiotic exercises? And where habits of academic professionalism prohibit experiencing possible worlds – what if anthropology as a discipline could leverage affect to differently connect and cultivate collaboration with others?

In line with growing movements to decolonize the academy, the essays in Affect as Cultural Critique feature ethnographic accounts of people actively describing, experimenting with, and otherwise exercising affect in ways that challenge the academy’s inherited models for analyzing emotional life. Through an experimental collection of traditional ethnographic essays and artist-activist-generated critiques, this volume explores how everyday modes of feeling function as methods of knowing. By centering non-academic and non-Western affective practices as answers to traditional theoretical problems generated primarily by Western theorists, Affect as Cultural Critique seeks new trajectories for the discipline through a reciprocal practice of uncovering itself as a guiding professional aim, as methodological inspiration, and as a source of reflexive critique of the discipline’s philosophical and theory-heavy analytics.

Daniel White is an associate fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge

Emma E. Cook is a professor of Modern Japanese Studies at Hokkaido University.

Andrea De Antoni is an associate professor in cultural anthropology at Kyoto University and research coordinator of the Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Kyoto.