Cultural Anthropology

Read CA's latest virtual issue on Affect, Embodied Experience, Sense Perception!

 If you been following recent trends in social theory, it’s likely that you’ve encountered the word “affect” at some point within the past several years. You may have heard or discussed the term in formal seminars, at conferences or in casual conversation among colleagues. If so, it’s possible that you’ve heard affect described as felt bodily intensity that is: different from emotion and language; pre-social, but not asocial; material—or somehow pertaining to matter; dynamic and energetic; rife with possibilities to produce “new” and “emergent” phenomena. This shorthand characterization of affect theory invites careful scrutiny of the presumptions underlying it. For instance: How must affect theorists understand "language" in order to then oppose language to "felt bodily intensity"? Why is affect aligned with the energetic, dynamic and new; while emotion is cast as static, deadening, ossifying? How must both time and the social be understood such that affect is presumed to come before the social, without being nonsocial? Finally: what's at stake in the conversations about affect, and what research and analytic tools do anthropologists possess in order to begin to address them? The articles collected in this collection come at the above qustions through different research methods and analytic objects. It features articles by Joseph Alter, Thomas Csordas, Lochlann Jain, Eva Hayward and Nacy Rose Hunt. We invite you to read their materials and visit the associated supplemental pages. The aim of this currated collection is not to present settle arguments not to present authoritative definitions, but to pose questions--like those mentioned above--which index a given field of possible discussion. Therefore, we invite readers to pariticpate in both the "Discussion" section of this collection and to leave individual comments on the featured articles. More...

Click here to read the articles included in this issue.

Previous virtual issues include:
Subaltern Studies
Ritual
Youth