Eight - Affect

Summary

Having established the value of a narrative approach to emotion, in Part 3 we consider other perspectives, beginning in Chapter 9 with Affect Theory, a mould-breaking paradigm in Cultural Studies that has made rapid inroads into the social sciences and humanities, with a recent showing in anthropology. Affect Theory claims to consign ‘emotion’ to an obsolete anthropocentric world and to offer instead a liberating post-human vision of possibility: claims worth considering on their own merits and worth appraising against actual accomplishments. The chapter begins with a substantial discussion of affect in mainstream emotion theory, in particular James Russell’s theory of psychological construction in which ‘core affect’ is the central concept. The huge differences between this experimental programme and the protean, loosely defined (or indefinable) notion at the heart of Affect Theory become apparent as we turn to Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects, which is discussed in some detail as a performance, an evocation of what it concerns, rather than a coherent, effective ethnographic programme. In contrast, Yael Navaro-Yashin’s The make-believe space offers a much clearer theoretical application of new-style affect to ethnography. Through careful analysis of examples and ethnographic reasoning, I show the gains and losses of this method.