This review article approaches the turn to affect theory as diagnostic of broader currents in cultural anthropology. This is a time of increased curiosity within the subfield. It is also a time of increased anxiety, as researchers feel mounting pressure to make a case for the empirical value of what they do. Affect theory seems to offer cultural anthropologists a way of getting to the bottom of things: to the forces that compel, attract, and provoke. And yet what affect theory is offering cultural anthropologists may be less an account of how the world works than a new awareness of the premises that guide their research. I base these observations on a discussion of recent ethnographies that deploy affect theory in the study of labor, governance, and animal–human relations. I conclude with an assessment of the risks and opportunities associated with the adoption of theoretical models from other fields.

What is the role of sympathy in imperial state building? In this essay, inspired by the empiricist philosopher David Hume and the anthropologist Nancy Munn, I develop a materialist concept of sympathy in an effort to cast new light on the expansion of colonial rule. I deploy this concept in an analysis of reports written just before WWII by officials charged with extending the Netherlands Indies government's reach within western New Guinea. Along with gifts and outright acts of coercion, these officials made sympathy into a central component of their practices. Instead of avoiding the natives' gaze, they sought out more or less intimate moments of identification with their subjects; they tried to adopt the Papuans' perspective to reform Papuan ways. In teasing out the causal force of sympathy, as these officials viewed it, I make causal claims of my own about the impact of this experience of empire on the Netherlands' subsequent policy in New Guinea. In doing so, I advocate an approach to anthropological analysis that is empirical, if not empiricist, one that insists on the power of circumstances to shape the imagination, and the power of the imagination to shape the world.

It is time for anthropology to reclaim the empirical. But this reclaiming must be accompanied by a rethinking of what empiricism means. What I'd like to affirm in this article-and have attempted to practice in my recent research-is a kind of empiricism that builds on the singular power of anthropological ways of knowing the world. A kinky empiricism: kinky, like a slinky, twisting back on itself, but also kinky, like S and M and other queer elaborations of established scenarios, relationships, and things. An empiricism that admits that one never gets to the bottom of things, yet also accepts and even celebrates the disavowals required of us given a world that forces us to act. An empiricism that is ethical because its methods create obligations, obligations that compel those who seek knowledge to put themselves on the line by making truth claims that they know will intervene within the settings and among the people they describe.There are several reasons why now is a good time for anthropologists to insist on the empirical nature of what they do. The new kinds of interchanges in which anthropologists are now engaged create obligations of a particularly pressing sort. There is a price of admission to the politically fraught arenas that anthropologists are increasingly entering. As I have learned in my work in the troubled Indonesian territory of West Papua, paying this price can require us to write and speak authoritatively on issues that matter to the people we have studied. But all too often, anthropology has appeared to outsiders as having a tangential relationship to the empirical, producing knowledge that is too partial, too particular, too relativistic or

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