Drawing on fieldwork in 2008–09, this article focuses on a courtyard (dvor) in a Soviet‐era apartment block in Astana, Kazakhstan. I explore the mundane material maintenance of the courtyard, in particular the use of scraps, as a way to reflect on the relationships between material agency, the formation of locality, and the state. Historically, the courtyard was an urban form through which the Soviet state sought to define its citizenry. In the post‐Soviet period the dvor persists as a space in which citizens' subjectivities and relationships to the state are formed. However, infrastructures fall into disrepair and are haphazardly patched up by residents. I argue that scraps play important roles in the emergence of localities, both enabling and constraining residents' agency. They engender a sense of disconnect between the local community and the state. Simultaneously, scrappiness also means that locality is unstable and ephemeral. Scraps, in general, are an underappreciated element of urbanization; yet they are significant actants in the making and unmaking of social and political configurations.

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with No TAV activists in Valsusa, in Alpine Italy, protesting against the planned construction of a new high-speed railway. Focusing on activists’ experiences of vulnerability and police violence, the article contributes to the recent ‘subjective turn’ in the anthropology of resistance and contentious social movements, and responds to calls to ‘de-pathologize’ and ‘de-exoticize’ resistance. It explores ways to reconceptualize the subjective experience of resistance through a focus on affect, vulnerability and becoming. Combining neo-Spinozist theory of affects with Judith Butler’s feminist perspective on agency and subjectivity, the article seeks to point a way beyond the limitations of established approaches informed by the work of Michel Foucault. Further, the article also shows how affects experienced during direct action are embedded in activists’ longer biographical narratives and gradually structured, through remembering and narrativization, to provide ground for a coherent subjective sense of agency. Third, the article highlights the difference a focus on affect makes compared to the more conventional sociological focus on emotion. The notion of affect helps us to move beyond a rationalist and instrumentalist approach to emotion in social movements. The article stresses the heuristic potential of a focus on affect, but also considers methodological challenges posed by such a perspective. It suggests that the methodological toolkit available to the ethnographers of contentious politics can be enhanced by drawing on the affective capacities of researchers’ own bodies in order to register the visceral intensities vital to the experience of resistance and the ongoing formation of insubordinate subjects.

This article brings the concept of affect to the analysis of the relationship between buildings and political ideology, as a way of contributing to recent anthropological work on the state. It focuses ethnographically on the contradictory affects of the new built environment in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, where extensive renovation and construction have been under way since the early 2000s. On the one hand, spectacular new structures induced feelings of hope, pride, and enthusiasm for the state in some citizens. Simultaneously, the unfamiliar designs and material defects of the new built environment emanated affects of estrangement, lifelessness, disingenuousness, and instability. The article examines how these different affects were qualified and mediated discursively. Official 'propaganda of emotion' is juxtaposed with unofficial discursive forms: puns, rumours, and satirical literary fiction. It is argued that largely uncontrolled affects, rather than ideology, rendered 'the state' a plausible, if contradictory, 'fictional reality'.

This article focuses ethnographically on the built environment of the socalled "Left Bank" area in Astana, Kazakhstan. Previously merely a provincial administrative center, the city became the country's capital in 1997; soon a new quarter of monumental, futuristic, and stylistically extravagant administrative, residential, and commercial buildings emerged. I argue that the construction effort produces complicity by mobilizing and channeling citizens' agency. Against the background of recent history, it offers a sense of restored progress-directed collectivity within which individual citizens can seek to engage, pursuing more meaningful and materially satisfying lives. A selective vision of the city is propagandized widely, producing a hyperreal space that captures imaginations, set in opposition to more "ordinary" social space. The contrast between that vision and the lived realities of Astana causes disillusionment, but emic criticism of the political economy fails to transcend the logic of modernization narratives that the ideology of Astana's construction rests upon.

The aim of this special issue is to bring a critical discussion of affect into debate with the anthropology of the state as a way of working toward a more coherent, ethnographically grounded exploration of affect in political life. We consider how the state becomes a 'social subject' in daily life, attending both to the subjective experience of state power and to the affective intensities through which the state is reproduced in the everyday. We argue that the state should be understood not as a 'fiction' to be deconstructed, but as constituted and sustained relationally through the claims, avoidances, and appeals that are made toward it and the emotional registers that these invoke. This article situates these arguments theoretically and introduces the subsequent ethnographic essays.