Affect and Material Culture: Perspectives and Strategies

Abstract

Becoming attuned At that wonderful concert you attended, did the music fill your body, did your feet dance uncontrollably and did your voice crackle in the sing-along with people you had never met before? Do you remember the sweet pain in your palms after applauding and the almost suffocating throng of bodies? Was the atmosphere uplifting? Did it encapsulate sounds, sights, smells, bodily sensations, and feelings simultaneously? What about the sudden feeling of power and togetherness when you took part in a demonstration, the sudden shouting and rush of blood to the head when your home team scored a goal? By posing questions like this about the body, senses, feelings and atmosphere, we hope to attune readers to affect-the subject to which this book is devoted. We will look at how affects matter in general and, in particular, how they are related to the body, the environment, and things. This, we believe, is the contribution to which ethnology and anthropology are best suited, considering the changing yet persistent importance of material culture in these disciplines and of fieldwork for understanding the affective potentialities of objects. 1 Interdisciplinary studies of affect and emotion have produced 'a virtual explosion' of research and theoretical writings in the last decades, writes the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett (2010: 203), who heads an interdisciplinary affective science laboratory. These studies are not only marked by differing and sometimes conflicting theoretical perspectives

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“…8 Despite offering dynamic and exciting challenges to conventional scholarship in humanities and social sciences, several methodological and conceptual complexities still exist in affect studies. Due to its interdisciplinary quality, various studies emerging in different disciplines inevitably led to theoretical and epistemological conflicts to arise (Frykman & Frykman, 2016). One of the main difficulties stems from the interchangeable usage of the terms 'affect, emotion, feeling and sentiment' that often caused confusion across different disciplines (p. 10).…”