PASSIONS AND POWERS: EMOTIONS AND GLOBALISATION

Abstract

We thank Thomas Wilson and Jonathan Hill for their useful comments on an earlier version of this introduction.

Notes

1. In the field of sociology, for example, the American Sociological Association has a section on emotions, the British Sociological Association has a study group on emotions, and the European Sociological Association hosts a research network on emotions. Anthropologists are no less institutionally committed to the study of emotions. For example, the Society for Psychological Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, publishes the journal Ethos, which functions as a major platform of discussion about emotional dynamics. Human geographers are also in the process of establishing a journal that will centre more specifically on the study of emotions in spatial contexts.

2. A 2004 special issue of Ethos on emotions contains papers presented on a panel organised by Tom Boellstorff and Johan Lindquist at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling (Milton and Svašek 2005) resulted from the workshop entitled “Theorizing Emotions,” organized by the editors at Queen's University Belfast. In 2006, the participants of two interdisciplinary workshops at Queen's University Belfast focused on the themes of emotional dynamics in transnational families (Skrbiš 2008; Svašek 2008) and explored emotional interactions between migrants and members of local communities. In 2002 and 2006, two large interdisciplinary conferences were organised by Liz Bondi, Joyce Davidson, and others at the University of Lancaster and the University of Ontario, which led to the publication of Emotional Geographies (Davidson et al. 2005).

3. In 2006, for example, at the bi-annual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, nine contributors presented papers in the session “Emotional Attachments in a World of Movement,” discussing topics that ranged from Tibetan sensibilities in the Indian diaspora (Timm Lau) to memory and sentiment amongst displaced Serbs in the United States (Birgit Bock-Luna). The session was organised and convened by Dimitrina Mihaylova and Maruška Svašek.

4. It is not surprising that in the light of increasing reflexivity in anthropology, some anthropologists have explored the emotional interaction between themselves and their informants (Behar 1996; Ewing 1987; Kirschner 1987). In September 2006, at the conference “Emotions in the Field” (organised by James Davies and Dimitrina Mihaylova at Oxford University), scholars from various backgrounds (mainly anthropology and psychoanalysis) discussed this issue.

5. They argued that certain speakers of English could say things like: “The discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational plane,” “We put our feelings aside and had a high-level intellectual discussion of the matter,” and “He couldn't rise above his emotions” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).

6. A similar charge of implicit neglect of emotional realities in social analyses has been directed to studies of how transnational family life have treated emotions (Skrbiš 2008).

7. As Ahmed et al. (2003: 10) have argued, the “work of making home, affective and physical, is an ongoing process.” This implies that it is necessary to “[unsettle] linear narratives of origin and migration; and [rethink] the relation between embodied subjectivity, place and belonging.”