Affective States

In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as ‘affect theory’. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this ‘affective turn’ through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as ‘affect theory’. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this ‘affective turn’ through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

Introduction: Affective States: Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions
Mateusz Laszczkowski and Madeleine Reeves

Chapter 1. Negotiating Uncertainty: Neo-liberal Statecraft in Contemporary Peru
Annabel Pinker and Penny Harvey

Chapter 2. The Fines and the Spies: Fears of State Surveillance in Eritrea and in the Diaspora
David Bozzini

Chapter 3. “Recognize the Spies”: Transparency and Political Power in Uzbek Cyberspace
Sarah Kendzior

Chapter 4. Moral Subjectivity and Affective Deficit in the Transitional State: On Claiming Land in South Africa
Christiaan Beyers

Chapter 5. ‘Father Mao’ and the Country-Family: Mixed Feelings for Fathers, Officials, and Leaders in China
Hans Steinmüller

Chapter 6. The Turn of the Offended: Clientelism in the Wake of El Salvador’s 2009 Elections
Ainhoa Montoya

Chapter 7. Living from the Nerves: Deportability, Indeterminacy, and the ‘Feel of Law’ in Migrant Moscow
Madeleine Reeves

Afterword: Political Timequakes
Mateusz Laszczkowski and Madeleine Reeves