Anthropology of Affect

Dialogue with the History of Emotions

Abstract

This review article brings together recent anthropological works on affect to summarize how the notion has been adopted in the field, especially in relation to the more conventional category of emotion. Theoretical debates on affect often emphasize the radical distinctions between them: defining affect as intersubjective, visceral and pre-linguistic while equating emotion with a person's inner feeling generally expressed through language. Such dichotomous definitions, however, are criticized in anthropology and related fields in humanities such as the history of emotions, notably in terms of their inapplicability to empirical research. By reviewing these debates, this article argues that ethnographic approaches to affect, despite their attempts to focus on intersubjective, creative, nonlinguistic aspects of emotional experiences, still have to critically engage with conventional notions like subject, power, and language. It concludes that affective anthropology's struggles have similarities with—thus can possibly contribute to—other anthropological trends questioning the limitations of those categories.