Affect: An Introduction

Abstract

This Retrospectives collection offers a look at what the concept of affect has contributed to anthropology in the recent past and where it might take us in the near future. Although the practice of retrospection suggests its own affective character of being a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn, I hope to dial up the intensity some. Why? Because lately I get the sense that affect is escaping our theoretical grasp. Sure, this was one of the fundamental points of the affective turn (Clough and Halley 2007): if anthropologists of emotion throughout the 1970s and 1980s had shown how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse, anthropologists of affect shortly thereafter sought to show how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture. This proved incredibly stimulating for scholars who took this distinction between emotion and affect seriously, as it meant finding creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on hand to describe it. This held especially true for those working in and sometimes against the wake of the Writing Culture moment who understood that while poetics may quite possibly be all that we have,