Sentiment, Feeling, Affect

Anthropology 679

Winter 2014
University of Michigan
Department of Anthropology



Alaina Lemon, Associate Professor
Tuesdays, 4-7 pm
Room 210, West Hall
Office hours: 3-5 Wednesdays 230C WH

Anxiety, anger, angst. Sympathy vs. schadenfreude. Boredom. Euphoria. Disgust. We frequently
encounter claims that feelings or emotions emerge from the recesses of individual psyches or biological
organisms, forming islands of primal reality. At the same time, even while accorded such reality, the
phenomena at hand are often deemed lesser than those assigned to geopolitical scales. Or filed away
from the important topics as ephemeral, epiphenomenal, or indescribable. And yet, conflicts over
how to define and categorize feeling, spark or manage emotions underwrite all manner of large
scale political and economic projects, from colonialism, and industry, to modern socialism, and
seem to drive movements or values such as freedom, patriotism, feminism, or world peace.
Some would argue that such projects situated, or even discovered feeling as individual in the first place.
In this seminar, we will attend to these and to other debates as we contrast approaches to
sentiment/feeling/affect/emotion that have been recently relevant within anthropology. We will work to
recognize both their promises and their limiting presuppositions.

Requirements: Your interested and regular presence, three short presentations, one final paper.

- Presence: Please come to each seminar having formulated a few specific questions or reactions. Feel
free to bring in outside materials (media clips, relevant observations from your own research, etc.)

- Presentations (one of each, each person):
1) Discuss a puzzle posed by (a)readings(s), and then set up parameters for a debate about it
(@10 minutes).
2) Based on questions arising during seminar the week previous, vet an outside source. For
instance, if one of our readings makes frequent reference to Diderot, or Massumi, or Bateson,
etc., you would go investigate and report back (see attached list for suggestions (@10
minutes).
3) Present a dilemma or example from your final paper. Please be concise about a specific
hurdle or two, and do not summarize or read the whole draft aloud (15 minutes max +
discussion).

- Paper, due April 27 (6,000 words max, double spaced, 11 or 12 pt font). This may draw from your own
research, or take the shape of a critical essay on some puzzle in the literature. Either way, the paper
should engage with the questions and debates that have arisen during the seminar, among us in our
discussions.


READING Schedule (all readings are on CTools):
1-14
Introductions
Discussion of seminar themes and emphases. Discussion of students research interests.
Logistics: divisions of labor, structure of seminar, presentations and writing.


1) 1-21
Who is looking for what, and where? (and to whom are we talking?)
In the Ctools folder labeled Media, in subfolder labeled 1-21: - read the selections from recent print
media, - visit website of Paul Ekman (skim as you wish).

Irvine, J. T. 1990. Registering affect: heteroglossia in the linguistic expression of emotion, In Lutz and
Abu-Lughod, Pp. 126-161.

Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Tone, In Ugly Feelings, Pp. 38-88.


2) 1-28
Problems of articulation
Appadurai, A. 1990. Topographies of the self: praise and emotion in Hindu India. In Lutz, C., Abu-
Lughod, L., eds. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Pp. 92-112

Besnier, N. 1992. Reported Speech and affect on Nukulaelae Atoll. In Responsibility and Evidence in
Oral Discourse, eds. Hill and Irvine, Pp. 161-181.

Daniel, Valentine, 1994. The individual in terror, in Embodiment and experience: The existential ground
of culture and self, ed. Csordas. (229-47.)

Berlant, Lauren. 2006. Cruel Optimism. Differences. 17(3): 20-36.

Throop, C.J. 2012. On the varieties of empathic experience: tactility, mental opacity, and pain in Yap.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26(3): 408-430.


3) 2-4
Working through binaries (culture/nature, universal/particular, etc)
Goffman, E. 1978. Response cries. Language 54/4:787-8

Scieffelin, Edward. 1983. Anger and Shame in the Tropical Forest: On affect as a cultural system in
Papua New Guinea. Ethos 11/3: 181-191.

Abu-Lughod , Lila. 1985. Honor and the Sentiments of Loss in a Bedouin Society. American Ethnologist,
12/2: 245-261.

Lutz Catherine. 1985. Depression and the translation of Emotional Worlds, In Culture and Depression.
Eds. Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good. U Cal Press. Pp. 63-100.
Brenneis, D . L. 1990. Shared and solitary sentiments: the discourse of friendship, play and anger in
Bhatgaon. In Lutz and Abu-Lughod, Pp. 113-25.

4) 2-11
Fieldwork
Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Grief and a Head Hunters Rage. In Culture and Truth, Pp. 1-24

Behar, Ruth. 1991. Death and Memory: from Santa Maria del Monte to Miami Beach. Cultural
Anthropology 6(3): 346-384.

Dominguez, Virginia. 2000. For a Politics of Love and Rescue. Cultural Anthropology 15/3: 361-393.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of
Anthropological Knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15/1

Candea, Matei. 2010. I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat: Engagement and Detachment in Human-
Animal Relations. American Ethnologist 37(2): 241258.



5) 2-18
Structures of Feeling
Williams, Raymond. 1977. Structures of Feeling. In Marxism and Literature. Pp. 128-135.

Harding and Stewart. 2003. Anxieties of Influence: Conspiracy theory and therapeutic culture in
millennial America. In Transparency and Conspiracy. Eds., West and Sanders. Pp. 258-286.
Musharbash, Yasmine. 2007. Boredom, Time, and Modernity: An Example from Aboriginal Australia.
American Anthropologist 109(2): 307 317.

Stoler, Ann. 2009. Habits of a Colonial Heart, and Imperial Dispositions of Disregard. In Along the
Archival Grain, Pp. 57-102 and 236-27.

Rutherford, Danilyn. 2009. Sympathy, State Building, and the experience of empire. Cultural
Anthropology 24 (1): 132.



6) 2-25
The uses of pleasure, pain, empathy
Asad, Talal. 1983. Notes on body pain and truth in medieval Christian ritual, in Economy and Society 12
(3): 287-328.

Theweleit, Klaus. 1989. Male bodies and the white terror, Body and Flesh. (305-23).

Santner, Eric. 1990. Postwar/Post-Holocaust/postmodern: Some Reflections on the Discourses of
Mourning. In Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany.

Holmes, Mary. 2004. Feeling beyond rules: politicizing the sociology of emotion and anger in feminist
politics. European Journal of Social Theory 7 (2) (May 1): 209227.

Willerslev, Rane. 2004. Not animal, not not-animal: hunting, imitation and empathetic knowledge among
the Siberian Yukhagirs. JRAI 10: 629-652.


---- BREAK ----


7) 3-11
A sense of class
Corbin, Alain. 1986, The stench of the poor, In The foul and the fragrant: Odor and the French Social
Imagination. (142-60).

Goffman, Erving. 1956. Embarrassment and Social Organization. AJS 56/3: 264-271.

Anderson, W. 2006. States of hygiene. In Haunted by empire: geographies of intimacy in North American
history (ed) Ann Laura Stoler, Pp. 23-71.

Mueggler, Erik. 2011. Bodies Real and Virtual: Joseph Rock and Enrico Caruso in the Sino-Tibetan
Borderlands. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (01): 637.

Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. Introduction, The Managed Heart: Commodification of Human Feeling.


8) 3-18
Economies of Sentiment and Affect
Hardt, M. 1999. Affective Labor. Boundary 2 26(2): 89100.

Elisha, Omri. 2008. Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in
Evangelical Faith-Based Activism. Cultural Anthropology 23 (1): 154189.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2011. On affective labor in post-Fordist Italy. Cultural Anthropology 26/1: 5982.

Richard and Rudnyckyj. 2009. Economies of Affect. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15
(1): 5777.



9) 3-25
Animating, automatizing
Mahmood, Saba. 2001. Rehearsed spontaneity and the conventionality of ritual: disciplines of salat. AE
28/4:827-853.

Blackmore, T. 2003. Rotor Hearts: The Helicopter As Postmodern Wars Pacemaker. Public Culture 15
(1): 90102.

Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Animatedness. In Ugly Feelings. 89-125.

Shklovsky, Victor. 1965 [1917]. Art as Technique. Russian Formalist Criticism. Lemon and Reis. eds.





10) 4-1
Vibrations
Gordon, R. B. 2001. From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French
Cabaret and Early Cinema. Critical Inquiry 27 (3): 515549.

Pazderic, Nickola. 2004. Recovering True Selves in the Electro-Spiritual Field of Universal Love.
Cultural Anthropology 19 (2): 196225.

Jannarone, K. 2009. Audience, Mass, Crowd: Theatres of Cruelty in Interwar Europe. Theatre Journal 61
(2): 191211.

Blackman, L. 2010. Embodying Affect: Voice-Hearing, Telepathy, Suggestion and Modelling the Non-
Conscious. Body & Society 16 (1) (April): 163192.

Pine, Jason. 2010. Embodied Capitalism and the Meth Economy. In The Body Reader: essential social
and cultural readings. Ed. Moore and Kosut. Pp. 164-183.



11) 4-8
Sentiments, sensoria, (Geo)politics
Linke, U. 2006. Contact Zones: Rethinking the Sensual Life of the State. Anthropological Theory 6 (2)
(June): 205225.

Bubandt. 2009. From the enemys point of view: Violence, empathy, and the ethnography of fakes.
Cultural Anthropology 24(3): 553-88.

Masco, Joseph. 2004. Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los
Alamos. American Ethnologist 31 (3): 349373.

Lemon, Alaina. 2013. Touching the Gap: Social Qualia and Cold War Contact, Anthropological Theory
(special issue on Qualia) 13(1/2): 67-88.

Costiglia, Frank. 1997. Unceasing Pressure for Penetration: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George
Kennans Formation of the Cold War. Journal of American History 83 (4): 130939.



12) 4-15
Paper presentations



13) 4-22
Paper presentations





MONOGRAPHS, COLLECTIONS, Other key works

Abu-Lughod. Lila. 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society.
Ahearn, Laura. 2001. Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters and Social Change in Nepal.
Appaduraj, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger.
Barnes, Elizabeth. 1997. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel.
Barthes, Roland. 1979. A Lovers Discourse.
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
Behar, Ruth. 1997. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks your Heart.
Berardi. Franco. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy.
Bergson, Henri. 1900. Laughter, an essay on the meaning of the comic.
Berlant, Lauren. 2004. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion.
_____. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture
_____. 2011. Cruel Optimism

Brennan, Theresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect.
Briggs, Jean. 1970. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family.
Capps L, Ochs E. 1995. Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia.
Constable, Nicole. 2003. Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography and mail-order
Marriages.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling
Daniel, Val. 1996. Charred Lullabies.
Darwin, Charles. 1872. The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. 1983. Vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Politics of Friendship.
Diderot, Denis. @1778. The Paradox of Acting.
de Souza, Ronald. 1987. The Rationality of Emotion.
Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic.
Ekman, Paul. 2003. Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and
Emotional Life.
Ellison, Julie. 1990. Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding.
_____. 1999. Catos Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion.

Eng, D. & edsD. Kazanjian. 2003. In Loss: the politics of mourning.
Feld. Stephen. 1990. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli
Expression.
Foucault, Michel de. 2005. The History of Sexuality Vol. 2 and 3 (The Uses of Pleasure, Care of the Self).
Freud, Sigmund. 1917. Mourning and Melancholia.
Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern
Societies.
Goodman, Stev. 2010. Sonic Warfare Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Technologies of Lived
Abstraction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
Griffiths, Paul. 1997. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories.
Grima, Benedicte. 1992. The Performance of Emotion among Paxtun Women.
Handler, Richard and Dan Segal. 1990. Jane Austen and the fiction of culture: an essay on the narration
of social realities.
Harre, R ., ed. 1986. The Social Construction of Emotions.
Hirsch, Jennifer and Holly Wardlow, editors. 2006. Modern loves: The anthropology of romantic
courtship & companionate marriage.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commodification of Human Feeling.
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 2009. Mothers and Others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding.
James, William. 1884. What is an Emotion.
Kleinman A, Good B. 1986. Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural
Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder
Koestenbaum, Wayne. 1993. The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.
Langer, Suzanne. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key.
Le Bon, G. 1896. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.
Ledoux, Joseph. 1996. The Emotional Brain
Levinas, Emanuel [trans. 1998]. On thinking-of-the-Other.
Luhman, Nicholas. 1982. Love and Passion: The Codification of Intimacy.
Lutz, Catherine. 1998. Unnatural Emotions: Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to
Western Theory.
Marshall, David. 1988. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary
Shelley.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables of the Virtual.
Mullan, John. 1988. Sentiment and Sociability: Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century.
Murray, David, ed. 2009. Homophobias: Lust and loathing across time and space.
Nietsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals,
Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions.
Oushakine, Sergeui. 2009. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia.
Palmer and Occhi, eds. 1999. Langauges of Sentiment.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2006. The Empire of Love.
Plato. Symposium.
Radway, J. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature.
Rebhun, L.A. 1999. The Heart is an Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast
Brazil.
Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: experiments in neoliberalism, sexuality, and public culture.
Rosaldo, Michele. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1781. The Confessions.
Ryang, Sonia. 2006. Love in modern Japan : its estrangement from self, sex, and society.
Sapir, Edward. 1949. Culture, Language, and Personality.
Sapolskey, Robert M. 2005. Monkeyluv and other essays on our lives as animals.
Sartre. J. 1948. The Emotions: Outline of a Theory.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1977. Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics
_____. 1993. Death Without Weeping.

Shweder, R., leVine, R., eds. 1984. Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
Sedgwick and Frank, eds. 1995. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader.
Stewart, Kathleen. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the
collection
_____. 2007. Ordinary Affects.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.
Smith, Adam. 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Snediker. Michael. 2008. Queer Optimism
Susan Sontag. 2003. Regarding the pain of others.
Stamenov, Maxim and Gallese, Vittorio, eds. 2002. Mirror Neurons and the evolution of brain and
language.
Steedman, Carolyn. 1987. Landscape for a Good Woman.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire.
____. 2008. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense.

Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, colonialism and the wild man.
Taylor, Charles. 1992. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity.
Throop, Jason. 2010. Suffering and sentiment: exploring the vicissitudes of experience and pain in Yap.
Terada, Rei. 2001. Feeling in Theory.
Tomkins, S.S. 1962. Affect, imagery, consciousness.
Trawick, Margaret. 1990. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family.
Wikan, Unni. 1990. Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living.