Short Abstract:

In this workshop we investigate recent trends towards materiality and affect in political anthropology. We assemble papers that scrutinize political dynamics as affective encounters between material bodies in space and reflect on what this can contribute to ethnography of politics today.

Long Abstract:

For several decades, anthropologists have approached political processes and power dynamics through the dialectics of domination and resistance — often (reductively) referred to as the ‘Foucauldian paradigm’. In recent years, and in the wake of theoretical trends such as New Materialism or Affect Studies, political anthropologists have begun to expand what counts as the field of politics. Beyond the study of political discourses and practices, anthropologists increasingly speak of politics in terms of ‘atmosphere’, ‘material arrangement’, or ‘affective space’. They study the political life of the specific kinds of relationalities between human and non-human bodies in space, and how people subjectively experience these relationalities. The way in which the political practices of ‘commoning’ and ‘uncommoning’ are approached in this year’s GASCA conference is a telling example of this general trend. The ethnographic method, a core practice of political anthropology, is the ideal approach to ask new questions through the lens of politics as affective encounters between material bodies in space: How can we analyse political atmospheres? Can one feel what it means to be political? What does it mean for politics to require people to relate affectively to their material surroundings, to differently racialised and gendered bodies, to one’s fellow political activists, or even to the world as a whole? In this panel, we aim to explore the consequences of these ‘turns’ to materiality and affect for political anthropology today. To this end, we invite papers that empirically explore the affective and material life of politics through an ethnographic lens.

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