Short Abstract

This workshop explores affective–moral entanglements in political life, bringing the anthropology of emotions into conversation with the anthropology of ethics. We ask what moves and matters to people, tracing the instability, indeterminacy and ambivalence of affective moralities and moral affects.

Long Abstract

Over the past decades, two lines of inquiry have become particularly generative in anthropology. The study of emotions, asking ‘what moves and matters in human life’ (Lutz 2017), and the study of ethics, exploring peoples’ ‘movements toward an otherwise’ (Zigon 2023). Their popularity is no coincidence. Both emotions and ethics offer unique perspectives on the forces driving the contemporary moment – the rise of the far right, genocidal wars, polarised debates, and the chilling loss of political certainties. However, emotions and ethics are rarely investigated in relation. In this workshop, we unpack affective–moral entanglements in political life, thereby bringing the anthropology of emotions into conversation with the anthropology of ethics. We invite theoretically driven, ethnographic contributions that explore what moves people and lifeworlds through the combined lens of affective moralities and/or moral affects. This focus emerges from our own research, where laughter during vigilantes’ violent punishments in Ouagadougou rather expressed moral instability than cruelty, and exhaustion in activism for Kashmir proves activists’ ethical commitment. Building on these insights, we encourage contributors not to take emotions for granted as moral categories, but to critically examine ideas about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings. Emotions, we assume, have no inherent morality, but can move in all kinds of directions. Likewise, moral practice is not inherently linked to particular emotions, but can involve various affective intensities and practices. What can we learn from ethnographic perspectives on moralities and emotions once we treat them as unstable, contradictory and, yet, entangled categories that shape people’s lived experiences?