Paper short abstract:

Drawing on interactions with robot users in Japan organizing memorial services for Sony's pet robot AIBO, this paper illustrates how exercising playful attitudes toward artificial life can leverage affect to better capture and critique traditional anthropological treatments of animacy.

Paper long abstract:

What if the best response to a shared problematization among anthropologist and interlocutor was not the formulation of an answer but the cultivation of an affect? How should anthropologists in these cases treat social facts that manifest as feelings? Finally, how can anthropology as a discipline leverage affect not only as a method of anthropological inquiry but also as a reflexive critique of its dominant analytics? Drawing on interactions with interlocutors in Japan organizing memorial services for Sony's pet robot AIBO, we examine how robot users cultivate affects of amusement and care in collaboration with artificial agents to feel into perspectives on reality that challenge categorical divisions between inanimate and animate forms of life. By documenting our own affective transformation from a disposition of cynicism that protects against feelings of enchantment to another of playfulness that is receptive to it, we illustrate how affect can organize descriptions of social practices that traditional theoretical approaches would posit as logical problems requiring a "resolution," such as the treatment of robots as both artificial and alive. We argue that exercising amusement as an affective analytic that holds multiple and seemingly contradictory perspectives together can also generate opportunities to operationalize affect for cultural critique. Thus, by comparing an active cultivation of amusement with a passive understanding of enchantment, associated with classic critiques of commodity fetishism and the culture industry, we aim to reclaim enchantment's critical capacities, explored by thinkers like Jane Bennett and Yana Stainova.