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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores what it might mean to consider fun as a mood. I ask how fun mooded atmospheres are produced at high school, who is drawn in and who is excluded, what kinds of performances constitute fun moods, and what it means for subjects to be affected in the right way by the right objects.

Paper Abstract:

After playing an invented basketball-badminton game with two students in PE class, where we attempted to hit shuttlecocks into the basketball nets with our badminton racquets, I wrote in my fieldnotes that, “I feel embarrassed; I feel childish.” I was “caught up” in the fun.

My retrospective embarrassment at the fun I had playing with the high school students reflects some of the methodological and ethnographic challenges fun presents. Drawing on a year of ethnographic research with year 10 (aged 14-15) students at a high school in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the anthropology of mood, I consider the implications of fun as a mooded atmosphere, a shared participatory mood. Viewing fun as a mood locates fun as an affective and interrelational attunement. This means that fun is something produced between selves, something that is both felt privately, internally, and shared. Here arises the possibility that one may produce a fun atmosphere without feeling or having fun. If fun moods produce and are produced through particular affective attunements, they may also be modalities for the emergence of particular forms of subjectivity. In this paper, I explore how fun mooded atmospheres are produced at school, who is drawn in and who is excluded, what kinds of performances constitute fun moods, and what it means for subjects to be affected in the right way by the right objects.