Paper short abstract:

On the periphery of globalised modernity, how would a politics of emotion be framed? How might other configurations of affect, power, and place throw new light on our own micromanaged, monetized emotional world? This paper proposes an approach through ethnographic narrative.

Paper long abstract:

Can there be a politics of emotion any more than a politics of thought? If emotions motivate, orient, and comment on all action, 'setting up' social reality (Solomon), how best to apprehend them in a political frame? Not by severing - or artificially rejoining - praxis from affect, abstracting from context. Real emotions cannot be grasped in a snapshot, still less in a model. Embedded in situations, dramas and interpersonal histories, only narrative ethnography can capture their recursive, dynamic, proleptic role within fluid networks of influences and persons. Without narrative context, emotions are drained of personal significance and biographical resonance, robbed of their constitutive time-bound property. They become theoretical fictions, not models but fakes.

In this paper I explore conceptual issues in emotion theory and intersections with 'affect theory' pertaining to place, time, and power. Building on arguments in Emotional Worlds (2019), I focus on two Indonesian societies, one (Nias) in which performed emotions are the vehicle of a power play on the anxious fringes of modernity; the other (Java), in which a loosely-structured society, 'modern' yet 'traditional', functions through a relativistic modulation of emotion and place, in which specifically spatial emotions orient political actors. Narratively framed, these cases offer a naturalistic alternative to approaches that exclude what counts in emotional episodes (whatever makes action emotional). Only by putting emotions back into a narrative weave, can we see how political they actually are, how emotions - like politics - are comprised of backstory, positions, stakes, judgments, selves, and consequences.