Paper short abstract:

From emotion to affect the Latin American discourse on violence continues to prioritise the relationship between violence and feeling as a way to analyse places with relatively high levels of violence. How robust is this research framework and what can it actually tell us?

Paper long abstract:

How will the 'turn to affect' perpetuate themes of violent determinism and sentient priority already found in the Latin American discourse on violence and what are the methodological and analytical problems with this? The growing movement on affect provides analysis on violence that follows previous work on emotional, cognitive and social transformation that has come out of Latin America (e.g. Taussig, Scheper-Hughes, Green, Rotker). The paper's critical approach to this geneology of discourse reveals why this particular panel discussion was almost inevitable and further questions whether, like earlier work on emotion, the observation of specific 'affects' reveals more about the observer than the observed. Drawing on methodological and theoretical problems encountered with ethnographic work designed to uncover the emotional impact and affective responses to violence among Colombian coffee farmers, the paper sets out challenges that research on affect and violence will need to overcome.