Home
Affect As Cultural Critique

Affect As Cultural Critique

Name: Affect As Cultural Critique
Author: Daniel White
ISBN: 9781487559793

Methods for Ethnographic Uncovering

Edited by Daniel White, Emma E. Cook and Andrea De Antoni

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

312 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 × 18.00 mm, 21 illustrations

Paperback
9781487559793
Published: March 2026

£23.99

Buy

Digital download
9781487559809
Published: January 2026

Digital download
9781487559816
Published: January 2026

Description
Contents
Authors
Accessibility

Affect as Cultural Critique assembles leading anthropologists, affect theorists, and artist-activist scholars to ask, what if the most constructive response to moments of ethnographic puzzlement was not the formulation of an answer but the cultivation of a feeling? What if understanding the powerful effects of discourses requires somatic rather than semiotic exercises? And where habits of academic professionalism prohibit experiencing possible worlds – what if anthropology as a discipline could leverage affect to differently connect and cultivate collaboration with others?

In line with growing movements to decolonize the academy, the essays in Affect as Cultural Critique feature ethnographic accounts of people actively describing, experimenting with, and otherwise exercising affect in ways that challenge the academy’s inherited models for analyzing emotional life. Through an experimental collection of traditional ethnographic essays and artist-activist-generated critiques, this volume explores how everyday modes of feeling function as methods of knowing. By centering non-academic and non-Western affective practices as answers to traditional theoretical problems generated primarily by Western theorists, Affect as Cultural Critique seeks new trajectories for the discipline through a reciprocal practice of uncovering itself as a guiding professional aim, as methodological inspiration, and as a source of reflexive critique of the discipline’s philosophical and theory-heavy analytics.

Motivation and Map (Start here)
Daniel White, Emma E. Cook, and Andrea De Antoni

Preliminaries
1. Meeting Affect Halfway
Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe
2. Where to Now? Affect and Mediation in Multimodal Productions of Ethnographic Research
George Marcus
3. Convivialities of Emotion and Affect Research
Daniel White and Catherine Lutz
4. Proliferation
Kathleen Stewart

Chapters
Introduction: Affect as Cultural Critique
Daniel White
1. Sensing the World: Intuition as a Musical and Social Orientation
Yana Stainova
2. Interiority Currency as Affective Method: Racialized Affect, Therapeutic Cultures, and Latin American Elites
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas
3. The Devil is in the Details: Affect and Creativity in Discerning Illness and Demonic Possession in Contemporary Italy
Andrea De Antoni
4. Serious Play and the Facilitation of Feeling in Food Allergy Advocacy in Japan
Emma E. Cook
5. On Moral Thresholds: Shiʿi zakirs and the Surface Tension of Public Affect in Pakistan
Timothy Cooper
6. What Sticks: Affective Scholarship in Times of Pandemic
Thomas Stodulka

Commentaries
1. Recasting Affect Theory’s Genealogies: Centering Feeling with Historicizing Approaches
Yael Navaro
2. Kathleen Stewart Turned Me: Apprehensions of Affect
William Mazzarella

Practices
1. Haku: Decolonizing Intimacies
Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio
2. Adaptation: Affect and Sexual Inclusion in Pride and Protest
Nichole Carelock
3. Listening: Sonorous Affect
Marié Abe
4. Meditating: Attention to Affect
Joanna Cook
5. Making: A Robot’s Homecoming
Elena Knox

Dedication
Daniel White, Emma E. Cook, and Andrea De Antoni

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Notes

Daniel White is an associate fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge

Emma E. Cook is a professor of Modern Japanese Studies at Hokkaido University.

Andrea De Antoni is an associate professor in cultural anthropology at Kyoto University and research coordinator of the Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Kyoto.

The publisher of this title has not provided any details on the accessibility features that may be included. You should contact them for more information.