PAPER AND PANEL ABSTRACTS
Theme 1: What is the relation between publicly expressed political discourses, on the one hand, and personal experiences, affects, or understandings, on the other? Are there any gaps or disjunctures between collective political ideologies and individuals’ ways of making sense of political disputes?
Peter Hervik, “Psychological Anthropology and the Challenge of Making Sense of the Scandinavian Exclusionary Reasoning”
In the political realm European news media coverage, political party programs, social movements, scores of books, and social media networks have embraced a negative dialogue towards migrants, whose identities are increasingly seen as incompatible with ‘Western’ values and presenting a major challenge to the democracy. The media coverage of events like 9/11, the Muhammad cartoon affair (2005/6), the “22/7” massacre in Norway and the Charlie Hebdo attacks recently have shown a development of the news media coverage and political communication that compels us to rethink the public side of imposing discourses. Research on the Danish Muhammad cartoon crisis revealed how efficiently social memory could be controlled. i.e., how history is remembered. This establishment of professionalized political communication with grounded (including ethnographic analysis) challenge the semi-shielded, resistant-potential embodied knowledge of the kind we pride ourselves of evoking in person-centric approaches, and making them more predictable, more controllable and less and less fact based. Besides the theoretical challenge this development also compels psychological anthropologists to join with political anthropologists and others to examine closer how these attempts of controlling social memory and building positive self-understandings along the lines of the nation, by being opposed to cultural others.
Psychological anthropologists have for decades worked with a unity of opposed alleged ontologies and approaches. Extra- and intra-personal realms of culture, constructivists and culturalist, public and personal, and schema and discourse are some of the realms that are studied as imposed messages invested with value facing embodied knowledge. In between were ideas of membranes, filters, and interfaces with metaphors evoked argue that the public was not faxed directly into the mind of the person, a Xerox-copy or an injection of the message but instead bits and pieces sedimenting from experience over time, therapeutic processes and intense problem-solving thought slowly building up larger cognitive schemas and cultural models. Most of the psychological anthropological effort focused on the embodied side.
But how do people reason on these issues in everyday life interaction and on social media? The “mediatization of society has become an established concept among European media scholars referring to a process where the society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic. Commercialization of news and the crisis of journalism have contributed further to this process, where the news media and politics have become so interwoven that it is no longer possible to keep them apart. As newspapers continue a 15-20 year old downward trajectory of its readership, they re-structure and compete on opinions instead of “getting” the facts; they hire journalists to write blogs and use numerous contracted personal to write on blogs, web-news exchanges, and Facebook commentaries.
In the newly started research project we will examine social media exchanges as well as carry out in-depth interviews to explore how negative reasoning about “non-Western migrants” (particularly Muslims) embeds a number of negatively laden arguments from clusters such as multiculturalism and feminism, animal rights. The article for the workshop approaches this coexistence of negativities as a ‘nexus of exclusionary reasoning’ with its blurred relations and taken for granted assumptions in the Muhammad Cartoon Affair in Denmark, the media coverage of the terrorist attack in Norway 2011; and a number of blogs and web-exchanges I haven’t decided yet.
Claudia Strauss, “Political movements, vernacular discourses, and personal meanings: The example of Occupy and economic populism in post-recession California”
The Occupy Wall Street movement rallied Americans to unite in opposition to the richest 1%. At present many on the political left in the United States continue to mobilize around a politics of economic populism. What is the meaning of such rhetoric for ordinary Americans who are facing economic struggles? In the aftermath of the Great Recession (2011-2012) an assistant and I interviewed 65 unemployed southern Californians from a variety of occupational, income, racial/ethnic, and immigrant/native backgrounds; two years later I re-interviewed most of them. My initial research coincided with the efflorescence of the Occupy movement and among my interviewees I found a mix of views about it, as well as about socioeconomic structures in the US and globally. Their reactions can be understood in terms of a broader model proposed here of what mediates the public’s interpretation of political discourses. I argue that the personal meaning of political discourses depends on the entire set of vernacular discourses someone has acquired and also on their affectively laden identities and personal semantic networks. Vernacular discourse analysis reveals the local political ecology that new rhetoric enters. It is a corrective to studies that focus on social movements without understanding local cultural frames for interpreting them. Psychological level of analysis of the way political discourse relates to personal identities and meanings reveals when political discourses of any sort carry emotional and motivational force for someone. I will show that my interviewees’ investment in Occupy discourse and critiques of economic elites depended on both the vernacular discourses they had learned and their personal identities and motivating experiences.
Katherine Ewing, “'The Third Gender' and Sex Reassignment in India: New Legal Identities and the Selves that Inhabit Them”
Popular and scholarly literature on transsexualism, the “third gender,” and sex reassignment surgery (SRS) can be seen as aspects of politicized debates that problematize the gendered self in ways that have very recently become part of mainstream public discourse in the US, where gender reassignment through hormones and surgery has grown in visibility and popularity. In contrast, several South Asian countries have been among the first to offer legal status for individuals who identify as “third gender.” This and other legal changes in India changes have reshaped possibilities for belonging, yet these possibilities encourage strategies and self narratives that are inconsistent with the medically dominant SRS self narrative of a fixed inner self that was born “in the wrong body.” In this paper I examine how individuals in India negotiate these often contradictory and highly politicized possibilities for narrating the ambivalently gendered self.
Theme 2, What are different forms of political consciousness? What sorts of conflicts are there between explicit identities and outlooks, on the one hand, and tacit or unconscious or embodied ones, on the other?
Jack Friedman, “Feeling Populist: Emotions, 'Immature' Politics, and 'The People'”
Populism has been contrasted with “mature” politics because it has often been assumed that populist movements are driven by the manipulation of public emotions, particularly anger – anger at the rich and elite, foreigners, terrorists, even the state itself. Populism, in its worst forms (violent, xenophobic, nationalistic, etc.), is characterized as a kind of “mob rule.” The “mob rule” associated with populist movements is frequently contrasted with notions like the Foucauldian “population,” essentialist notions of “the people,” or even more global notions like Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” primarily because it appears to be driven by emotions over rationality or a more “natural,” shared social bond between people. This paper considers populism from the standpoint of a more mature and complex engagement with psychology and culture. As such, while this paper considers the role of emotions as they are bound to claims of entitlement in populist politics, it is also the complex interplay between emotions, cognition, cultural knowledge, political economics (structural conditions), and psychodyanamic processes that gives shape to much of what has been broadly characterized as “populist,” “populism,” and “populist politics.” Arguing that Laclau’s claims regarding the “vagueness” that underlies populism is based on the assumption that this vagueness (as he sees it) springs from the emotional foundation of populism and that this assumes that emotions lack cultural logics, I explore the particular challenges in defining populism through an engagement with scholarship examining the role of emotions in contentious politics (e.g. Emirbayer and Goldberg). This paper draws on examples of contentious politics and populist movements in two different contexts – contemporary neo-nationalist politics in post-socialist Romania and the contentiousness over “climate change” in Red State Oklahoma. In the context of Romania, I examine the rise of and continued threat of neo-nationalist, xenophobic, and irredentist political ideology and political parties in the post-socialist context. The continued existence of these anti-liberal political movements at the same time as most people in Romania enthusiastically embrace and support continued liberalization and democratization as part of the country’s membership in the European Union illustrates a profound paradox at the heart of Romanian political subjectivity. In Oklahoma, a different set of paradoxes are part of the process of being a “Sooner.” Specifically, not only does much of Oklahoma share the populist contradictions made famous in Thomas Frank’s, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (a contradiction made more troubling by the history of poverty in Oklahoma, made famous in the figure of Tom Joad), but, given the history of manmade environmental disasters in Oklahoma (e.g., The Dust Bowl), Oklahoma’s populist political subjectivity also faces the profound contradiction of resisting calls to action to combat climate change. Overall, this paper argues that an understanding of the cultural underpinnings of emotions is only part of any attempt to rethink populism (as a concept) and deepen our understanding of populist movements (as social and language acts). In addition to understanding emotions, I argue that it is the multitude of factors – the political, the social, the cultural, the psychological – that shape the particularities of populisms.
Conerly Casey, "Sensory Politics and War: Affective Anchoring and Vitality in Nigeria and Kuwait"
The 2003 U.S. War in Iraq brought about highly mediated, emotionally charged images, movements and sounds of war, mediations of violence that continue to circulate. In Nigeria and Kuwait, these war sensorial, and the moral appraisals they evoked, became increasingly significant for young Muslims, as news reports and social media about the war began to shape national and regional politics. Sensations of ‘danger’ in images, movement, and sound, coded in categorical and vital affective registers, accumulated in the body, and produced lives that were both anchored in conflict situations and tending toward escape or freedom. As affect exceeded the body, trans-individual links manifest in self-censorships and expressions of ill health and raised social and political consciousness. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic and analytic research in Nigeria and Kuwait, this essay traces affect archived in the body, and in and across social relations and media, as well as trans-individual links with others in face-to-face and mediated situations. The essay focuses on the mutual inclusion of micro- and macro-political activities, those in which there is a creative excess of affective intensity and those tending toward conformation. The essay will assess self-reflexivity in information/communication feedback loops as young Muslims in Nigeria and Kuwait find affective anchoring and the vitality of abstraction in post-war, conflict zones. How is ‘affect’ archived in the body, and in and across social relations and media? How do mediated sensations interact simultaneously with categorical affect, or the content of emotions that may be of long duration, and vital affect or the manner or qualities of affect in conflict zones? How are categorical and vital affects incorporated into the body, and how might they produce a sensory politics of war in conflict zones? What are feedback loops of memory, sensation, affect, perception and emotion among young Muslims in Kuwait and Nigeria that may be both individual, micro-political activities and macro-political or trans-individual, and trans-situational as the global protests against Charlie Hebdo suggest?
Theme 3. What leads people to join social movements and form senses of themselves as movement actors? How do their personal experiences, affective commitments, and social networks affect the specific nature of their activism?
Yehuda C. Goodman, “Mediating Moralities: Inter-subjectivities in Israeli Soldiers' Narratives of the Occupation”
While struggling with state mechanisms like education systems that help in shaping citizens’ perspectives, people in democratic states are not indoctrinated into specific political views. Sometimes citizens are required to make their own personal moral commitments about political matters. How do persons transform from the pre-political to the explicitly political? Or from one political position to another? How do they work out this process? And, how do they describe the discovery of a political voice?
Following anthropological inquiries into margins of the state and politics (Herzfeld 2002; Das and Poole 2004), I adopt a pragmatic approach to understanding morality (cf. Fischer 2003, Zigon 2008, Ortner 2006), thus challenging conceptions of morality as given local habits (and as identical with the cultural). Morality is, I assume, an evolving experience in which subjects face new pressing problems that they grapple with, trying to figure out the very notion of right and wrong. I try to demonstrate how this complex process is shaped up.
I suggest that both the concepts of mediation and of improvisation are helpful in trying to understand the relation between selfhood and politics. Mediations are the registries through which individuals process their lives, including their political views. Individuals often act primarily within larger meaningful frameworks (as part of their group of soldiers for instance), instead of directly and existentially facing the political. How is morality work embedded then in complex socially mediated experiences? Further, I follow Holland et al (1998) in adding to social and cultural mediations, individuals' improvisations. I ask then, what is the creative work of subjects who articulate their own political views in the face of the collective?
My research site is the experiences and narratives of Israeli combat soldiers who served in the Palestinian occupied territories. Their experiences are similar in many respects yet different than other armies in similar situations (like the US army in Iraq; see Gutman and Lutz’ Breaking Ranks).
The military – like other fields, medicine, law, and education – is a good site to follow the development of political consciousness, because it is built upon institutionalized constant efforts to depoliticize military actions. How do individuals' experiences disrupt dominant discourses of the state and its armed forces? How do personal and collective experiences partake in developing a new political language, either for themselves or as part of a large political project?
I focus on a small number of dialogues with soldiers in order to allow a close look at the subject's shifting moralities as these are worked out within its broader milieu. The soldiers tell complex narratives about the ways their moralities were mediated and creatively transformed. From their narratives it became apparent how their service involved confusing mixtures of fighting with armed Palestinians and governing civilians, both Jews and Palestinians, and how is was occurring within ongoing political debates (serving at “home" vs. in "occupied territories").
The political figures in their stories not only as explicit debates but also as embedded in experience of dissonance, of something that was not working out in ways that could be easily explained or emotionally handled. For these individuals the political is an evolving confusing process in which they grapple with new experiences, trying to figure out the right and wrong, their needs, interests, and social relations and their heritage.
A few salient ways emerge in which a political self is denied, downplayed, obscured, discovered, maintained or transformed. The political is thus narrated as mediated by a series of contradictory inter-subjective commitments and experiences, ranging from the personal to the organizational, the social, cultural and historical. It turns out soldiers’’ moralities were mediated by the following registries:
· Personal biographies and upbringing,
· Peer relations and hierarchies of authority in the army,
· Changing masculine identities,
· Political discourses about Jewish-Israeli suffering vs the "occupation," and
· Mundane experiences during army service.
Soldiers were thus absorbed in these registries, and at times were occupied in years of moral work to differentiate and purify the quite hybrid notion of the political. In such trajectories of a moral self and working its politics, the complications of both are manifested in an ongoing efforts to form a political voice, to make sense of it – and to act upon it.
William H. Westermeyer, “Progressives’ ‘Plantation’: The Tea Party, Race, and the Formation of Political Selves”
Research undertaken with autonomous, community-level Tea Party groups in central North Carolina reveals how members create figured worlds (Holland et al 1998)- socially produced horizons of meaning and activities-that constitute the symbolic, discursive and affective components of a Tea Party collective identity. I have argued that this cultural world is grounded in the belief that America faces an existential threat as foundational American principles of self-reliance, patriotism and individualism are forsaken by many Americans and eroded by the modern welfare state (Westermeyer in press). My findings differ with some popular and scholarly writings that argue the Tea Party Movement is primarily motivated by racism (e.g. Burghart and Zeskind 2010). Some have argued the movement is driven by white resentment toward the first African-American President (Street and DiMaggio 2011), while others argue that the Tea Party’s brand of populism mirrors that of white “status anxiety” (Hofstadter 1963), as minorities gain greater access to American social, political and cultural life (Parker and Barreto 2013). However during grounded ethnographic research among local Tea Party groups in central North Carolina members often ruminated over how to attract Black members and were often self-conscious and resentful toward what they saw as the unfair racist label directed at them. My research revealed a dual relationship between Tea Partyists and race that reflects contemporary conservative approaches to racial politics (Lowndes 2011). On one hand, members and supporters reflected contemporary “White hegemony” discourses of “colorblindness” which ignore enduring institutional and interpersonal discrimination in American life while asserting American nationalism and unity across the supposedly disappearing boundaries of race (Omi and Winant 2014). On the other hand, Tea Partyists frame the problems of the black underclass as the tragic result of dependency created by government action such as “Great Society” social programs. Both concepts were meaningful in light of the distrust of government and the attention to individualism and personal achievement which characterize the Tea Party figure world. Moreover this outlook provides an explanation of Blacks’ unwillingness to join the TPM. Many believe this dependency, what some termed a modern “plantation”, creates strong loyalty to the Democratic Party and strong social pressure for conservative Blacks to hide their true feelings. In the following paper, I use social practice theories of identity and data gained from 18 months of field work with eight local tea party groups, to argue that these groups are important sites where contemporary race discourses, supplemented by media and visits by compelling Black conservative speakers, circulate and become one component of the Tea Partyists’ political identities.
My conclusions help to replace some of the poorly grounded claims of the Tea Party emergence based on goals of racial domination with more nuanced forms of bias and essentialism which more accurately reflect contemporary race politics in the US. Moreover, by illustrating racial politics circulating within relatively small, submerged, widely distributed spaces of political practice, the paper sheds light on the intersection of wider discourses and small-scale social processes constituent in the formation of political subjectivities in particular locales.
Charles Price and Dorothy Holland, “Becoming a Political Actor (Part I): Black Identity Theory and Pathways to a Politically Engaged Consciousness”
The encounter, in William Cross Jr.’s Nigresence model of Black identity formation, entails a watershed experience that urges a person to create a valorized Black identity. The Nigresence model focuses on racial awareness. However, my research suggests that a racial identity transformation focused on valorizing Blackness has political ramifications. Indeed, people who become pro-Black may express a heightened or critical political awareness (though not necessarily “activism” in a strict sense).
The encounter marks an empirically demonstrable shift in people’s thinking, acting, and relating to each other. Proponents of Nigresence theory explain that what happens after an encounter is immersion-emersion (learning, pursuit of cultural competence in the new identity and attendant beliefs), internalization (make the identity-outlook “normal,” routine, integrated into quotidian life), culminating in commitment (the person becomes invested in maintaining the identity-outlook).
While Nigresence theory emphasizes important inner or interior states that manifest in people’s behavior, Black identity theories, and psychology generally, only hint at how collectivities, structures and history influence identity formation.
Here, social practice theory is relevant: the theory points a way toward explaining relations among the personal, social-collective, and historical aspects of identities. For example, encounters, immersion-emersion, internalization, and commitment occur and evolve in local “spaces of practice” influenced by associated structural and historical factors.
Treating identities as formed substantially through practice opens a door for a key emphasis of social practice theory: the importance of cultural resources to identity formation. The larger problem our paper seeks to address is how scholars of identity talk past each other, not fully acknowledging that “identity” interlinks local, cultural, personal-intimate, social-collective, structural, and historical dimensions of experience. Therefore, our paper creates a dialogue between Black identity theory (and psychology) and practice theory, seeking to productively merge them into a framework that advances our understanding of the various dimensions of identity. Drawing on our research, we present a framework potentially intelligible and useful to anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars of identity.
Dorothy Holland, Charles Price and William Westermeyer, “Becoming a Political Actor (Part II): Social Practice Theory and Pathways to Politically Engaged Action
How is it that people sometimes move against currents of power, norms of propriety, and their own reticence to become political actors? This paper, assuming that a politically engaged consciousness is not sufficient, asks: Under what conditions does an engaged consciousness become a basis for sustained political action? We approach this question from a social practice theory framework and draw on our research to flesh out its significance.
In order to understand the action dimension of the formation of political actors, we emphasize two core arguments from the theoretical framework of social practice theory. First, intimate senses of self are conceived to be a key basis for sustained action. Political sentiments are not enough. They must be accompanied by an investment of the self. Second, the theory sees these intimate identities as complexly developing with social identities with the result that both are understood to be culturally constructed, socially situated, relational, dialogic and always in process. Political identities are dynamic and always in motion. Our respective research with environmental activists in two regions of the United States, Rasta practitioners in Jamaica, and Tea Party adherents in North Carolina provide insights into the entailments of the social practice theory framework for understanding political selves. For one, we argue from the research for the importance of communities of practice in the entry of persons into politically engaged action. For another, we note that political selves are often caught up not in concerns about the value or truth of a political position but in the social entanglements and cultural politics surrounding particular political viewpoints. Especially for neophyte political actors, for example, attraction to a position is often attraction/repulsion from the persona and imagined figured worlds associated with those who “own” (in the Bakhtinian sense) the position or strategy.
Theme 1: What is the relation between publicly expressed political discourses, on the one hand, and personal experiences, affects, or understandings, on the other? Are there any gaps or disjunctures between collective political ideologies and individuals’ ways of making sense of political disputes?
Peter Hervik, “Psychological Anthropology and the Challenge of Making Sense of the Scandinavian Exclusionary Reasoning”
In the political realm European news media coverage, political party programs, social movements, scores of books, and social media networks have embraced a negative dialogue towards migrants, whose identities are increasingly seen as incompatible with ‘Western’ values and presenting a major challenge to the democracy. The media coverage of events like 9/11, the Muhammad cartoon affair (2005/6), the “22/7” massacre in Norway and the Charlie Hebdo attacks recently have shown a development of the news media coverage and political communication that compels us to rethink the public side of imposing discourses. Research on the Danish Muhammad cartoon crisis revealed how efficiently social memory could be controlled. i.e., how history is remembered. This establishment of professionalized political communication with grounded (including ethnographic analysis) challenge the semi-shielded, resistant-potential embodied knowledge of the kind we pride ourselves of evoking in person-centric approaches, and making them more predictable, more controllable and less and less fact based. Besides the theoretical challenge this development also compels psychological anthropologists to join with political anthropologists and others to examine closer how these attempts of controlling social memory and building positive self-understandings along the lines of the nation, by being opposed to cultural others.
Psychological anthropologists have for decades worked with a unity of opposed alleged ontologies and approaches. Extra- and intra-personal realms of culture, constructivists and culturalist, public and personal, and schema and discourse are some of the realms that are studied as imposed messages invested with value facing embodied knowledge. In between were ideas of membranes, filters, and interfaces with metaphors evoked argue that the public was not faxed directly into the mind of the person, a Xerox-copy or an injection of the message but instead bits and pieces sedimenting from experience over time, therapeutic processes and intense problem-solving thought slowly building up larger cognitive schemas and cultural models. Most of the psychological anthropological effort focused on the embodied side.
But how do people reason on these issues in everyday life interaction and on social media? The “mediatization of society has become an established concept among European media scholars referring to a process where the society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic. Commercialization of news and the crisis of journalism have contributed further to this process, where the news media and politics have become so interwoven that it is no longer possible to keep them apart. As newspapers continue a 15-20 year old downward trajectory of its readership, they re-structure and compete on opinions instead of “getting” the facts; they hire journalists to write blogs and use numerous contracted personal to write on blogs, web-news exchanges, and Facebook commentaries.
In the newly started research project we will examine social media exchanges as well as carry out in-depth interviews to explore how negative reasoning about “non-Western migrants” (particularly Muslims) embeds a number of negatively laden arguments from clusters such as multiculturalism and feminism, animal rights. The article for the workshop approaches this coexistence of negativities as a ‘nexus of exclusionary reasoning’ with its blurred relations and taken for granted assumptions in the Muhammad Cartoon Affair in Denmark, the media coverage of the terrorist attack in Norway 2011; and a number of blogs and web-exchanges I haven’t decided yet.
Claudia Strauss, “Political movements, vernacular discourses, and personal meanings: The example of Occupy and economic populism in post-recession California”
The Occupy Wall Street movement rallied Americans to unite in opposition to the richest 1%. At present many on the political left in the United States continue to mobilize around a politics of economic populism. What is the meaning of such rhetoric for ordinary Americans who are facing economic struggles? In the aftermath of the Great Recession (2011-2012) an assistant and I interviewed 65 unemployed southern Californians from a variety of occupational, income, racial/ethnic, and immigrant/native backgrounds; two years later I re-interviewed most of them. My initial research coincided with the efflorescence of the Occupy movement and among my interviewees I found a mix of views about it, as well as about socioeconomic structures in the US and globally. Their reactions can be understood in terms of a broader model proposed here of what mediates the public’s interpretation of political discourses. I argue that the personal meaning of political discourses depends on the entire set of vernacular discourses someone has acquired and also on their affectively laden identities and personal semantic networks. Vernacular discourse analysis reveals the local political ecology that new rhetoric enters. It is a corrective to studies that focus on social movements without understanding local cultural frames for interpreting them. Psychological level of analysis of the way political discourse relates to personal identities and meanings reveals when political discourses of any sort carry emotional and motivational force for someone. I will show that my interviewees’ investment in Occupy discourse and critiques of economic elites depended on both the vernacular discourses they had learned and their personal identities and motivating experiences.
Katherine Ewing, “'The Third Gender' and Sex Reassignment in India: New Legal Identities and the Selves that Inhabit Them”
Popular and scholarly literature on transsexualism, the “third gender,” and sex reassignment surgery (SRS) can be seen as aspects of politicized debates that problematize the gendered self in ways that have very recently become part of mainstream public discourse in the US, where gender reassignment through hormones and surgery has grown in visibility and popularity. In contrast, several South Asian countries have been among the first to offer legal status for individuals who identify as “third gender.” This and other legal changes in India changes have reshaped possibilities for belonging, yet these possibilities encourage strategies and self narratives that are inconsistent with the medically dominant SRS self narrative of a fixed inner self that was born “in the wrong body.” In this paper I examine how individuals in India negotiate these often contradictory and highly politicized possibilities for narrating the ambivalently gendered self.
Theme 2, What are different forms of political consciousness? What sorts of conflicts are there between explicit identities and outlooks, on the one hand, and tacit or unconscious or embodied ones, on the other?
Jack Friedman, “Feeling Populist: Emotions, 'Immature' Politics, and 'The People'”
Populism has been contrasted with “mature” politics because it has often been assumed that populist movements are driven by the manipulation of public emotions, particularly anger – anger at the rich and elite, foreigners, terrorists, even the state itself. Populism, in its worst forms (violent, xenophobic, nationalistic, etc.), is characterized as a kind of “mob rule.” The “mob rule” associated with populist movements is frequently contrasted with notions like the Foucauldian “population,” essentialist notions of “the people,” or even more global notions like Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” primarily because it appears to be driven by emotions over rationality or a more “natural,” shared social bond between people. This paper considers populism from the standpoint of a more mature and complex engagement with psychology and culture. As such, while this paper considers the role of emotions as they are bound to claims of entitlement in populist politics, it is also the complex interplay between emotions, cognition, cultural knowledge, political economics (structural conditions), and psychodyanamic processes that gives shape to much of what has been broadly characterized as “populist,” “populism,” and “populist politics.” Arguing that Laclau’s claims regarding the “vagueness” that underlies populism is based on the assumption that this vagueness (as he sees it) springs from the emotional foundation of populism and that this assumes that emotions lack cultural logics, I explore the particular challenges in defining populism through an engagement with scholarship examining the role of emotions in contentious politics (e.g. Emirbayer and Goldberg). This paper draws on examples of contentious politics and populist movements in two different contexts – contemporary neo-nationalist politics in post-socialist Romania and the contentiousness over “climate change” in Red State Oklahoma. In the context of Romania, I examine the rise of and continued threat of neo-nationalist, xenophobic, and irredentist political ideology and political parties in the post-socialist context. The continued existence of these anti-liberal political movements at the same time as most people in Romania enthusiastically embrace and support continued liberalization and democratization as part of the country’s membership in the European Union illustrates a profound paradox at the heart of Romanian political subjectivity. In Oklahoma, a different set of paradoxes are part of the process of being a “Sooner.” Specifically, not only does much of Oklahoma share the populist contradictions made famous in Thomas Frank’s, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (a contradiction made more troubling by the history of poverty in Oklahoma, made famous in the figure of Tom Joad), but, given the history of manmade environmental disasters in Oklahoma (e.g., The Dust Bowl), Oklahoma’s populist political subjectivity also faces the profound contradiction of resisting calls to action to combat climate change. Overall, this paper argues that an understanding of the cultural underpinnings of emotions is only part of any attempt to rethink populism (as a concept) and deepen our understanding of populist movements (as social and language acts). In addition to understanding emotions, I argue that it is the multitude of factors – the political, the social, the cultural, the psychological – that shape the particularities of populisms.
Conerly Casey, "Sensory Politics and War: Affective Anchoring and Vitality in Nigeria and Kuwait"
The 2003 U.S. War in Iraq brought about highly mediated, emotionally charged images, movements and sounds of war, mediations of violence that continue to circulate. In Nigeria and Kuwait, these war sensorial, and the moral appraisals they evoked, became increasingly significant for young Muslims, as news reports and social media about the war began to shape national and regional politics. Sensations of ‘danger’ in images, movement, and sound, coded in categorical and vital affective registers, accumulated in the body, and produced lives that were both anchored in conflict situations and tending toward escape or freedom. As affect exceeded the body, trans-individual links manifest in self-censorships and expressions of ill health and raised social and political consciousness. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic and analytic research in Nigeria and Kuwait, this essay traces affect archived in the body, and in and across social relations and media, as well as trans-individual links with others in face-to-face and mediated situations. The essay focuses on the mutual inclusion of micro- and macro-political activities, those in which there is a creative excess of affective intensity and those tending toward conformation. The essay will assess self-reflexivity in information/communication feedback loops as young Muslims in Nigeria and Kuwait find affective anchoring and the vitality of abstraction in post-war, conflict zones. How is ‘affect’ archived in the body, and in and across social relations and media? How do mediated sensations interact simultaneously with categorical affect, or the content of emotions that may be of long duration, and vital affect or the manner or qualities of affect in conflict zones? How are categorical and vital affects incorporated into the body, and how might they produce a sensory politics of war in conflict zones? What are feedback loops of memory, sensation, affect, perception and emotion among young Muslims in Kuwait and Nigeria that may be both individual, micro-political activities and macro-political or trans-individual, and trans-situational as the global protests against Charlie Hebdo suggest?
Theme 3. What leads people to join social movements and form senses of themselves as movement actors? How do their personal experiences, affective commitments, and social networks affect the specific nature of their activism?
Yehuda C. Goodman, “Mediating Moralities: Inter-subjectivities in Israeli Soldiers' Narratives of the Occupation”
While struggling with state mechanisms like education systems that help in shaping citizens’ perspectives, people in democratic states are not indoctrinated into specific political views. Sometimes citizens are required to make their own personal moral commitments about political matters. How do persons transform from the pre-political to the explicitly political? Or from one political position to another? How do they work out this process? And, how do they describe the discovery of a political voice?
Following anthropological inquiries into margins of the state and politics (Herzfeld 2002; Das and Poole 2004), I adopt a pragmatic approach to understanding morality (cf. Fischer 2003, Zigon 2008, Ortner 2006), thus challenging conceptions of morality as given local habits (and as identical with the cultural). Morality is, I assume, an evolving experience in which subjects face new pressing problems that they grapple with, trying to figure out the very notion of right and wrong. I try to demonstrate how this complex process is shaped up.
I suggest that both the concepts of mediation and of improvisation are helpful in trying to understand the relation between selfhood and politics. Mediations are the registries through which individuals process their lives, including their political views. Individuals often act primarily within larger meaningful frameworks (as part of their group of soldiers for instance), instead of directly and existentially facing the political. How is morality work embedded then in complex socially mediated experiences? Further, I follow Holland et al (1998) in adding to social and cultural mediations, individuals' improvisations. I ask then, what is the creative work of subjects who articulate their own political views in the face of the collective?
My research site is the experiences and narratives of Israeli combat soldiers who served in the Palestinian occupied territories. Their experiences are similar in many respects yet different than other armies in similar situations (like the US army in Iraq; see Gutman and Lutz’ Breaking Ranks).
The military – like other fields, medicine, law, and education – is a good site to follow the development of political consciousness, because it is built upon institutionalized constant efforts to depoliticize military actions. How do individuals' experiences disrupt dominant discourses of the state and its armed forces? How do personal and collective experiences partake in developing a new political language, either for themselves or as part of a large political project?
I focus on a small number of dialogues with soldiers in order to allow a close look at the subject's shifting moralities as these are worked out within its broader milieu. The soldiers tell complex narratives about the ways their moralities were mediated and creatively transformed. From their narratives it became apparent how their service involved confusing mixtures of fighting with armed Palestinians and governing civilians, both Jews and Palestinians, and how is was occurring within ongoing political debates (serving at “home" vs. in "occupied territories").
The political figures in their stories not only as explicit debates but also as embedded in experience of dissonance, of something that was not working out in ways that could be easily explained or emotionally handled. For these individuals the political is an evolving confusing process in which they grapple with new experiences, trying to figure out the right and wrong, their needs, interests, and social relations and their heritage.
A few salient ways emerge in which a political self is denied, downplayed, obscured, discovered, maintained or transformed. The political is thus narrated as mediated by a series of contradictory inter-subjective commitments and experiences, ranging from the personal to the organizational, the social, cultural and historical. It turns out soldiers’’ moralities were mediated by the following registries:
· Personal biographies and upbringing,
· Peer relations and hierarchies of authority in the army,
· Changing masculine identities,
· Political discourses about Jewish-Israeli suffering vs the "occupation," and
· Mundane experiences during army service.
Soldiers were thus absorbed in these registries, and at times were occupied in years of moral work to differentiate and purify the quite hybrid notion of the political. In such trajectories of a moral self and working its politics, the complications of both are manifested in an ongoing efforts to form a political voice, to make sense of it – and to act upon it.
William H. Westermeyer, “Progressives’ ‘Plantation’: The Tea Party, Race, and the Formation of Political Selves”
Research undertaken with autonomous, community-level Tea Party groups in central North Carolina reveals how members create figured worlds (Holland et al 1998)- socially produced horizons of meaning and activities-that constitute the symbolic, discursive and affective components of a Tea Party collective identity. I have argued that this cultural world is grounded in the belief that America faces an existential threat as foundational American principles of self-reliance, patriotism and individualism are forsaken by many Americans and eroded by the modern welfare state (Westermeyer in press). My findings differ with some popular and scholarly writings that argue the Tea Party Movement is primarily motivated by racism (e.g. Burghart and Zeskind 2010). Some have argued the movement is driven by white resentment toward the first African-American President (Street and DiMaggio 2011), while others argue that the Tea Party’s brand of populism mirrors that of white “status anxiety” (Hofstadter 1963), as minorities gain greater access to American social, political and cultural life (Parker and Barreto 2013). However during grounded ethnographic research among local Tea Party groups in central North Carolina members often ruminated over how to attract Black members and were often self-conscious and resentful toward what they saw as the unfair racist label directed at them. My research revealed a dual relationship between Tea Partyists and race that reflects contemporary conservative approaches to racial politics (Lowndes 2011). On one hand, members and supporters reflected contemporary “White hegemony” discourses of “colorblindness” which ignore enduring institutional and interpersonal discrimination in American life while asserting American nationalism and unity across the supposedly disappearing boundaries of race (Omi and Winant 2014). On the other hand, Tea Partyists frame the problems of the black underclass as the tragic result of dependency created by government action such as “Great Society” social programs. Both concepts were meaningful in light of the distrust of government and the attention to individualism and personal achievement which characterize the Tea Party figure world. Moreover this outlook provides an explanation of Blacks’ unwillingness to join the TPM. Many believe this dependency, what some termed a modern “plantation”, creates strong loyalty to the Democratic Party and strong social pressure for conservative Blacks to hide their true feelings. In the following paper, I use social practice theories of identity and data gained from 18 months of field work with eight local tea party groups, to argue that these groups are important sites where contemporary race discourses, supplemented by media and visits by compelling Black conservative speakers, circulate and become one component of the Tea Partyists’ political identities.
My conclusions help to replace some of the poorly grounded claims of the Tea Party emergence based on goals of racial domination with more nuanced forms of bias and essentialism which more accurately reflect contemporary race politics in the US. Moreover, by illustrating racial politics circulating within relatively small, submerged, widely distributed spaces of political practice, the paper sheds light on the intersection of wider discourses and small-scale social processes constituent in the formation of political subjectivities in particular locales.
Charles Price and Dorothy Holland, “Becoming a Political Actor (Part I): Black Identity Theory and Pathways to a Politically Engaged Consciousness”
The encounter, in William Cross Jr.’s Nigresence model of Black identity formation, entails a watershed experience that urges a person to create a valorized Black identity. The Nigresence model focuses on racial awareness. However, my research suggests that a racial identity transformation focused on valorizing Blackness has political ramifications. Indeed, people who become pro-Black may express a heightened or critical political awareness (though not necessarily “activism” in a strict sense).
The encounter marks an empirically demonstrable shift in people’s thinking, acting, and relating to each other. Proponents of Nigresence theory explain that what happens after an encounter is immersion-emersion (learning, pursuit of cultural competence in the new identity and attendant beliefs), internalization (make the identity-outlook “normal,” routine, integrated into quotidian life), culminating in commitment (the person becomes invested in maintaining the identity-outlook).
While Nigresence theory emphasizes important inner or interior states that manifest in people’s behavior, Black identity theories, and psychology generally, only hint at how collectivities, structures and history influence identity formation.
Here, social practice theory is relevant: the theory points a way toward explaining relations among the personal, social-collective, and historical aspects of identities. For example, encounters, immersion-emersion, internalization, and commitment occur and evolve in local “spaces of practice” influenced by associated structural and historical factors.
Treating identities as formed substantially through practice opens a door for a key emphasis of social practice theory: the importance of cultural resources to identity formation. The larger problem our paper seeks to address is how scholars of identity talk past each other, not fully acknowledging that “identity” interlinks local, cultural, personal-intimate, social-collective, structural, and historical dimensions of experience. Therefore, our paper creates a dialogue between Black identity theory (and psychology) and practice theory, seeking to productively merge them into a framework that advances our understanding of the various dimensions of identity. Drawing on our research, we present a framework potentially intelligible and useful to anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars of identity.
Dorothy Holland, Charles Price and William Westermeyer, “Becoming a Political Actor (Part II): Social Practice Theory and Pathways to Politically Engaged Action
How is it that people sometimes move against currents of power, norms of propriety, and their own reticence to become political actors? This paper, assuming that a politically engaged consciousness is not sufficient, asks: Under what conditions does an engaged consciousness become a basis for sustained political action? We approach this question from a social practice theory framework and draw on our research to flesh out its significance.
In order to understand the action dimension of the formation of political actors, we emphasize two core arguments from the theoretical framework of social practice theory. First, intimate senses of self are conceived to be a key basis for sustained action. Political sentiments are not enough. They must be accompanied by an investment of the self. Second, the theory sees these intimate identities as complexly developing with social identities with the result that both are understood to be culturally constructed, socially situated, relational, dialogic and always in process. Political identities are dynamic and always in motion. Our respective research with environmental activists in two regions of the United States, Rasta practitioners in Jamaica, and Tea Party adherents in North Carolina provide insights into the entailments of the social practice theory framework for understanding political selves. For one, we argue from the research for the importance of communities of practice in the entry of persons into politically engaged action. For another, we note that political selves are often caught up not in concerns about the value or truth of a political position but in the social entanglements and cultural politics surrounding particular political viewpoints. Especially for neophyte political actors, for example, attraction to a position is often attraction/repulsion from the persona and imagined figured worlds associated with those who “own” (in the Bakhtinian sense) the position or strategy.
