The Language and Affect of Belief

Research on emotion in anthropology has been supplanted by an ethnographic turn toward ‘subjectivity’, ‘embodiment’, ‘personhood’, and ‘experience’. In this article, I explore how these interrelated modes of analysis can help ethnographers to better understand the cultural processes that constitute how people feel. I show that among my Christian Dusun interlocutors in Ranau, Malaysian Borneo, the interactive engagement between subjects and their environment determined the vectors of emotional possibility in terms of belief. The intersection of religious objects (God, the Holy Spirit, Satan) and mutual obligations in the community produce what I refer to as the ‘faith network’. I trace these collective attachments to consider how ‘believing in’ regulates feeling in relation to situations of crisis, impasse, and tragedy. The combined efforts of my interlocutors, I suggest, created an active commitment that pulsated through the faith network, which sustained an intensive and defining mode of their relational experience

Governing Affect

Roberto E. Barrios presents an ethnographic study of the aftermaths of four natural disasters: southern Honduras after Hurricane Mitch; New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina; Chiapas, Mexico, after the Grijalva River landslide; and southern Illinois following the Mississippi River flood. Focusing on the role of affect, Barrios examines the ways in which people who live through disasters use emotions as a means of assessing the relevance of governmentally sanctioned recovery plans, judging the effectiveness of such programs, and reflecting on the risk of living in areas that have been deemed prone to disaster. Emotions such as terror, disgust, or sentimental attachment to place all shape the meanings we assign to disasters as well as our political responses to them. The ethnographic cases in Governing Affect highlight how reconstruction programs, government agencies, and recovery experts often view postdisaster contexts as opportune moments to transform disaster-affected communities through principles and practices of modernist and neoliberal development. Governing Affect brings policy and politics into dialogue with human emotion to provide researchers and practitioners with an analytical toolkit for apprehending and addressing issues of difference, voice, and inequity in the aftermath of catastrophes

Caring by silence: How (un)documented Brazilian migrants enact silence as a care practice for aging parents

While existing work on transnational aging and care has largely focused on the substance of transnational communication and what is being said, this article examines what is being ‘silenced’ during transnational exchange. I argue that to better understand aging and intergenerational caregiving we need to pay careful attention to what is not being said during transnational contacts, suggesting that silence and ‘communication voids’ are often formulated and enacted as a care practice. Drawing on ethnographic research with Brazilian migrants in the United States whose aging parents live in Brazil, I illustrate how migrants curate their lives abroad and sieve their lived experiences as an act of care for their aging parents back home. In so doing, I reveal the significance of faith as a coping strategy in the process of silencing and concealing emotions and as a means to fight loneliness, cope with adversity, and protect family exchanges

Urban Attunements: Potentialities of a City’s Discomfort

This thesis investigates the affective implications of the politics of(non)belonging in the making of places. It asks the question of what a place feels like and it explores, through the concept of “palimpsestuous attunements” its multiple sensorialities (as theorised by Hamilakis). Drawing on the work of Kathleen Stewart, palimpsestuous attunements are defined as a labour to get attuned to the city’s multiplicity, its presences and absences, and its (im)materialities. Data was collected through participant observation during eleven months of fieldwork (June 2015 – May 2016) in Latina (Italy). It explores people’s use of the hyperbolic statement “there is nothing here” and it proposes a twofold argument. On one side, Latina finds itself in a relation of cruel optimism (drawing on Berlant’s work), because of its inability to perform according to the normativity of Italian localism. On the other, ironies, hyperboles, and lamentations are used rhetorically as a political potential to exist otherwise (drawing on the works of Povinelli and Bryant and Knight). Through this analysis, this thesis provides a commentary on contemporary localisms in Italy, which are defined as kinship-inspired distributed genealogical imaginaries. It also offers an exploration of the affective excess exuded in the urban environment by presences and absences, (im)materialities, and sensorialities

Power politics and sexual harassment in Downtown Cairo

This thesis explores how the meaning and experience of space contributes to our understanding of sexual harassment in downtown Cairo. I argue that we cannot understand relationships on the street without acknowledging the various affective discourses concerning space. Experiences of the everyday social, political and economic affect men and women differently, and constitute visible contextual and temporal sites of tension. I argue that the development-esque term of sexual harassment envelopes a wide range of practices that depend entirely on the moment and context of utterance. According to a 2013 United Nations report on Egypt, 48.9% of women believe that harassment has increased since the January 2011 uprising that called for political freedom and social justice. During 2011-2014, a number of violent political events have taken place in and around downtown Cairo that are significant for the area and for the nation at large. These events affect people’s perceptions of the area depending on the individual’s class, gender, age or political persuasion among other variables. I explore how this particular social, economic and political moment and location affect the interactions between individuals in public. This research suggests that a microanalysis of movement in the street reflects wider social anxieties about social change and politics of power both domestically and internationally. Aside from political events other (although not unrelated) social and economic shifts took place in the flux between local and global. I explore how people make room for each other on the streets amidst conflicts that the neo-liberal city presents. Understanding how people view space and interact with one another reveals negotiations and tensions that are an important conversation for understanding sexual harassment

Roots to Reasons: A Podcast Series - Emotional, Intellectual, & Substantive Environmental Conversations

As six students of the Resources and Sustainability Global Theme of the Franke GLI program our capstone project addresses the need for emotional, intellectual and substantive environmental conversations, a lack thereof we all have observed in our studies and daily lives. We conducted research of scholarly sources that found experience, upbringing, biases, and emotions are influencers of a person’s attitude and behavior toward the environment and climate change. Attitude is expressed through a person’s morals that inform behavior. The topics of environment and climate change are largely interpreted and expressed through pathos, which is easily manipulated by social media, marketing, and news sources. The second half of our research focused on conversation and interview techniques that would help us discuss these influences with others and learn how they manifest themselves in individuals\u27 lives. Finding agreement, listening intently, providing a safe atmosphere, creating rapport, being cognisant of pacing, tone, and emotions are crucial to conducting an emotionally, politically, or personally challenging conversation. We compiled our sources into a literature review that identifies what shapes a person’s relationship with the environment and climate change and how to hold conversations about these topics. The culmination of work is a podcast series, “Roots to Reason,” that models these environmental conversations. We conducted nine conversations with individuals such as ranchers, professors, small business owners and tribal members about their upbringing and relationship with the environment and climate change. These conversations were analyzed and synthesized into a podcast format to deliver conversation models to scholars and laymen. Not considering the background that shapes an individual’s morals, attitudes, and behaviors impedes productivity and collaboration that is critical to solving environmental challenges. This project models how differing backgrounds can cooperate from a place of mutual understanding and acceptance

Humanitarian shame and cosmopolitan nationalism: Norwegian volunteers at home and abroad

Following the so-called refugee crisis unfolding on the Greek islands in 2015, a multitude of citizen-led agencies emerged to mitigate or contest the EU’s policies of securitisation and containment. This dissertation explores the trajectory of one of these initiatives: a Norwegian humanitarian volunteer organisation Dråpen i Havet (A Drop in the Ocean, DiH). Established by a mother-of-five with no prior experience in humanitarian or social work, DiH aspires to “make it easy” for ordinary people to help refugees in Greece, but has undergone a process of partial professionalisation, leading to larger responsibilities inside and outside Greek refugee camps. The organisation also tries to scale up their acts of care and hospitality to the Norwegian state and to influence co-nationals who do not share their humanitarian sensibilities. The dissertation is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Greece and Norway. Chapter 1 discusses the emergence of a new humanitarian geography and the rise of “Fortress Europe.” Chapter 2 and 3 trace DiH’s trajectory from spontaneous volunteering to “NGOization” and explore the organisation’s shifting and contested efforts to “fill humanitarian gaps” on Europe’s southern border. Chapters 4 and 5 examine DiH’s widespread appeal amongst Norwegian citizens and the organisation’s vision of volunteering as a transformative experience. These chapters also explore volunteers’ pathways to help refugees in Greece and ambivalent experiences of returning home and negotiating different worlds and relationships. Chapter 6 analyses DiH’s political turn and efforts to witness and mobilise for more inclusive asylum policies and positive public orientations towards refugees in Norway. The conclusion discusses the redemptive potential of volunteering. Taken together, the chapters challenge enduring representations of humanitarian actors and volunteers as “rootless cosmopolitans” or “transnationals” motivated by either selfish or altruistic concerns to help distant strangers. Conversely, the dissertation shows that DiH staff and volunteers felt deeply ashamed by Norwegian affluence and their government’s restrictive asylum policies and increasingly worried over the moral health and future of the Norwegian state and society. The dissertation argues that DiH staff and volunteers can be understood as “cosmopolitan nationalists,” called to help as indignant and ashamed Norwegian citizens and mobilising against what they perceive as an illicit, inward-looking nationalism. Drawing on feminist and anthropological work on the politics of affect, the dissertation analyses shame (skam) as both culturally and politically contingent, expressed on personal and collective levels and simultaneously on behalf of and against the nation. Contrary to popular and scholarly assumptions, DiH staff and volunteers experience shame as largely productive and self-affirming. However, the dissertation argues that its political force is hampered by its reliance upon (and reproduction of) a sanitised and romanticising national narrative. While primarily a contribution to the study of humanitarianism, nationalism and border politics, the dissertation addresses anthropological and philosophical debates on ethics, affect, cosmopolitanism and liberalism. It further provides windows into changing and increasingly fragmented and hostile humanitarian and political landscapes on the fringes of Europe. Analysing volunteers’ post-utopian and redemptive aspirations, the dissertation identifies “sticky attachments” to national and humanitarian frames and imaginaries yet also some cracks and openings.Aker scholarshi

Towards Empathetic Dialogue Generation over Multi-type Knowledge

Enabling the machines with empathetic abilities to provide context-consistent responses is crucial on both semantic and emotional levels. The task of empathetic dialogue generation is proposed to address this problem. However, lacking external knowledge makes it difficult to perceive implicit emotions from limited dialogue history. To address the above challenges, we propose to leverage multi-type knowledge, i.e, the commonsense knowledge and emotional lexicon, to explicitly understand and express emotions in empathetic dialogue generation. We first enrich the dialogue history by jointly interacting with two-type knowledge and construct an emotional context graph. Then we introduce a multi-type knowledge-aware context encoder to learn emotional context representations and distill emotional signals, which are the prerequisites to predicate emotions expressed in responses. Finally, we propose an emotional cross-attention mechanism to exploit the emotional dependencies between the emotional context graph and the target empathetic response. Conducted on a benchmark dataset, extensive experimental results show that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of automatic metrics and human evaluations.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1911.0869