Sentiment/Affect/Structures of Feeling

3 credits · Graduate credit

Anxiety and angst. Despair, disdain, boredom. Schadenfreude and sympathy. Love and lust. Conflicts over how to define, spark, or manage "emotions," "feelings," or "affects" have fueled projects from "colonialism" and "liberalism," to "market capitalism" and "modern socialism," to "feminism" and "peace movements." And yet we frequently confront discourses claiming the matters of sentiment are folded away into the recesses of individual psyches or biological organisms, as "unspeakable" island of primal realities--albeit realities deemed smaller and lesser than those assigned to, say, "geopolitical scales." In this seminar, we will contrast several approaches to thinking about sentiment that have been relevant within anthropology (semiotic, interdiscursive, linguistic, psychological, biological, social, reflexive, political economic...), and work to recognize both the promises and limiting presuppositions of each.