Affect and Material Culture

Perspectives and Strategies

Jonas Frykman & Maja Povrzanovic Frykman

Becoming attuned

At that wonderful concert you attended, did the music fill your body, did your feet dance uncontrollably and did your voice crackle in the sing-along with people you had never met before? Do you remember the sweet pain in your palms after applauding and the almost suffocating throng of bodies? Was the atmosphere uplifting? Did it encapsulate sounds, sights, smells, bodily sensations, and feelings simultaneously? What about the sudden feeling of power and togetherness when you took part in a demonstration, the sudden shouting and rush of blood to the head when your home team scored a goal?

By posing questions like this about the body, senses, feelings and atmosphere, we hope to attune readers to affect – the subject to which this book is devoted. We will look at how affects matter in general and, in particular, how they are related to the body, the environment, and things. This, we believe, is the contribution to which ethnology and anthropology are best suited, considering the changing yet persistent importance of material culture in these disciplines and of fieldwork for understanding the affective potentialities of objects.

Interdisciplinary studies of affect and emotion have produced 'a virtual explosion' of research and theoretical writings in the last decades, writes the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett (2010: 203), who heads an interdisciplinary affective science laboratory. These studies are not only marked by differing and sometimes conflicting theoretical perspectives and research strategies – 'old debates continue to rage on' (ibid.), especially when body and language are concerned – but also lack a common scientific language that would enable 'an epistemologically objective scientific enterprise about something that is so ontologically subjective' (ibid.) and eludes 'conventional semiotic and semantic procedure' (Gibson 2013: 243). As always in academia, this dilemma is characteristic of perspectives that are in the process of breaking new ground. The fact that the words affect, emotion, feeling and sentiment are often used interchangeably makes dialogue across disciplinary borders difficult and confusing. Being a truly interdisciplinary field, genealogical influences are still clearly visible (Pellegrini and Puar 2009). Although definitions vary, the common keywords when describing affects seem to be intensity, contingency and potentiality.

A commoner way of approaching what affects stand for is found in the writings of geographer Ben Anderson, who reflects on 'affective atmospheres' and uses the vague term 'something' in many of his texts. To him, affective atmospheres express 'an ill-defined indefinite something, that exceeds rational explanation and clear figuration. Something that hesitates at the edge of the unsayable' (Anderson 2009: 78). Being 'at the edge' implies that they 'mix together narrative and signifying elements and non-narrative and asignifying elements' (ibid. 80). In line with our introductory questions about the atmosphere at a concert, Anderson (ibid. 77) reflects more on what such atmospheres do and less on what they are. Affective atmospheres 'may interrupt, perturb and haunt fixed persons, places or things' (ibid. 78). They are indeterminate with regard to the distinction between the subjective and objective and are 'impersonal in that they belong to collective situations and yet can be felt as intensely personal' (ibid. 80).

We claim that ethnographic research provides a fertile ground from which to capture the ambiguities of affective and emotive experience. For an ethnographer, that 'ill-defined indefinite something' is always related to particular people, places, situations and objects. Lingering momentarily with the examples of music and atmosphere, when Elisabet Hauge (Chapter 9) writes about the background of a successful Norwegian black metal band and its lead guitarist, she portrays a man whose music draws inspiration from his immediate material environment – a 'very sensuous interface of people, places and things' (Bille et al. 2015: 37). The old building housing 'The Mill' studio in his home village, its waterfall, the surrounding forest and the carefully scythed fields are all objects that put him 'in the mood', make him feel that there is 'something in the air' and inspire his compositions and performances. This 'mood' and this 'something' are not only physically experienced by him, but also by the other musicians, producers, record managers, volunteers and audiences, and contributes to an affective attunement to the world of metal music.

The effect of an atmosphere, as suggested above, is deeply personal and embodied, yet is hard to describe. When listening to music, we can feel the goose pimples on our skin and let our fingers snap to the rhythm. Music does not have to engage the mind's cognitive functions, but has the power to move our bodies and make us dance, jump and turn. A concert becomes 'a surface resonant with the rhythms of music, as well as of bodies, crowds, calendar events, trucks, heart rates, muscle contractions and more' (Clough 2010: 228, citing Henriques 2010). Music may fill us with joy or sadness. Regardless of which, it is almost always a mix of bodily motion, affect and emotion. The moment we engage in the scholarly practice of analysing such experiences and try to understand their history, symbolic significance and what they represent, their complexities are too easily reduced and the beat of the music – that 'something in the air' that affects us but is so hard to put into words – too easily lost.

Changing perspectives on affect

Nils Gilje (Chapter 2) states that, by definition, affect deals with the pre-theoretical conception of the world. He sees the present interest in the field as linked to how a cognitive bias has left whole territories of human life uncharted, where...