Afterword

In this Afterword, I use the observations from the special issue ‘Music, Affect and Politics’ to discuss what I see are recurring questions in the studies of music and affect: (1) the tension between new materialism and historical materialis…

Street Rhythms and the Revolution

Cuban street vendors use pregones, high-pitched rhymes and rhythms, to promote their goods and services. This ambulant form of small-scale commerce has been part of the urban soundscape since the early years of Spanish colonization. While of…

Affective Turn, or Return?

The ‘affective turn’ suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities, and shape new forms of politics in the making. It invites us to move beyond established humanities and social science paradigms and …

Music, Phones and Bank Loans

This article explores the making of two branded Spotify playlists to critique the concept of ‘affective labor.’ Over the last few decades, scholars have argued that social media users and creative industries workers alike are engaged in a ne…

Neoliberalism and the Opportunodemic

It would be far too unkind to suggest that academics and journalists have presented the COVID-19 pandemic in isolation from its broader economic context. However, it would be less unkind to suggest that its location in a triptych of major cr…

Zagaku

The majority of this article consists of an unadulterated piece of auto-ethnographic writing depicting a key experience from my anthropological fieldwork. For my PhD research on Japanese policing, I spent two years living in Tokyo and traini…

Debt and Emotional Labour in Present Day Serbia

This article deals with the affective aspects of indebtedness in present-day Serbia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Belgrade and Šabac during the period 2016-19, it analyses gendered aspects of affective states created and trig…

Measuring Humans Through Money

This introduction to the special issue outlines important anthropological insights into debt relations and relations of indebtedness drawing on my own research on post-Soviet economies as well as on the contributions to this special issue. T…

Debt Relations in Georgian Bazaars

This article is about practices of borrowing and lending money in the context of Georgian bazaar trade. While many anthropological studies focus on debtors or individual moneylenders, this article starts from the perspective of microcredit e…

Making Friends and Playing the Game

Bribery relations are a way to cope with the uncertainties of everyday life for many people living in Tanzania. For members of the Tanzanian Indian communities, the uncertainties not only count the faltering bureaucratic systems and a state …

Other Terms, Other Conditions

Introduction to the blog series by Endre Dányi (J. W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main), Clément Dréano (University of Amsterdam) and Gergely Mohácsi (Osaka University) danyi@em.uni-frankfurt.de January 3, 2022 . For quite some time now, strong voi…

Contemplating the Robotic Embrace

Introspection for Affective Anthropology by Daniel White (Free University of Berlin) daniel.white@fu-berlin.de June 20, 2018 The first time I held a robot in my arms I was overcome with a wave of sympathy. Pepper had arrived in our laboratory in a larg…

From Mad Cows to Posthumanism

Alan Smart (University of Calgary): “Posthumanism, as I use the term, means the ways in which we are entangled with non-humans, and which expand our capacities (although in other ways they may diminish them, as with disease).  Rather than being a featu…