Suchergebnisse

Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city's longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form

This article brings the concept of affect to the analysis of the relationship between buildings and political ideology, as a way of contributing to recent anthropological work on the state. It focuses ethnographically on the contradictory affects of the new built environment in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, where extensive renovation and construction have been under way since the early 2000s. On the one hand, spectacular new structures induced feelings of hope, pride, and enthusiasm for the state in some citizens. Simultaneously, the unfamiliar designs and material defects of the new built environment emanated affects of estrangement, lifelessness, disingenuousness, and instability. The article examines how these different affects were qualified and mediated discursively. Official 'propaganda of emotion' is juxtaposed with unofficial discursive forms: puns, rumours, and satirical literary fiction. It is argued that largely uncontrolled affects, rather than ideology, rendered 'the state' a plausible, if contradictory, 'fictional reality'.

Affective states : entanglements, suspensions, suspicions / Mateusz Laszczkowski and Madeleine Reeves -- Negotiating uncertainty : neo-liberal statecraft in contemporary Peru / Annabel Pinker and Penny Harvey -- The fines and the spies : fears of state surveillance in Eritrea and in the diaspora / David Bozzini -- "Recognize the spie" : transparency and political power in Uzbek cyberspace / Sarah Kendzior -- Moral subjectivity and affective deficit in the transitional state : on claiming land in South Africa / Christiaan Beyers -- "Father Mao" and the country-family : mixed feelings for fathers, officials, and leaders in China / Hans Steinmuller -- The turn of the offended : clientelism in the wake of El Salvador's 2009 elections / Ainhoa Montoya -- Living from the nerves : deportability, indeterminacy, and the "feel of law" in migrant Moscow / Madeleine Reeves.

The aim of this special issue is to bring a critical discussion of affect into debate with the anthropology of the state as a way of working toward a more coherent, ethnographically grounded exploration of affect in political life. We consider how the state becomes a 'social subject' in daily life, attending both to the subjective experience of state power and to the affective intensities through which the state is reproduced in the everyday. We argue that the state should be understood not as a 'fiction' to be deconstructed, but as constituted and sustained relationally through the claims, avoidances, and appeals that are made toward it and the emotional registers that these invoke. This article situates these arguments theoretically and introduces the subsequent ethnographic essays.