In recent years an increasing number of scholars have incorporated a focus on emotions in their theories of material culture, transnationalism and globalization, and this book aims to contribute to this field of inquiry. It examines how ‘emotions’ can be theorized, and serves as a useful analytical tool for understanding the interrelated mobility of humans, objects and images. Ethnographically rich, and theoretically grounded case studies offer new perspectives on the relations between migration, material culture and emotions. While some chapters address the many different ways in which migrants and migrant artists express their emotions through objects and images in transnational contexts, other chapters focus on how particular works of art, everyday objects and artefacts can evoke feelings specific to particular migrant groups and communities. Case studies also analyse how artists, academics and policy makers can stimulate positive interaction between migrants and non-migrant communities.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations, Figures, and Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Affective Moves: Transit, Transition and Transformation
Maruška Svašek
Chapter 1. Materiality, Memories and Emotions: A View on Migration from a Street in South London
Fiona Parrott
Chapter 2. The Objects of Christmas: The Politics of Festive Materiality in the Lives of Polish Immigrants
Kathy Burrell
Chapter 3. From Shop to Chapel: Changing Emotional Efficacy of the Statue of Virgin Mary of El Rocio within the Spanish Community in Vilvoorde, Belgium
Eddy Plasquy
Chapter 4. Sweater Business: Commodity Exchange and the Mediation of Agency in the Tibetan Itinerant Sweater Trade in India
Timm Lau
Chapter 5. Moving Tamils, Moving Amulets: Creating Emotional Well-Being and Comfort
Anne Sigfrid Grønseth
Chapter 6. The Price of Progress: ‘Dying Arts’ Among the Karen of Andaman Islands
Sameera Maiti
Chapter 7. Artefacts as Mediators through Time and Space: The Reproduction of Roots in the Journal of Lussignani
Enrico Maria Milič
Chapter 8. Making Connections: Biography, Art, Affect and Politics
Maggie O’Neill
Chapter 9. Crossing Borders: Migration, Memory and the Artist’s Book
Deborah Schultz
Chapter 10. The Emotions and Ethnicity in the Indo-Caribbean
Leon Wainwright
Chapter 11. ‘What You Perceive Is What You Conceive’. Evaluating Subjects and Objects through Emotions
Maruška Svašek
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Maruška Svašek is Professor of Anthropology in the School of History and Anthropology, Queens University, Belfast. Her main research interests are emotional dynamics, migration and art and artefacts. Recent publications include Human Mobility and Emotions: Ethnographies of Movement (ed., 2012), Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production (2007) Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe (2006).
Review :
“The editor has assembled a welcoming rage of case studies that go beyond the European locale to include Africa, North America, Asia and the Caribbean. The book spans an unexpected scope of fine-grained ethnographies that put the diasporic, social and emotional agency of material culture at the centre of analysis.” • Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
