The Practices of Feeling with the World:

Towards an Anthropology of Affect, the Senses and Materiality

Introduction

Andrea De Antoni and Paul Dumouchel

Ritsumeikan University

In recent decades, anthropological scholarship has recognized corporeality as a

condition of human experience and the body as the “existential ground of culture and
self ” (Csordas ed. 1994). These approaches, strongly influenced by authors such as
Bateson (1972), Merleau-Ponty (1945) in philosophy, and Gibson (1979) in psychology,
pointed at the necessity of investigating the body from the perspective of its perceptions
(see also Sugawara 2013). Therefore, anthropologists began to focus on the lived body
moving-in-the-world, considering it as a source of perception, a bearer of practical
knowledge and skills developed through the practices with which humans dwell in the
world (Ingold 2000). Similarly, “somatic modes of attention,” or “culturally elaborated
attention to and with the body in the immediacy of an intersubjective milieu” (Csordas ed.
2009:139 original emphasis), became central in anthropological inquiries. Such
ecological approaches, by pointing at the necessity of investigating the construction of
human experiences and social phenomena from the perspective of the body in its
interaction with the (material) environment, particularly influenced anthropology, but
also pushed other social sciences to grant greater importance to physical sensations, felt
impressions and affect.
Thus, on the one hand, anthropological research turned its attention to the senses, as
interfaces between the body and the world, while stressing their centrality in the
shaping of social practice and culture (e.g. Geurtz 2002; Higa 2015a, 2015b; Howes
2005; Iida 2006, 2015). These approaches also drew attention to the need to take the
ethnographer’s perceptions, feelings and sensations into account in the practice of
fieldwork (Pink 2009; Stoller 1997).
On the other hand, the so-called “affective turn” (Clough and Halley eds. 2007) in the
humanities and social sciences—strongly inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari
(1987), building on Spinoza’s Ethics (2009[1677]) and Bergson’s Matter and Memory
(1988[1896])—focused on the role of affect and bodily perceptions in the shaping of

Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology, vol. 18-1, 2017

92 Andrea De Antoni and Paul Dumouchel

social practice. Clough defined affectivity as “a substrate of potential bodily responses,

often automatic responses, in excess of consciousness” (2007: 2). Massumi—while
arguing for the necessity of relying on a philosophy of movement—distinguished
between affects and emotions, the first being “virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored
in (…) the actually existing (…), a nonsignifying response to a quality of intensity”
(2002: 35). In Massumi’s view, affects are pre-cognitive, pre-symbolic, pre-linguistic and
pre-personal lived “intensities” that constitute the virtual and vital from which realities
and subjects may emerge. Emotions, according to him, are “captures” of affect within
structures of meaning that, inevitably, cannot give a complete account of affects.
Consequently, anthropologists have recently begun investigating, for instance, the
idea of “affective spaces” (e.g. Navaro-Yashin 2012), shedding light on how places,
objects and cultural history shape affect and on how, conversely, affect and emotions are
attached to material environments. Affects have been described as something “sticky,”
that becomes attached to certain cultural or political products (Ahmed 2004, 2010),
something that can be transmitted (Brennan 2004), and its centrality in creating social
relationships in localities has been investigated from an ethnographic perspective also
in non-Western contexts (e.g. Nishii 2013).
These approaches, in many ways ground-breaking, have become so central in
contemporary anthropological debates that an entire “Openings and Retrospectives”
section of Cultural Anthropology (White 2017) was dedicated to them. Yet, although they
provide interesting insights into the topics of affect, emotions and bodily perceptions,
they also have several drawbacks. The first is a general failure to ground theory in
empirical data, particularly in the case of so-called affect theory. Moreover, the above-
mentioned studies consider either affect or the senses, thus lacking an integrative
perspective. This is due, on the one hand, to the fact that research on the senses simply
does not take affect theory into consideration. On the other hand, it is because—despite
the very broad way in which affect is theorized for instance by Massumi (2002) or
Clough and Halley (2007)—affect theory tends to ignore perceptions and to remain
centred on issues related to emotions. Finally, neither strands provide a theorization of
the topics that engages with developments in other academic fields.
Yet, embodiment, the body, and the idea of embodied agents, gained importance also
in a variety of disciplines beyond anthropology and social theory. For instance,
psychology and neurophysiology—especially since the discovery of mirror neurons (e.g.
Shockley, et al. 2003; Harmon-Jones and Winkielman eds. 2007; Rizzolatti and
Sinigaglia 2005)—philosophy and cognitive sciences (e.g. Clark 1999; Gibbs 2000) and
social robotics (e.g. Ziemke and Lowe 2009; Damiano, et al. 2012, 2015; Dumouchel and
Damiano 2016), all witnessed in recent years the appearance of new “embodied
approaches.” These all share the idea that the higher cognitive functions and
achievements of agents are made possible by the embodiment of their cognitive
apparatus. These approaches also highlighted another important aspect of the role of
 The Practices of Feeling with the World 93

affect and of the senses in human sociality: individual humans are “always already”
social, in the sense that they are in relation with each other at a sub-personal level.
Consequently, what is experienced by the individual as subjective, may already be
“social,” intersubjective in a fundamental way.
These ideas are all central in the approach to affect and emotions proposed in
Dumouchel (1996, 2008). He views affect as a form of (proto)action and focuses on
“affective coordination,” through which two (or more) persons come to determine their
intentions toward each other. In this approach, emotions are not construed as private
internal states, but constitute “salient moments” in the process of coordination and both
subjects and their “feelings” emerge as a result of affective coordination itself. The
characteristic of this work is, first, that it offers a more practice-oriented approach to
affect. Second, it points at the intersubjective dimension of affect, as well as of feeling
and perceiving subjects as emerging from interaction.
A similar approach—along with a call for more interdisciplinary communication in
the study of affect—is put forward by social psychologist Wetherell (2012). She
painstakingly takes into consideration many of the above-mentioned approaches, while
methodically criticising them. Her main criticisms revolve around three major points.
The first—a charge also leveled by Dumouchel (1996)—is the generalized trend in
psychology and neuro science to reduce affect to discrete emotions. This not only
provides insufficient explanations of social phenomena, but also creates issues of
incomparability among socio-cultural contexts and languages. The second is the
tendency to dismiss discourse while taking affect into consideration (see also Robbins
2013). Third is the strong inclination, particularly in social theory and psychoanalytic
writings, to focus on uncanny or unconscious aspects of affect (Wetherell 2012:17–22).
Therefore, Wetherell proposes the idea of “affective practice,” namely “a figuration
where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with
meaning-making and with other social and material figurations. (…) [A]n organic
complex in which all the parts relationally constitute each other” (Ibid.: 19).
These approaches, then, propose to look at entanglements of affects that happen
through social practice. They resonate with notions of “assemblage” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987) and “meshwork” (Ingold 2011), while suggesting to look at the active
role that affects and bodily perceptions have in the emergence of the social through
practice, as well as through coordinations, attunements, and correspondences with the
environment. Nevertheless, because at this point they remain almost purely theoretical,
they call for their enactment in social scientific research based on empirical data, from
an interdisciplinary perspective.
This special issue, therefore, by focusing on “the practices of feeling with the world”
aims to be a first step in that direction, investigating some consequences of these
suggestions for research in the anthropology of affect and bodily perceptions. We rely on
the above-mentioned conceptualizations of affect and emotions elaborated by
94 Andrea De Antoni and Paul Dumouchel

Dumouchel (1996), Massumi (2002) and Wetherell (2012), but we extend them to the
broader perceptions of the body being-in-the-world, or “feelings.” Indeed, as Ingold
(2000:23) points out, “feeling is a mode of active, perceptual engagement, a way of being
literally ‘in touch’ with the world.” Consequently, we see it as a way to bypass the
methodological and disciplinary differences between affect as something that
necessarily moves towards a language of emotions on the one hand, and sensory
perception as something separated from it on the other.
Moreover, coherent with our call to engage with developments in other disciplines, we
also propose a dialogue with philosophy and primatology. All contributions here engage
with theories on affect and the senses, while also relying on empirical data, collected
through fieldwork, experiments, or drawn from existing literature. Our main objective
is to determine the extent to which the subjective is social and to which the social and
the environment do not only shape, but actually constitute, the feeling subject.

Meshworking This Special Issue

This special issue is the result of a workshop held in Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto,
on January 23rd and 24th 2016. It assembles re-elaborations of some of the papers that
were presented at the workshop. From a theoretical perspective, this collection can
itself be considered as a “meshwork” (Ingold 2011), emerging from attunements and
(affective) coordination among the contributors. We believe that the result provides a
unique and provocative contribution to the field of the anthropology of affect and
perception, which sheds light on the active role that affects play in the emergence of a
variety of social practices, as well as on affective entanglements with the environment.
Paul Dumouchel’s article “Of Objects and Affects,” addresses the question of the place
of “objects” or, perhaps better, of third parties—persons, pretexts, “objects” or “things”—
in affective coordination. It begins with an analysis of Paro, a baby seal robot used in
substitute pet therapy, that shows how the robot’s inability to engage with objects—
with anything other than ongoing one to one social relations—both limits and shapes its
special form of “pure sociality.” Dumouchel argues that the complexity and richness of
human sociality is inseparable from the fact that it nearly always includes an “object,”
as a necessary third party within social relations.
Eyal Ben-Ari’s study of weapons as (lethal) things shows how a soldier’s rifle, through
training, learning how to clean it, learning how to take it apart and to reassemble it in
different circumstances, exercise and practice at shooting, living and even sleeping with
it, progressively becomes part of the soldier’s body. Manipulating it becomes “over
learned,” like moving one’s legs or arms. Ben-Ari analyses and describes how the bodily
incorporation of this lethal thing transforms the soldier’s feelings and emotions, as well
as his or her perception of the world and others.
 The Practices of Feeling with the World 95

Emma E. Cook in “Risks and Affective Coordination: Food Allergy Experiences in the
UK” deals with how people suffering from food allergies respond to “eating out.” That is,
she investigates how they negotiate—with strangers and friends when having to eat (or
when refusing to eat) in restaurants or at other places—food that may or may not
contain something to which they are allergic. Cook also looks into their different ways of
conceptualising and dealing with an allergic reaction. She argues that what is involved
in all these cases is a complex form of coordination that includes the agents’ bodily
sensations, their relations with others (both friends/family and restaurant personnel),
and finally the food itself, as well as affordances of place and time.
Andrea De Antoni in “Sympathy from the Devil: Experiences, Movement and
Affective Correspondences during a Roman Catholic Exorcism in Contemporary Italy,”
recounts his participation in a ritual of exorcism and his subsequent interview with the
possessed person. His analysis of his experience as a participant in the ritual and of the
later conversation shows how the “Evil One” emerged through practices, mutual
engagements and attunements among human and non-human actors, leading to
“affective correspondences.” De Antoni places special emphasis on the importance of
movement (during the ritual) and of bodily sensation in giving the devil its reality and
presence.
In “Ageing with Bad-Boy Charm: An Affective Analysis of Japanese Retirement
Migration in Malaysia,” Shiori Shakuto narrates the changed life and novel sensory
experience of elderly Japanese retiree migrants to Malaysia. She analyses their positive
affective experience of the Malaysian environment and the rejuvenation of their senses
as part of the process of re-evaluating the values and beliefs they had adopted during
their working years in Japan. This transformation of their senses, she argues,
highlights how the affective is an arena where the effect of capitalist discourses become
visible. In doing so, therefore, she provides one of the first attempts of linking the macro
dimension of the social and the discursive related to neoliberal capitalism, with the
micro level of the felt sensorium and the affective.
Describing affects is a complicated challenge. For example, as it has been defined by
Massumi (2002), affect is pre-cognitive, pre-linguistic, pre-symbolic and pre-subjective:
something that gets lost as soon as one tries to grasp it. According to him, it “is the
perception of this self-perception, its naming and making conscious, that allows affect to
be effectively analysed—as long as a vocabulary can be found for that which is
imperceptible but whose escape from perception cannot but be perceived, as long as one
is alive” (p. 36, original emphasis). Consequently, an “affective ethnography” can be
very tricky to create. For instance, Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007), proposes a
writing method which, rather than capturing affect through ethnographic description,
succeeds in communicating it, through text scenes and vignettes deprived of
explanation or analysis, simply letting certain affects emerge. Similarly, in at least part
of their articles, De Antoni and Shakuto strategically experiment with their writing,
96 Andrea De Antoni and Paul Dumouchel

trying to create some space for the reader to be affected by their narrative.
Finally, James Anderson’s contribution is, as its title indicates, a ground-breaking
call to open and establish a “Comparative Evolutionary Thanatology of Grief ” as an
academic field. It is also a close study in the grief reactions of non-human primates to
the death of group related individuals, one that is partially based on rarely observed
reactions of chimpanzees to the death of a bonded partner. Anderson concludes his
paper by claiming that what “appears undeniable, however, is that at least some of our
human ways of dealing with death and bereavement have their roots in our long, shared
evolutionary past with other primates,” thus illustrating the value that the findings of
other disciplines can have for the anthropological study of the senses and emotions.
We would like this special issue to be perceived as a starting point for discussions on
the possibilities of “feeling with the world” through social practice. Hopefully, this
“meshwork” will spark new lines, entanglements, and engagements within and beyond
anthropology.

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