Language, Emotion, and the Politics of Vulnerability

Abstract

Previous research on language and emotion in anthropology has demonstrated that rather than being a private, subjective, and prediscursive experience belonging to individuals, emotion is an intersubjective, emergent process that is not only everywhere in language but also everywhere language is. In this review, I discuss how recent research in linguistic anthropology and related fields has continued to build on such insights in investigations of the flow of affect across bodies, the ways in which politically situated ideologies of language and emotion function at various institutional scales, and the role of language and emotion in the enactment of agency. Overall, my discussion is framed in a consideration of how this body of work contributes both theoretically and methodologically to understanding the role that language and emotion play in mediating the dynamic relationship between vulnerability and political agency.

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