The Potentiality of Ethnography and the Limits of Affect Theory

• Autores: Emily Martin
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. Extra 7, 2013 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Potentiality and humanness : revisiting the anthropological object in contemporary biomedicine), págs. 149-158
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Historical scholarship on the banishment of subjectivity from experimental psychology led me to explore a current theoretical enterprise in literary and cultural studies that goes by the name �affect theory.� This approach, tied to contemporary neuroscience research, at once joins the effort to banish subjectivity from human experience and introduces the apparently compelling merits of a certain kind of potentiality. The potentiality revealed by affect theory lies deep in the human brain, hidden below the level of conscious intentionality. Affect theory draws on a long history in the human sciences going back to the late nineteenth century. Therefore, in this paper I take a fresh look at the early history of experimental psychology from the vantage point of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898. I intend this early anthropological approach to subjectivity to serve as a thought-provoking counterpoint to the later banishment of subjectivity from the methods used in experimental psychology and from the models proposed in affect theory.