Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Cultural Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists

Primary Theme: Ethics

Secondary Theme: The Political

(3-1115) Emotional States, Envy, and the Politics of Accusation

This panel will explore how accusations of envy and other closely related ‘ugly feelings’ like greed and anxiety are politicized reflections of the everyday hierarchies, inequalities, and differential power relations within communities. In place of more psychologizing accounts, this panel will seek a deeper understanding of the economic, social and political realities that lie beneath emotions, and argue that people’s moral judgments, and the moral policing of others, reveals something profound about their position in society. Through ethnographic engagements in Europe, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and South America, we will examine and compare what happens as emotions are detached from face-to-face interpersonal relations, institutionalized, and scaled up to the identity categories deployed in broader collective struggles. Above all, we consider the relationship between such accusations and the maintenance of the status quo, questioning who or what in society really envies and what is at stake when they do so.

Organizer(s)

• Megnaa Mehtta

  PhD Candidate
  London School of Economics

Chair(s)

• Megnaa Mehtta

  PhD Candidate
  London School of Economics

Presenter(s)

• Megnaa Mehtta

  PhD Candidate
  London School of Economics

Chair(s)

• Geoffrey Hughes

  Postdoctoral Fellow
  London School of Economics

Presenter(s)

• Geoffrey Hughes

  Postdoctoral Fellow
  London School of Economics

Organizer(s)

• Stuart Strange

  Assistant Professor
  Yale, NUS College

Presenter(s)

• Stuart Strange

  Assistant Professor
  Yale, NUS College

• Courtney Cottrell

  Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Nurhaizatul Jamil

  Postdoctoral Fellow
  College of the Holy Cross

Discussant(s)

• Jarrett Zigon

  William & Linda Porterfield Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology
  University of Virginia

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  Crab Antics: The Moral and Political Economy of Greed Accusations Among Conservationists and Crab Collectors in the Sundarbans Forests of West Bengal, India
  Megnaa Mehtta – London School of Economics
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  God Calm their Minds: Envy, the Devil and the Problem of Evil in Islamic Mediascapes
  Geoffrey Hughes – London School of Economics
• 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

  Ironies of Envy and the ‘Literalness’ of Surinamese Racism
  Stuart Earle Strange – Yale, NUS College
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  Authoritative Anxiety: Negotiations of Expertise in Museum Exhibitions
  Courtney Cottrell – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  “Change your mindset!”: Disciplining envy, Islamic self-help in Contemporary Singapore
  Nurhaizatul J. Jamil – College of the Holy Cross
• 5:30 PM - 5:45 PM

  Discussion
  Jarrett Zigon – University of Virginia