Political anthropology of emotions: the mobilizations of victims in Latin America

摘要

In contemporary Latin American societies, we find numerous public causes driven by victimized people. Usually, emotions are treated as variables that explain the commitment to these movements. Following a different point of view, here I propose to take as research object the conflictive processes through which certain conducts are classified (or not) as emotional and are put into play in contentious contexts. The analysis is oriented from the "mobilizing emotions" to the "mobilized emotions." I rely on materials contributed by different Latin American ethnographies as well as those produced during my own fieldwork among the victims of a fire occurred in Buenos Aires in 2004. Finally, I raise the discussion around the analytical status that we could give to the affective record and the political consequences that this could imply for our research. The article aims to contribute to the understanding of the intersections between politics and emotions in contemporary Latin American societies.