world transformations inspire, and how do these direct our movements and actions?
Another way we look at affect is in terms of how it is managed. This management of affect can be part of a “technology” for governing individuals (Good 2004), as modes of governmentality shift from welfare states that sought to govern “through society” to advanced liberalism that seeks “to govern through the regulated and accountable choices of autonomous agents . . . and . . . through intensifying and acting upon their allegiance to particular ‘communities’” (Rose 1996: 61). The shift toward neoliberalism has been shown to involve the production of subjectivities through the management of affect. For example, affect-laden spiritual development sessions known as ESQ, Emotional and Spiritual Quotient, were instituted in Indonesian corporations, mixing management techniques with Koranic verses, with employees and high-level managers, leaders, and participants sharing in tears that showed “an open heart” and that led to a renewal that would improve business practices (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009). Those who established these practices shared in the affect and were moved themselves to new kinds of subjectivities. A second example can be seen in the work of Ana Ramos-Zayas, who shows how emotions like belonging or pride in one’s desirability or commercial viability can be managed to enhance an individual’s “Blackness” and overall worth in terms of race, sexuality, and gender in the current wider race politics (2009). In the example mentioned above concerning Mexican NGOs, the affect elicited for volunteers by hard work with local people and shared food is purposefully molded by local leaders into warmth that will lead to ongoing partnerships. The NGO local leaders conceive of this as a kind of therapy, working against the alienated emotions and “coldness” that they see as characteristic of human relations for their foreign volunteers, and fostering warmth, creating solidary subjectivities (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009: 67).
It should be clear from these examples that the management of affect can occur in very different sites and with very different goals. In the field of study and volunteering abroad, we can ask: How is affect managed, by whom (students and volunteers themselves, local partners on-site, education abroad professionals, researchers)? To what ends? What discourses and political, economic, and social environments move students and volunteers to overcome certain affect, such as fear of the unknown, anxiety about novel experiences, and a sense of guilt about privilege in the face of social injustice? What neoliberalist and globalist restructuring of higher education and employment pushes us to think about what affect and what affect-management skills a successful employee should have? What kind of interpretative strategies are used to “read” students’ affect in order to manage it?
In this volume, we see how curiosity about and desire for the romantic “dark continent” (Africa) or the “City of Love” (Paris) can be reframed and problematized by study abroad professionals and students, in contexts involving laughter, urban exploration, and study (Rink, Taïeb et al.). Other authors consider how students’ themselves manage their affect—various degrees and contours of fascination about the destination—in ways that may highlight the sometimes contradictory goals of studying abroad (Doerr, Kumagai); or how the affect evoked by volunteering abroad—ranging from a sense of being useful and loved to guilt and doubt—are managed by participants as they evaluate their experience (Jakubiak, Li).
Affect also shapes our subjectivities and our own and others’ actions. The notion of affect has a double aspect—it is a noun and also a transitive verb. This fits well with the idea that affect simultaneously is what one has and acts on others: a particular form of affect, such as the feeling of shame for example, shapes others’ actions, while shaping oneself as a subject (Richard and Rudnyckyu 2009).
In this volume, our authors explore how passion for the language of the destination transforms subjectivities and shapes the borders of the self as well as the surrounding social terrain (Rodriguez). Romantic attachment to destinations makes the study abroad students observant as they hope to become like local people by copying their behavior and attire but also become critical and reflexive when romanticism turns into disappointment (Taïeb et al., Doerr). The desire to serve others generates for volunteers a sense of themselves as good and caring (Jakubiak) but also guilt as they come to view themselves as colonialist imposers of “Western values,” depending on the type of project and context (Li).
While our main theoretical frames are thus analyses of affect as it is mobilized, is managed, and produces subjectivities and actions, our discussions intersect with four fields of research, to which we turn below.
The Global, the National, and Affect
Current study and volunteering abroad are often framed within the notion of the global. Researchers and administrators, as well as guidebooks and brochures, highlight the merit of these experiences as ways of gaining “global/intercultural competence” (Savicki 2008) and becoming “global citizens” (Lewin and Van Kirk 2009, see Chapter 2 of this volume for extensive discussion of these issues). The notion of the global is often uncritically viewed as positive (for exceptions to this see Doerr 2012, 2014; Grünzweig and Rinehart 2002; Johnson 2009; Woolf 2007, 2010; Zemach-Bersin 2009, 2011). The notion’s reliance on pre-existing differences among people (see Doerr 2012, 2013) and how this relates to students’ affect are rarely discussed. In this subsection, we review the notion of the global and discuss its relation to affect, starting with the research on nationalism/nationhood that serves as the unit of “difference” to be noticed, learned, and bridged.
The sense of belonging to a nation—patriotism, Volkgeist, etc.—has been a major topic of investigation in studies of nationalism. How does one come to feel attachment and belonging to fellow nationals in the bounded territory of the nation-state—people that one may never meet in one’s lifetime? This question was at the heart of the now classic work on nationalism, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson (1991), as well as other studies of nationalism (Balibar 1988; Borneman 1992; Briggs 1996; Comaroff 1987; Sommer 1991). Also, anthropologists in recent years have analyzed affective aspects of the state, its “modern bureaucracy” that is infused with affect—desire, apathy, irony, cynicism (Navaro-Yashin 2006). Michael Taussig (1993) and Michael Herzfeld (1997) illustrate aspects of the state and its officials, respectively, that relate individuals affectively to the state.
This understanding of nation as a unit of belonging with a clear boundary that draws individuals together affectively is an important basis of the notion of the global because the notion relies on crossing such boundaries (Doerr 2012). Researchers of globalization focus on disjunctive flows of people, media images, technology, finances, and ideologies across national borders (Appadurai 1990) as well as the channeling (Broad and Orlove 2007), interrupting, and resisting of such flows (Tsing 2005). Examination of changing perceptions (Robertson 1992; Wilk 1995) and practices (Appadurai 1986; Howes 1996) does not escape the assumption that the unit of focus—whether crossing it or overcoming it—is that of nation-state.
Because the notion of culture has been linked to the nation-states (though it came to be used to challenge the ideology by “ethnic groups”)—in its ideologies, one nation, one people, one culture—some discussions of the notion warrant some space here. Culture is a “take” on human variations that needs to be situated in the context of changing anthropological theorizations: “race” (the nineteenth century), “culture” (the twentieth century), and “ethnicity” with a revised notion of “culture” (late twentieth century). While the earlier approach viewed culture as a given without consideration of power politics, an approach emerged in the 1960s that viewed culture as a new way to stake out claims to precedence and power—the way of life as rooted in the particular place—as cultural particularity has become a major ideological weapon in political struggles (Wolf 1994).
Here, culture came to be viewed as a strategy for groups to mobilize, shape, and reshape self-images and elicit participation. Culture became objectified—aspects of a social world get interpreted as typifying that world and represented as detached,
