1985)—and analyzed as such (see theme issues in Mankind, 1982; Oceania, 1992; and Anthropological Forum, 1993). Once culture is objectified and named, people take a variety of stances towards it, including using it as a strategy to challenge the one-nation, one-people ideology of the nation-state (Kearney 2004), or to claim authority (Oakdale 2004) and authentic existence as an indigenous group (Clifford 1988; Povinelli 1998), or to gain self-determination (Henze and Davis 1999; Warner 1999), or to intermittently express a sense of belonging when convenient (Gans 1999), or to understand themselves and guide their subsequent behavior (Holland et al. 1998).
Research on study and volunteering abroad often uses the objectified notion of culture without critical analyses about such objectification. The notion of culture is also used to measure the interpersonal skills of individuals who “cross cultural borders”—study and volunteering abroad participants—and is a basis for establishing the desired skills to be taught through these activities, evoked in the notion of “intercultural competence.”
In this volume, we do not focus on the notion of culture as an object of study nor as an analytical tool because of its political nature as described above. We are interested instead in maintaining critical distance from the notion of culture and also the notion of intercultural competence, all the while remaining aware of their importance in the field of international education, in order to reflect on how these notions play a role in the evocation of desired affective states for students and volunteers abroad.
Research about the process of globalization is critiqued as itself being part of the ideologies that portray global connections as always positive, progressive, and universally accessible (Friedman 2003; Tsing 2000). What is rarely discussed is its affirmation and perpetuation of the national as the most relevant unit of difference through its analytical privileging of the crossing of the national borders—methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002)—over other kinds of borders. This is also the case for research on study abroad: it relies on a valorization of global connection and the existence of difference based on which the experiential learning of another culture becomes meaningful (Doerr 2012, 2013, 2015a).
We then seek to analyze how students’ romantic images of the destination draw on and perpetuate (Doerr, Kumagai), ignore (Rink), or subvert (Taïeb et al.) the imagining of the nation as having unique and homogeneous culture. How does urban-rural difference frame differently the power relations between volunteers and those they serve, complicating the notion of crossing borders (Li)? Chapters in this volume further examine kinds of sameness and difference, commonality and separation, that students/volunteers feel and how this is interpreted in light of national borders and the notion of the global (Taïeb et al., Doerr). That is, we show that globalist ideologies mobilize affect around the crossing of national borders and that affect nurtured by various nationalist ideologies is managed through study abroad practitioners’ wish for encouraging critical thinking in students (Taïeb et al.), students’ wish to succeed in schooling (Kumagai), and volunteers’ own anticolonial critiques (Li), creating various types of subjectivities.
Through these analyses, we open up new fields of inquiry, asking: How does the discourse of culture and interculturality interpret, mobilize, and manage affect, and to what end? What kinds of belongings are being created? Does the notion of the interculturally competent global citizen suggest a new kind of belonging, to a world imagined community? If so, how is affect mobilized and managed to create this new kind of community? What light is shed through this process, and what shadows are cast?
Encounter with Cultural Difference: Power and Affect
Encounters with difference have been analyzed extensively in colonial contexts. Edward Said (1978) argues that Orientalism, a style of thought based upon a distinction made between the “Orient” and the “West,” shows a prevalent way of knowing the cultural Other in the context of relations of power. With an assumption that the Orient cannot represent itself, the West gained authority over the Orient by making observations about it, making statements about it, authorizing views of it, and teaching about it. At the same time, the West defined itself in contrast to the Orient. Said argues that this is how cultural domination operates.
In these colonial relations of power, people of the non-West were displayed in zoos, freak shows, circuses, and museums as spectacles (Fusco 1995). These exoticized people embody the audience’s anxieties about the cultural Other while also affirming the spectators’ mastery over them (Koritz 1997). Such exhibitions helped forge a special place for nonwhite peoples and their cultures in the Euro-American affective imagination, as also discussed by Rink with the case of Hottentot Venus (this volume). The legacy of this colonial exoticism remains in the present day, especially in the form of various “cultural performances” by ethnic minorities (Fusco 1995) but with added implications (Doerr 2008, 2009).
Analyzing imperial travel writing, Mary Louise Pratt (1992/2008) argues that discourses in eighteenth-century Europeans’ travel writing on non-European places “produced ‘the rest of the world’ for European readerships” (4, emphasis in original) and constructed “the imperial order” for these readers, nurturing in them a sense of ownership, entitlement, curiosity, adventure, and moral fervor about their colonies. Debbie Lisle (2006) argues that today’s travel writing carries this legacy in two intertwining visions: colonial visions that resuscitate the hierarchy by which the dominant Western writer judges the “less civilized,” and cosmopolitan visions that distance themselves from the legacy of empire by celebrating cultural difference yet impose a universal standard by which to judge others, as well as creating an illusion that “globalization” has produced a world where everyone can move freely. Both visions presume aforementioned natural differences between cultures marked by stable boundaries, ignoring the relations of power that structure, mobilize, and mark such differences. Lisle argues that the reemergence of travel writing hinges on its ability to let readers reimagine clear-cut, contained, stable differences, thus alleviating the anxieties of globalization.
These works on colonial relations analyze affect toward the cultural Other—desire and fear, longing and disdain, and surrender and control—as emerging in and perpetuating power relations. In this volume, we will look at some cases in which affect is mobilized and managed in relations of power when students and volunteers encounter the cultural Other. Rink’s chapter discusses students’ exoticization of the African continent. Jakubiak’s chapter portrays contours of affect that simultaneously distance and connect volunteers to those receiving their service. Li’s chapter compares different ways volunteers working in the rural areas and urban areas frame themselves to the locals in the context of (neo)colonial relations between the United States and the Marshall Islands. We also look at cases where there is no clear-cut status differential, such as when American study abroad students visit European countries with varying degrees of romanticization of the destination (Taïeb et al., Doerr), or when historically hierarchical relations become more complex, when American study abroad students visit Japan (Kumagai). We then examine how affect is mobilized and managed and new subjectivities get constituted as they intersect with study abroad practitioners’ intent, more specific relations between countries, and discourses of schooling.
Analyzing cases where relations of power are explicit and apparent and cases where such relations of power are more ambiguous, we extend the question of affect and the constitution of otherness to a wider frame of cultural Others, to the question of border crossing more generally. Especially, border crossing in general and between those in less-visible relations of power have not been approached yet in the field of the anthropology of affect; this volume can offer new insight in that area.
This volume further asks what happens when the encounter with the Other is interpreted in terms of “intercultural education” or experiential learning through “immersion,” as we discuss in the next section.
Learning and Affect
Affect has
