In the World that Affect Proposed

For me, affect came into view through a slowed ethnographic practice attuned to the forms and forces unfolding in scenes and encounters.This practice pulled the apparatus of conceptualization itself into a tricky alignment with slow ethnography's immanent concerns and with the concerns of the worlds it was trying to trace.Anthropological objects became things that shimmered out of molten states or lay nascent in an atmosphere.They had to be walked around, approached from precise angles, and seen as states of being; they were emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter as if it were their resting point.The cultural became a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.Ethnographic writing began, again, to try to describe collective states and sensibilities hitting people and traversing otherwise incommensurate things: bodies of thought, assemblages of infrastructures and institutions, new ecologies, the rhythms of a daily living, and the strangely connective tissue produced by handheld devices and social media.In the world affect brought into view, the point of analysis was not to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and struc-