Sense and Sensibility – Ethnology of Affect

Abstract

With the so-called “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences, affect has become a popular theoretical frame in the research of human practice and sociality. The notion of affect places feelings, emotions, embodied experiences, and the feel of things at the front and center of academic interest. Researchers differ in their definitions of affect – some see affect as a potential to affect and an openness to being affected, while others approach it as an intensity, a sensation, or a bodily process. Whether and how affect is distinct from emotion is a subject of ongoing scholarly debate. Ethnology Days, arranged by the Association of Finnish Ethnologists Ethnos and the Pori University Consortium, tapped into the emerging trend of affect research. With its theme Sense and Sensibility – Ethnology of Affect, the conference attracted approximately 80 researchers from Finland and beyond to discuss feelings in the Finnish city of Pori. The three keynotes and seven working groups spread over two days on March 15 and 16 addressed questions of touch, affective materiality, cultural emotions, and ethnographer’s emotions, among other things. The first conference day started with a warm welcome from the organizers. After that, it was time for the first keynote by Taina Kinnunen, who presented aspects of the Finnish touching culture and the affective power of touch on human bodies. Kinnunen’s research relies on “touch biographies,” people’s written descriptions of the role of touch in their everyday lives. According to Kinnunen, effects of physical contact – or the lack thereof – accumulate and become patterned and “sticky” over time, affecting how people touch each other and how they experience and talk about physical contact. This challenges (Western) ideas of autonomous, individual subjects and speaks for the relationality and porousness of human bodies. In her keynote, Kinnunen presented examples of her empirical research material. Not all tactile experiences and memories recounted in touch biographies were positive. In the most traumatic texts, violent touch was framed as “normal” behavior and an integral part of the narrator’s lifecycle whether in the form of domestic violence in childhood, experiences of maltreatment in youth, or partner abuse. Sometimes the object of violence was also a subject