Ugly emotions like envy and greed tend to emerge ethnographically through
accusations (as opposed to self-attribution), de-centring the individual psyche
and drawing attention to how emotions are deployed in broader projects of moral
policing. Tracking the moral, social dimension of emotions through accusations
helps to account ...
Ugly emotions like envy and greed tend to emerge ethnographically through
accusations (as opposed to self-attribution), de-centring the individual psyche
and drawing attention to how emotions are deployed in broader projects of moral
policing. Tracking the moral, social dimension of emotions through accusations
helps to account concretely for the political, economic and ideological factors
that shape people’s ethical worldviews – their defences, judgements and anxieties.
Developing an anthropological understanding of these politics of accusation leads
us to connect classical anthropological themes of witchcraft, scapegoating, and interand
intra-communal conflict with ethnographic interventions into contemporary
debates around speculative bubbles, inequality, migration, climate change and
gender. We argue that a focus on the politics of accusation that surrounds envy
and greed has the potential to allow for a more analytically subtle and grounded
understanding of both ethics and emotions.
