Human Geography: Affect and Emotion - Essay Example

? Human Geographical Research: Affect and Emotion Human geography is a field of social science that focuses on how people make sense of the world—howwe interact with other people in our immediate environment, across space and how we all make sense of it all. In short, human geography tries to evaluate or understand how people put meaning to aspects of space and society (Fouberg, Murphy, and de Blij, 2009: 8). Because of the vast spectrum that concerns human life and his interaction with the environment, human geography had evolved specialized fields that focused in particular areas to which it could fully devout objective studies—thus various subfields of human geography slowly emerged i.e. behavioural geography, cultural geography, health geography, and historical geography to name a few. But these subfields are still very broad that it is further divided into subcategories and came up with various approaches to research. For instance, behavioural geography, which focuses more on how people perceive, behave, and create behavioural pattern in their physical environment undertake its studies based on perception and cognitive learning in relation to environmental patterns. With the onset of globalization and post globalization, the ‘spatial concept’ has evolved dramatically. Technological advancement in transportation and communication have created invisible networks that made people more intimate and interconnected as ever. Popular culture—i.e. architecture, engineering design, and fashion are making people and culture look more homogeneous despite diversity in religion, language, and myriad of other things that is unique to the people and place. Understanding and explaining this diversity is the goal of human geography (Fouberg, Murphy, and de Blij, 2009: 8). Because of the immense subject that human geography deals with, this paper would focus on affect and emotion as approaches to human geography. This paper aims to critically evaluate as to why there is an increasing shift, and what are the basis, towards affect and emotion as a major theme for human geographical research and investigate the potentials/ strengths of this approach that is not present or is undermined with other approaches to human geographical research. Emotion Geography Emotions are intense political subject that is often times highly-gendered. This being, could be the basis why emotion had been, for the longest time, excluded from most social science research, methodology, and critical commentary. The marginalization of emotion as part of gender politics have of course given birth to researches and academic approaches that are highly detached, objectified, rationalized while down playing or devaluing desire, passion, subjectivity, and engagement. As such subjectivity is something that is associated with something that is less objective to the effect that it clouds judgment. Add that to the fact that emotions are receptive to various stimuli and could often times be misleading or deceiving. But that is where emotion geography also finds its greatest strength: “at particular times and in particular places, there are moments where lives are so explicitly lived through pain, bereavement, elation, anger, love and so on that the power of emotional relations cannot be ignored.” By taking into consideration these emotional aspects, and combining them with the more conventional and ‘objective’ approaches to social research, emotional geography would be a powerful tool in understanding class relations, economic rationality, political behaviour, and other areas of public life wherein emotional content is usually excluded (Anderson and Smith, 2001: 7-8). For instance, an emphasis on emotionally heightened spaces may prove useful for illustrating how social relations are arbitrated by sensibility and feeling. It could also provide researchers and social scientists to track emotional geographies to some less conspicuous emotional domains of life. For instance, housing studies have been largely looked through profit and loss, aesthetic and design, and supply and demand (Anderson and Smith, 2001: 8). Given the conventional method, one would not be able to fully explain why, at the later part of the 20th century up to the beginning of the 21st century, cities on the Arabian Peninsula have experienced accelerated growth largely due to its rapid urban development through attractive real estate. Emerging Arabian cities have gained global prominence and economy networks given a very short timeframe (Thierstein and Schein, 2008: 178). If we look at the rapid growth of cities in the Arabian Peninsula with the conventional method of analysis, one would simply overlook the emotional aspect that could be attached to experiencing something new and different that these cities are able to offer—i.e. how emotions would interpret, perceive, and give meaning and value to the idea of living on a man-made island? What are the emotions at play of living in a dessert city that is host to a foreign culture and people opposite of one’s own? It is how people value and give meaning to these emotions that is highly overlooked by just merely analyzing the appreciation of say aesthetic value, economic soundness, or profitability of investing in a luxury apartment. A “step beyond ‘representational geographies’ to think about emotions as ways of knowing, being and doing… ‘an awareness of how emotional relations shape society and space’ and a need to confront empathy methodologically, with an explicit return to philosophies of meaning.” Emotional geography values more not on the abstract meaning and its representation but gives emphasis on the direct experiences and how meaning is derived based on ‘felt worlds.’ Ergo it shift the perspective from explaining and defining experiences from abstract concepts and put back the humanist concern by focusing more on the lived experiences and lived emotions, and their representations—of which is concerned for doing and performing that goes beyond merely representation or describing the non-representational (Pile, 2009: 6). Its approach is to understand the interaction of people and his word to “the extent to which the human world is constructed and lived through the emotions…that to neglect the emotions is to exclude a key set of relations through which lives are lived and societies made” (Anderson and Smith, 2001: 7). Beginning in 2003, mounting human geographical researchers have shifted their approach to research and have found greater lenience towards emotion geography. Pile (2009) had identified three assumptions that he believed is responsible to the shift of perspective with regards to the approach of human geography—“a specific ontology of relation, mainly involving a concern with fluidity; a valuation of proximity and intimacy; and a methodological emphasis on ethnography” (2009: 5). Assumptions towards the Shift to Emotion Geography Emotion as a precise, explicit ontology of relation meant that relations and how people deal and interact with other people could best be explained and approached academically if social scientists also would look at the emotional aspects. For instance, studying how concepts of generosity, reciprocity, and mutual respect among strangers after a devastating calamity could best be understood when emotion is studied. For it is through emotion that people are able to explain with some degree of rationality the reasons behind selfless actions, traumatic experience, etc. Emotional geography could also play a role in housing studies. The emotional relations involved in purchasing and selling a house are often times undermined—i.e. frustration, anger, embarrassment, greed. Thus, housing competition and fluctuations in real estate market is still not something that could be substantially explained by conventional models of supply, demand, and profit. The second reason behind the increasing prominence of emotion geography as a human geographic research is that it places value to proximity and intimacy—that landscape and physical space could evoke emotion and that places have emotional qualities attached to them. For instance, when people would enter say, their work area, they tend to be more timid, on their guard, and become more professional in a sense. But when they get home, they are comfortable, relaxed, happy, and content. This is because physical space has within them emotional qualities that rouse emotional reactions. To put it in a larger perspective, emotional geography would prove useful in business process outsourcing industry that wants to have an offshore account but maintains an in-house operation of their business. Say, an American-based company would opt to offshore its customer service department to India, understanding how Indian nationals perceive spaces could create more intimacy in their workspace. By doing so, there is a greater chance that the workplace would have positive emotion to it—it is culturally sensitive, respectful of personal space, things that would directly affect the emotions of the workers and thus affect the quality of their work. Lastly is that though emotion is empirically difficult to study, it focuses on methodological emphasis on ethnography to provide a scientific study. Ethnographic methods allow researchers to do a holistic interpretation, description, and analysis of culture through immersion and participation with the subjects under observation through rigorous and intensive field work. In terms of human geographic research, ethnographic methodologies have developed several research tools that have departed itself from the traditional concept of qualitative research to a more reflexive approach that is more dependent in terms of interpretations, analysis, and assumptions of the researcher (Barker, 2008: 32-33). Ethnographic methods allow for researchers to present a more qualitative approach towards understanding emotion as theme for human geography. By supplementing one ethnographic method with another; i.e. a combination of interview, diaries/ recording, virtual ethnography, participant observation, focus group discussion, and questionnaires, researchers could provide a more vivid detail and a more holistic approach to emotion as subject of geographic inquiry as compared to just using one method. This way, the weaknesses or limitations of each method are minimized. Also it will allow for the presentation of the data gathering, though tackling a very subjective topic, is still able to present studies in a manner that is objective. Affect Geography In affect geography, the body is perceived as transpersonal rather than personal. The body is seen as a tool that challenges the expression of emotions—in this case the non-psychological location. It is not a source for testimonial evidence to which personal experiences are subject for analysis, but a tool that would let researchers reveal the trans-human, non-cognitive, and inexpressible that underlies and constitutes social life, although indirectly or unknowingly (Pile, 2009:11). If emotional geography perceive the body as a way of identifying and recognizing human differences—the human factor in humanity; then affectual geography’s perception of the body is social—a priori to its personal experiences, and universal—that it is part of a collective. Ergo, the body is an important subject and is taken very seriously both by emotion and affect geography but is interpreted and perceived differently. Both argues that the body is a social production that tends to generalize or universalise the body—either by presumptions that the personal lays beyond the social or by presumptions that transpersonal nonhuman goes beyond the production of humanness (Pile, 2009:11). As emotional geography focuses on represented emotions or expressed emotions; affect geography on the other hand focuses on the non-represented; the difference thus lie with respect to the representability of emotions and affects. “Non-representational theory emphasises the importance of inexpressible affects” (Pile, 2009: 12). And while some geographers would often use the terms affect and emotion interchangeably, emotion is more associated with specific, identifiable, empirical feelings and sensation that is felt by individual subjects, affect on the other hand is non-individualized and mobilized conceptually rather than having an empirical basis (Bondi, 2005: 437). Approaches to Affect Geography Affect geography, according to Thrift (2004) is “a form of thinking, often indirect and nonreflective, it is true, but thinking all the same. And, similarly, all manner of the spaces which they generate must be thought of in the same way, as means of thinking and as thought in action.” With the working definition, he also suggested that affect geography could therefore be approached in four ways. First is affect as a representation of practices that construct overt behaviour as product of common day-to-day interaction. From this context, the emotion usually comes not from the body, but from the external environment (2004: 60). In this case, affect geography could be approached or used in studying the patterns of daily life and how the disruption on these patterns could evoke particular emotion. This translation focuses on how external environment triggers the emotion that is not present in the usual pattern of interaction but limits its analysis on the superficial and finds its weakness in understanding as to why a particular disruption in the pattern would elicit a particular emotion and if that emotion would be a general reaction, or a cross-cultural one. The second approach to affect is anchored on the psychoanalytic framework and is based on the notion of drive. It follows the Freudian premise of sexual urges as the root cause for human motivation and identity (Thrift, 2004: 61). Of course this approach to affect is highly debatable but this translation do have grounds that libido and sexual urges have great impacts in affecting and influencing even the most rational of minds. However, focusing on the sexual urges alone undermines all other aspects and put all other human dynamics that could influence emotion out of balance. Third translation to affect geography is a realistic representation that centres on combining competencies through relations and interaction in a world which is constantly becoming. In this sense, affect is the by-product of an active encounter that takes the form of the ability of the body and mind alike—either increasingly or decreasingly, to act: if positively it increases that ability and if negatively, diminishes the ability (Thrift, 2004: 61-62). With this approach we find that the body and mind is inseparable ad must react in unison with the external environment. The significance of this approach lies on its emphasis on the importance of relation between the mind and body and how both simultaneously react to the complex elements of the exterior environment to evoke emotion. The last approach to affect is Darwinian. The premise of this approach is that emotion is universal and is the result of evolution. However, expressions of emotion are cross-cultural—i.e. body posture, movement, gestures, facial expression and voice modulation. Proponents of this approach have also expounded their approach to include the communicative properties of emotions. And also added that there are at least five universal emotions that transcends all cultural barriers—anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and enjoyment (Thrift, 2004: 63-64). Though the Darwinian approach presents a holistic and in-depth approach to affect geography, claiming that there are emotions that transcend cultural barriers would be undermining the social experience that could influence the attitude behind a particular emotion and thus undermining the understanding as to the cultural aspect of the production of the emotional reaction in relation to spatial environment. Affect and Emotion Geography: Putting the Puzzle Together Affect and Emotion geography, despite being two different fields, are often times used together—even interchangeable in some research; because of the common grounds that the two specialized fields share despite their very distinct characteristics: these are, according to Pile (2009): “ (1) relational ontologies that privilege fluidity; (2) valuing proximity and intimacy; and (3) an ethnomethodological predisposition” (2009: 10). The fluidity of both emotion and affect could be seen in their mobility—while emotions move, affects circulate—both having a place for establishing patterns of emotions. They are both interested in the movement and interaction between people and other things, they are unbounded. Yet despite their unrestrained characteristic, both emotions and affects are channelled in some form (Pile, 2009: 10). Another key feature of their similarity is the value their place in proximity and intimacy but is again interpreted differently—emotional geography focuses on people and their personal feelings while affect geography is more interested in interpreting and understanding the ‘hidden’ cause of emotions through analysis of representations—collective experiences rather than separate analysis of personal accounts (Pile, 2009: 11). Moreover, the way both approaches perceive and interpret the body and emotion is on opposite viewpoint but finds common ground that it should be approached intimately, humanly, and personally. Lastly, both emotion and affect geography rely on ethnographic methods to pursue research. Because of the qualitative predisposition of the studies, ethnographic methodologies such as questionnaires, observation, and interviews are the most common form of research methodology in gathering data. Conclusion The increasing shift towards affect and emotion as a major theme for human geographical research could be the cause for the clamour for a more intimate and personal understanding of human interaction. With post globalization and modernity making the world a more connected space, people are becoming more culturally aware of the diversity of people and are more liberal to pluralistic views of how interaction and external environment create emotions and affect. By studying emotion and affect geography, researchers and lay people hope to gain deeper understanding on how emotions are produce and understands how these emotions affects us. The increasing popularity and academic following of emotion and affect geography as an approach to human geography finds, furthermore, its strength in the intimacy of the research—the human connections that transcend between the researchers and his participants; between the researcher and the readers; and between the readers and the participants. The ability of emotion and affect geography to be able to connect or relate to an outside audience I believe is its greatest strength and its enduring quality. That despite the cross-cultural difference, there is that invisible thread that connects us that is usually undermined on quantitative researches. Though emotion and affect geography’s weakness largely remains to be its political nature, or sometimes the highly-gendering of emotion as is the approach of feminism and feminist movement, emotion and affect’s weakness could be minimized through the effective use of its data gathering method by using a myriad of ethnographic method for triangulation and data verification. This would tend to lessen subjectivity and produce a more objective and holistic interpretation of the data results and thus produce an insightful and better understanding of the subject that is being researched. Reference List Anderson, K. and Smith, S. (2001) ‘Editorial: Emotional Geographies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 26, pp. 7-10. Barker, C. (2008) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, 3rd edition, London: Sage Publications. Bondi, L. (2005). ‘Making Connections and Thinking Through Emotions: Between Geography and Psychotherapy’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 30, pp. 433-448. Fouberg, E. H., Murphy, A. B. and de Blij, H. J. (2009) Human Geography: People, Place, and Culture, 9th edition, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Pile, S. J. (2009) ‘Emotions and Affect in Recent Human Geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 35, pp. 5-20. Thierstein, A. and Schein, E. (2008). ‘Emerging Cities on the Arabian Peninsula: Urban Space in the Knowledge Economy Context’, International Journal of Architectural Research, vol. 2, issue 2, pp. 178-195. Thrift, N. (2004). ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards A Spatial Politics of Affect’, Geografiska Annaler Series B: Human Geography, vol. 86, issue 1, pp. 57-78. Read More