The Anthropology of Anxiety: An Introduction

ABSTRACT This introduction is part of a special section on the anthropology of anxiety. As a collection, it offers an innovative anthropological approach to anxiety as a social, political, and ontological condition rather than a clinical disorder. Each paper builds on theoretical and philosophical traditions, from Heidegger to Tillich to Lacan to Freud, to explore how anxiety inhabits fields of relations defined by radical social shifts, existential uncertainties, or political, moral, or ethical crises. What is unique about this collection is that each article argues anxiety is found when semantically overdetermined and conflicting scripts of the future, narratives of the past, and potentialities for selfhood collide. It defines anxiety as a condition of multiple disturbances that can inhabit various discourses and practices, affects and feelings, collective actions, and individual sensibilities. It emphasizes the leaky, destructive, emancipatory, and transformative nature of anxiety by examining institutional and political borderlands, liminal and multivocal identities, emerging and disrupting configurations of intimacy, and, by doing so, defines anxiety in relation to courage, love, desire, pain, hurt, and guilt rather than simply fear.