In this article, I propose an emotional-cognitive approach to ethnicity, demonstrating how boundaries and categorizations are relationally appraised and felt. I address Brubaker and colleagues' insightful work on ethnicity as cognition, as an area that would be analytically enhanced by combining cognition and emotion. Integrating emotion as a co-constituent of ethnic enactment transcends the mind–body dichotomy of rational versus emotional considerations, broadening our conceptualization of how people categorize the world in everyday circumstances. Drawing on ethnic and racial studies, STS, and sociology of emotions literatures, I review works emphasizing affect that have not sufficiently developed their relationship to cognition. Consequently, I put forward implications for a nascent emotional-cognitive ethnicity, supported by a brief secondary analysis of data on migration and interethnic friendships. This perspective reveals that ethnic boundaries are not only cognitively apprehended but also affectively charged and managed through relational practice.
Andrew Webb (Mon,) studied this question.