The Politics and Ethics of Anxiety

How anthropologists have invoked and conceptualized anxiety reflects the development of new ways of relating selfhood, subjectivity, and the sociopolitical to each other. This article examines the recent development of anthropological frameworks of anxiety in the context of the rising prevalence of and interest in anxiety. Since its inception in modern social theory, anxiety has functioned as a commentary on people's relation to risk, precarity, and emerging forms of capitalism. Early anthropological approaches to anxiety relied extensively on psychological theories that focused on the emotions at an individual level. Although they framed anxiety as a social condition in addition to an inner one, they were still beholden to the politics and ethics of the sovereign subject and dichotomies between self and society, individual and collective, and citizen and state. By framing anxiety as a social practice and relation, contemporary anthropologists are now redefining anxiety's role in political-economic transformations from a passive reflection of widespread uncertainty and insecurity to an agentive constituent of politics itself.