Ana Carolina Balthazar (UCL, London) "Shame, Anger, and the Emotional Logics of British Politics

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Engaging critically with recent interdisciplinary arguments linking repressed economic shame to anger and resentment among right-wing voters, in this paper I draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Thanet, a seaside area in South East England that has witnessed the growth of right-wing sentiments, to ask whether what I call an "emotional logic" of shame and anger is in fact specific to the right. Through the engagement with retired (60+) interlocutors with different political affiliations, and informed by my own positionality as a Brazilian migrant, I trace how experiences of shame, pride and humiliation - often connected to a sense of being outside productive economic and social life at older age - inform political action and moral reasoning. Rather than treating emotion as a "distraction" from rational politics, or as that which "leaks" from otherwise reasoned positions, I argue that emotions are themselves constitutive of the moods and horizons through which political subjects perceive and act in the world. In doing so, the paper builds on classical anthropological inquiries into ethics and morality by foregrounding the role of emotion within them, and contributes to a growing interdisciplinary effort - resonant with feminist and decolonial critiques of rationalist thought - to take emotion seriously as a political and analytical force, rather than as a pathology reserved for one side of the political spectrum. Dr Ana Carolina (Carol) Balthazar is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at UCL, London.