Collective Desire and Moral-Spiritual Resistance to Individual Emotional Interiority in the Rising Market Economy among the Akha

• In Event: 232. Emotional and Intimate Variations: Historicizing and Contextualizing Affect amid Changing Political Economies in Mainland Southeast Asia, Part 1. Sponsored by the Thailand/Laos/Cambodia Studies Group

Abstract

A fair amount of literature on neoliberalism and rising market economies in Asia link them to the development of an individual subjectivity with consumerist desires which privatizes and commoditizes dimensions of social life such as the ‘self’ (Rofel) and emotional interiority. However, others (Yan, Tran, Postert) have found that this is not an accurate description of changing social and emotional life in Asia. Using the dimension of the emotional world, I find that among the Akha, with a rising market economy, emotions are intersubjective and consumerist desires are collective in nature. I also find that there is a resistance to the individual with an elaborately developed emotional interiority, a resistance that is linked to local codes of moral-spirituality. Field research was conducted among Akha in Thailand in 2015 and 2016.

Author

• Deborah Ellen Tooker, Le Moyne College