The Ties Bound around Us: Collective Emotions and the Making of Boundaries

• In Event: 606 - Section on Social Psychology Roundtable Session (co-sponsored with Section on Sociology of Emotions)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Beliefs, Emotions and Memory

Abstract

Since the emotional turn in the 1980s, sociological scholarship of emotions, mainly social interactionists and social movement scholars have focused on individuals’ social interactions to understand the social constructivism of emotions and the contribution of shared emotions among social movements insurgents, respectively. Some sociologists of emotions expanded the scope of emotional studies to macro perspectives, comparing power and status of individuals and subsequent emotions they have as a result of them. This article focuses on the ways in which Christians as a community of religious minorities internalize violence and express negative emotions such as fear, anger, frustrations and embarrassment as reaction to the historical and repressive violence inflicted by the state and Islamist in contemporary Egypt. The purpose of this research is to understand how collective emotions among Egyptian Christians contribute to create and maintain symbolic boundaries that bind them as “us” versus them (Muslims) and highlight the importance of the consideration of collective emotions to “imagine” communities. With the increase in the power of Islamists since the 1970s along with fear politics of the authoritarian leader, Hosni Mubarak since the 1980s, Egyptian Christianshad to fight for their rights. I draw data from my seven months’ ethnographic research in the district of Shubra in Cairo, which includes 32 in-depth interviews and participant observations in various spaces of the region. My findings show that collective emotions are the effect of internalized violence against Egyptian Christians. This research expands the scope of macro sociology of emotions to the state and religious minorities.

Author

• Hyun Jeong Ha, University of Texas