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ONAFFECT ◆ A Methodological Note IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I wanted to produce an intimate account of the changes and continuities produced by globalization—and global migration—in the Philippines. I have tried to show how migrants carry with them histories and subjectivities that have been transformed through their encounters with states and host societies as well as changes in their home villages . I see the book as providing a useful platform for follow-on work. As a contemporary village ethnography gone global, this book opens up into key questions explored by anthropology’s subdisciplines. The text not only points readers toward debates on migration and affect, but it can also direct readers to compare ethnographies of development in Southeast Asia, examine the political anthropology on the margins of the state, study informal economies , explore accounts of subjectivity, investigate contemporary indigenous identities, and develop accounts of the uptake of new media and communications technologies. I have tried to work from my specific village case study toward general claims in order to demonstrate how far these claims can extend and where they fail. I anticipate that my readers will be reading ethnographies like this one not only to learn about the wider world but also with the aim of making their own research projects more interesting and entirely different pieces of scholarly work. Part of this book is about care and migration. But it provides only a partial answer to some of the bigger questions about Filipino migration: if care is a universal disposition or a technical proficiency, why is it that Filipino migrants are able to market themselves as the quintessential caring people, almost as a brand name? The answer, this book suggests, comes from the ways Filipinos conceptualize care as based on an ethic of shared labor and mutual affective exposure, much as Luis (and Esposito) considers work. This book thus foreshadows how the explanation for Filipino care lies in the affective experience of mutual exposure and the elaborations of exchange in caring work as these coincide with Filipino relational personhood and the obligations of kin and village exchange that constitute it. I am currently working on this follow-on project with a group of Filipino migrant friends in London. Methodologically, the question posed by my approach here is how I can claim to understand affect when much of this book has been written as 216 ◆ ON AFFECT secondary description rather than reporting directly what my respondents have said and the context for their statements. While I flag this in my introduction, here I want to draw together the reasons behind this approach. If I had offered the reader more interactive dialogue, reported in the actual language spoken by respondents, and described its context in greater detail, I would nonetheless have failed to reveal affect in any transparent way. The book is written against the suggestion that affect and emotions are related to each other in a universally applicable formula that would make reporting simply an act of translating emotion rather than my own authorial representation. My use of the secondhand and descriptive is intended to mark that and to provide the sense of dynamic ebb and flow, offering the staid ground against which outbursts stand out. To make producing a written text even more complicated, Adyangan Ifugao does not have a rich vocabulary for emotional expression that can be easily translated into equivalents in English. People don’t say the equivalent of “I’m angry . . . (sad, happy, etc.)” or “so-and-so was showing enthusiasm or was diffident.” They talk about showing a feeling that is (in English) “nice” or “good” or “not nice” and “not good,” and they do this after the fact, interpreting facial expressions and gestures. So to explain any exchange, one would need to interview both sides to find out what people intended to convey and then what they thought about what was shown and shared—good or bad and what particular English feelings they attributed to it—and then how they themselves identified those feelings in their interlocutors. Even after years of fieldwork, I have had only a few opportunities to do this where people were then comfortable with my sharing the results with an academic audience. My methods and tools in this project have been those of classic long-term participant observation, trying to understand the world through what happens in a singular neighborhood. I visited the various sites...

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