Ethnography in Progress - Katie Arnold-Murray

November 13th 11 am: PhD Candidate Katie Arnold-Murray, Linguistic Anthropology

Discussant: PhD Candidate Conor Lanning, Cultural Anthropology

Hale 450 or Zoom

Friendship bracelets in the 2024 US election and the political commodification of emotion

This chapter investigates how friendship bracelets circulated as objects which joy stuck to during the 2024 US election, and how the circulation of these objects commodified emotions for political gain to construct a sense of friendship and community between interactants. This commodification simultaneously served to rhematize (Gal & Irvine, 2019) specific emotions as iconic of opposing political sides, with Democrats viewing joy and positivity as representative of the political left and viewing hate and negativity as iconic of the political right. The findings of this chapter are based on ethnographic study of Swifties for Kamala, and my analysis carries out narrative analysis of small stories (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008; Georgakopoulou, 2007) told in ethnographic interviews with members of Swifties for Kamala wherein they discussed friendship bracelets in their political work. I critique the commodification of emotions associated with friendship in the political arena and discuss how friendship “provides a critical site for anthropologists to study identity formation, to pose new questions about the articulation of personal and social identities” (Bell & Coleman, 1999, p. 12)

Please RSVP to receive the paper and the zoom link for the event.