Abstract
This article argues that emotions can be a medium of social power. Using qualitative interview material from American Jews discussing anti-Semitism and its relationship to contemporary politics, it engages recent scholarship on emotions and political contention and shows how emotions make effective the various forms of symbolic exclusion by which group members exercise what Bourdieu calls symbolic power. It also explores the emotional connections to group membership by which some “excluded” members can engage in symbolic struggle over “the principles of vision and division” Bourdieu (Sociological Theory 7(1), 14–25, 1989) that define the group. Finally, it shows how emotions work to incite discipline in some group members, inspiring them to conform to dominant definitions of group membership so as to avoid both symbolic struggle and exclusion.
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Notes
While much sociological work on emotions distinguishes socially-defined, conscious emotions from pre-linguistic, non-conscious affects, the distinction is not germane for my purposes here, so I use the term emotion to refer to the entire spectrum from non-conscious to consciously recognized and named states of bodily responses to one’s situation (Hochschild 1979, 1983; Gould 2009; Massumi 2002).
Like many sociologists, they thus challenge the perspectives of many social scientists, including Petersen, who attends to and respects the role of emotions in collective action, but, echoing “collective behavior” scholars of the mid-twentieth century (for instance, Gusfield 1970, Klapp 1969, Smelser 1968) still posits emotions as individual “compulsions” (Petersen 2002, p. 3).
For instance, feminists (Stein 1993; Vance 1984; Hirsch and Kellner 1990), student activists (Balser 1997), civil rights activists (Balser 1997; Morris 1984; Polletta 2002; Robnett 2005), LGBT activists (Armstrong 2003; Gamson 1996; Ghaziani 2008) and AIDS activists (Gould 2009). For discussions of the factors that can shape which of multiple, overlapping identities become salient as group identities in the first place, see Laitin (1986) and Tilly (1998).
For more on how these struggles shed light on group identification, see Moon (2012).
It is not likely that my findings would have been significantly different if I had interviewed respondents with lower education or income levels. Scholars who study American Jews tend to find that while education and income have slight and opposing effects on political views in the general public, the effect is even smaller among Jews (Cohen et al. 2008). With regard to views of the Middle East peace process, there seems to be some evidence that income has significant, negative effect on “hawkishness,” though this relationship is not as strong as that between views of the peace process and many other factors (including denomination, Jewish education, and being male) (Kotler-Berkowitz and Sternberg, 2000: Table 6 [no pagination]).
Those who have had the greatest experience with ethnic violence, such as immigrants from former Soviet countries or Israel, may have been least willing to participate in a study of experiences and understandings anti-Semitism conducted by a non-Jew, but it is likely that their comments would amplify, rather than transform, the findings presented here.
For groups like these that are smaller and more locally-based, I use pseudonyms to protect respondents’ confidentiality. All personal names and identifiers have been changed for the same reason.
To be sure, habitus varies with factors such as religion; what is doxic to an Orthodox Jew may not be doxic for a Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, or secular Jew, for instance. However, the principles of civil Judaism themselves unite members of these disparate groups and other Jews, anchoring what I refer to as American Jewish habitus while providing sites for classificatory struggle.
The 2010 Current Jewish Population Reports (Sheskin and Dashefsky 2011, p. 32–33) found local communities varying widely with regard to the percentage of respondents reporting that they feel “extremely or very” emotionally attached to Israel (32–62 %), suggesting that national surveys may mask much regional variation; however, it is not clear exactly what these responses mean.
What Smith would call chimeric anti-Semitism might be seen today in the circulation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as reality, stories about Jews eating Arab children, and the like; see Hirsch ([ca. 2007]). There are still examples of chimeric anti-Semitism in the world, but these are currently highly marginal in the United States.
For some critics, the very concept of a “Jewish state” contradicts the notion of Israel as a democracy, especially given that 20 % of its citizens are not Jewish and are subject to double standards in public services and attitudes like those Lisa witnessed.
Bourdieu (1989, 1991) would beg to differ; as he considered symbolic violence—the power of the state to define group membership and reality and have its declarations accepted—a form of oppression affecting everyone touched by the nation-state. This concept certainly has some bearing on the topic at hand, but is a subject for a different article. Clearly, the state of Israel is widely seen as a solution to some major problems of Jewish oppression, including the Nazi Holocaust and subsequent attacks on Jews around the world.
Apart from the references to Ahmadinejad’s more recent actions, this list echoes Dershowitz’s (2003) reasoning in The Case for Israel.
This concept builds on Herzfeld’s argument that rhetoric is “the source of social continuity and change in all areas of social life” and a “causative agent” in the social world (1997, p. 142). Herzfeld’s (1997) and Butler’s (1993, 1997) understandings of performative authority are more apt here than Bourdieu’s (1991). See also Austin (1965). While Bourdieu (1991) sees the authority of the performative inhering in the social structural position of the speaker, Butler and Herzfeld show that such authority is sometimes created by citing previous nonhierarchical authority, or by affirming the everyday authority of others, and thus does not depend on structural position. Of course, in this case part of the power of Rick’s gesture comes from its widespread recurrence; the numbers of people who share his definitions contribute to the efficacy of the claims made by each.
Indeed, Goldberg (1996) argues that the success of such informal gestures creates institutional support.
By delineating types of symbolic exclusion and elaborating their effects and people’s responses to them, I expand on Herzfeld’s discussion of the performative power of stereotype (1997, pp. 165–164). Such rhetoric also echoes what Alexander (1992) describes as the distinction between worthy citizens and unworthy non-citizens in any civil society’s discourse. See also Alexander and Smith (1993), and Lamont (1992, 2000).
Bill made it clear that any state is open to criticism by its citizens or others; it was not out of bounds, in his mind, for Americans to criticize American policy in Iraq, nor is it anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli government. “Can you be anti-Israel and not anti-Semitic? Yes, you can. And it occurs in Israel. [And] to be Jewish does not mean to necessarily be pro-Israel. That’s fine,” he remarked, citing the small group of Israeli orthodox Jews who are critical of Zionism for religious reasons, believing that it is up to the Messiah, not human beings, to restore Israel. On the other hand, at a public event I attended at a synagogue, where a speaker discussed the creation of the state of Israel, a member of the audience mentioned that small Israeli orthodox group; the speaker responded in quick and forceful words, saying that there was a special place in Hell reserved for those who turn on their own people.
The organization’s actual name. Minkin, S. A. (n.d.). Constructive critique or unwelcome opinions: Israel advocacy inside a West Coast Hillel. Unpublished manuscript.
Whatever form it takes, symbolic exclusion challenges the legitimacy of those whose claims or behaviors run afoul of one’s definition of what it means to be “us,” of what members of the moral community owe each other. I have argued (Moon 2012) argues that these questions are central to the production of collectivities.
That sense of chaos or destruction is certainly made concrete in this case by the attacks on Jews in living memory, but all nation-states face similar threats, because, as many have pointed out, all nation-states are fictions, enacted by sometimes brutally incorporating some people and eliminating others (Tilly 1998; Herzfeld 1997).
Thinking about symbolic exclusion from a more Gramscian perspective (Laitin 1986), we could also say that these techniques show the work that people must do to maintain the “common sense” status of their political beliefs when the latter are opened for questioning from within the group. My approach complements Laitin’s perspective on how some identities come to be considered more significant than others by focusing on how people enact political struggles through collective emotions.
The policy may have changed between when Lisa read it and when I did. When I consulted the JCC’s website, the policy barred only specifically Jewish groups that did not affirm the need for Israel to remain a Jewish state, thus probably exempting Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Indeed, banning only Jews who do not affirm the Jewish state confirms that this policy is part of the struggle to define Jewishness itself.
This universalism was generally shared by Bill, Rick, and other respondents who took a more protective stance with regard to the state of Israel. The difference is that these speakers saw it as foolhardy to extend universalism to those whom they understood to be unwilling to or incapable of returning that graciousness, an example of the discursive struggle that Alexander (1992) posits as central to democratic civil society, the struggle over whom should be classified as democratic, and whom as repressive.
Lisa made no reference to Fackenheim’s (1987) “614th commandment” to deny Hitler a posthumous victory by asserting one’s Jewishness, though its resonance is evident.
Bernstein studied strategies for gaining political inclusion, in the form of lesbian and gay movements’ struggles for basic rights in a variety of polities. I expect that she would have found meanings to be more germane if she had looked at struggles over issues with subtler nuances for group insiders. A more analogous example would be struggles over whether Jews have full political rights, a struggle that would undoubtedly find a great deal more consensus among Jews (though no doubt there would be differences over strategy and the like). The conflict over policies in the Middle East would be more analogous to, say, a struggle over same-sex marriage rights, if the latter struggle were of a similar political scope and if same-sex marriage advocates felt their existence to be as imperiled as is the case here. In that case, struggles among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people over who is really homophobic, who is really “gay,” who is really working in “our” best interests would exhibit much more of the kind of symbolic struggle we see here.
Minkin, S. A. (n.d.). Constructive critique or unwelcome opinions: Israel advocacy inside a West Coast Hillel. Unpublished manuscript.
Similar blocks can exist for Palestinians as well, though their experiences of this conflict are not equivalent. Future research will examine some of these issues from a Palestinian perspective.
After the explosion of collective identity studies in the 1990s, some important works challenged the utility of the concept (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Polletta and Jasper 2001) but I have argued (Moon 2012) for examining how historically marginalized and stigmatized groups actually go about defining themselves and their members. This article advances that project by showing how emotions and power animate those processes.
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Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the countless friends and colleagues who have offered insight and encouragement. Particular help with this article came from Tobin Belzer, Steven M. Cohen, Lynne Gerber, Debbie Gould, Arlie Hochschild, Avi Jezer, Sarah Anne Minkin, Sameena Mulla, Jessica Weddle, and Jaye Cee Whitehead, some of whom read multiple drafts and offered tremendous help and insight. The anonymous referees and Editors at Theory and Society provided excellent, helpful, and gracious feedback, for which I am thankful. Most of all, I am deeply grateful to the anonymous respondents who made this work possible by spreading the word through their networks and being gracious enough to share their time and insights with me. I hope they may find something in this work to make them feel their contributing was worthwhile.
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Moon, D. Powerful emotions: symbolic power and the (productive and punitive) force of collective feeling. Theor Soc 42, 261–294 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9190-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9190-3