In anthropology, the human condition (Arendt 1958) usually encompasses the universal, indispensable aspects of ‘being human’ across a diversity of moral geographies. My talk will bring forth a discussion on how rage has become fundamental to our contemporary human condition as the world gets more interconnected through shared senses of injustice, along with fear, hatred, paranoia, and other ‘negative affect’. For the past decades, this world has faced exponential failures of democracy, resuscitation of dictatorships, rising gender backlash, surveillance capitalism, extractivism, protracted wars, mass killing and displacement, a pandemic, and authoritarian carceral regimes. These are merely some of the factors that has tipped the earth into what social scientists call ‘the bad, ugly Anthropocene’ (cf Dalby 2015)—signalling that human activity has eroded the social, economic and biological frontiers of planetary life. I want to explore how collective anger as a response to this plenitude in planetary crisis has become the defining fabric of contemporary human lives. Whether as resistance to earthly destruction, or riling for enforced segregations, or the fury in daily exposure to death and structural inequalities, anger seeps into ‘public moods’ through news, media and activism, and animates various experiences of injury and discrimination. These affective landscapes create pervasive atmospheres of human rage across the global North and South. Even the wrath of more-than-human worlds, such as climate vengeance, retaliatory floods, and cleansing wildfires, becomes integrated into this global indignation.
How can one ‘do’ anthropology in ‘the age of rage’ (Bone 2024)? Can we regurgitate ideas that frame extreme vulnerability in the South (e.g. necropolitics) and (re)interpret volatile geopolitics in the North? Do we direct our gaze to the speed at which angry communities are developed, deluded, and dispersed within digital ecologies, as ‘real-life’ protest is parallelly denied any voice? Should we focus on digital platforms that offer a range of new avenues (manospheres, rant portals, rage-baiting, netivism) to draw communities into the realm of rage? And what about the anger of anthrologists who conduct research on rapidly changing terrains of human fragility? If our interlocuters are in various states of anger, what is the impact of ‘their anger, our anger’ on the future of ethnography? Between the ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2009) of human life and the ‘stickiness’ (Ahmed 2004) of disparities, my talk will raise some issues around the global circulation of rage, which is embodied, stoked and energised in the contemporary era.