Identity On Move
What is the relationship between emotions and collective identity in western social protest? In this website we look at how identities take form collectively and individually in public manifestations and express and arouse in such demonstrations. This project is both theoretical and deeply personal: it depicts our exploration that, two anthropologists coming from China and Vietnam, was a somewhat foreign manifestation of public reaction and emotion. This vantage point promises to bring a unique, multi-cultural observation and reflection to our project.
The ethnographic research focuses on emotions and identity in European social manifestation.The aims of the study are 1) to identify how and what emotions permeate through the crowd as a social manifestation progresses, and 2) to situate the power dynamics between individual and collective identity in social manifestations.
Co-work with Dinh Thi Anh Thu
The project could be found: https://wordpress.com/view/identityonthemove790859079.wordpress.com
What would have happened before you get angry? You would not feel angry without any reason. You must see, hear, and realize something. It could be a photo of the people you hate or other things that bother you, which trigger your inner anger blowing off. Naturally, anger and other emotions are not only a psychological state which originates from nowhere, it is a dynamic cultural practice evoked by the contact between self and others, may them be humans or non-humans (Eva Illouz, 2020). Emotion is related to race, sex, status, life history, etc. As a heterogeneous assemblage, it is complicated to generalize different emotions in the social protest. For that case, we applied James Jasper’s model to help us to categorize and present the emotions we observed in two protests in March 2020 in Brussel. Jasper (2011) divides emotion into two kinds in terms of the ‘objects’. Shared emotion is a term coined to describe how participants feel for others outside the group, while Reciprocal emotion depicts feelings that protestors have toward each other. Moreover, emotions can also be divided through the period, namely, longer term and shorter term. Below we would elaborate four typical emotions in social protest, each one represents one grid.
Hate: Hate is categorized as long-term emotion that is inside humans for a long period of time. The creation of hate is highly associated with the propaganda on social media – as can be easily observed in social media platforms in which individuals are free to contribute and dispute opinions. Hate raises a social antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘then’. Therefore, hate can be one of key motivations that compel protestors to act. Most of the interviewees said they hate the fact that “our leaders” do not take adequate actions to protect our environment. One extreme example is when we hear a group of two people chanting that they want “death” to all the politicians. Once the long-term hate accumulates to a particular level, it could result in a radical explosion of anger.
Anger: In 1983, Hochschild wrote a book to unravel the commodification of human emotions. The ability to manage your emotions in certain places relates to a man’s competence in modern society. Intellectuals barely associate this emotion with positive factors of politics. Also, anger is not the kind of the emotions we try to inflict in daily life. If a person gets angry and acts on it, it means sensibility has gone off the rail. His actions would be considered as impulsive, which may not be taken seriously in the decision making process. However, through our fieldwork, we found out anger, as the primary emotion shared by group members, contributes to the formation of collective identity. It motivates protestors to engage in the process. Why is anger in this context taken in a positive light? We think, the idea of an angry collective, or more specifically, the idea of a group with shared emotions plays an important role in mediating and redirecting anger to a socially acceptable form of channeling such anger. Collective identity, in this sense, carries emotional significance to the individuals as well as social rationality to political performances.
Love: Here love is not meant as romantic love, waiting for a prince to save you someday. Love in social protests serves as a foundation for trusting relationships. Individuals from all over the planet, without knowing each other personally, share love and respect for each other as they have the same attitude towards particular subjects. The intangible bond enables them to easily form a community. The ticket to membership is empathy. During the women’s day protest, women from all over the world gather in the heart of Europe and discuss different topics of femininity. No matter if you are protesting for Cameroon’s civil war and death of thousands of innocent women and children, or fighting against capitalism which have been imposing a hegemonic gender stereotype of labor division, they all share the love for feminism. Even though their aims or definition of women differ from each other, it is crucial to acknowledge that they all contribute to the united imagined community that supports women
Joy: Quite frankly, we were exhausted after following the 3-hour protest, walking and shouting and talking – and repeat. But we did have lots of fun! Regardless that it was a serious protest, participants would also feel joy and excitement. For our fieldwork, we found out that protest turned out to be a ‘big party’, where youths enjoy the life of the crowd, or where women feel empowered. Joy could explain the reason why protestors keep engaging in protests. Every time the atmosphere seems to go down, there would be a voluntary cheerleader to shout out the slogans: “What do we want!”. Then there would come a huge reply from the public, shouting “Climate justice!” / “Women justice!”. This interaction is like a small ceremony, reinforcing protestors’ status and creating more emotions such as joy or excitement. “Participation carries many pleasures, which may be great enough to motivate participation without relying on a cognitive belief that success is possible or likely” （Jasper, 2001:18）.
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How signs, in social movement, express personal identity?
How it may bring people to a collective identity?
On 6th Mar, 2020, we conducted our first fieldwork in Brussels. It was a cold and rainy day, the first thing that caught our eyes, after we walked out of the central train station, was the colorful banners held by a large crowd of people. To be honest, it was the first time we have seen that many people in Europe gathering and manifesting together, even with the terrible weather. We were so thrilled because we are from different backgrounds, especially in Thu’s and my country, protests are extremely unfavorable. To our surprise, we never expected how creative and loud humans can be about personal feelings and opinions. With that curiosity, we read carefully every sign held by protestors.
The banners in protest are ‘direct captions’ that explicitly express the identity of individuals. The sentences are not hard to read or understand. The girl in the photo, with a giant smile, told us that her angle to solve the environmental problem is to alleviate the rich/poverty gap. To some extent, she is against capitalism that only cares about generating profits at the expense of environmental and natural cost. Hence she wrote “Stop grilling the Planet, Start grilling the Rich” with lively drawings. It portrays the capitalist as a fat man, smoking a cigar and holding his money leisurely as opposed to the burning planet. She and her banner warn us about global warming and indicates the concealed forces that lead to it.
However, some people are not satisfied with simply putting their thoughts on a board. They have other ways to manifest their identity. In the middle of the protest, this man with a big yellow rectangle doll on his shoulder got our attention. Unlike most of the protestors, his manifestation is embodied in his dolls. He told us he’s furious about the fact that governments such as the EU don’t listen to people’s claims about the environment. Thus, ‘the banana with a mask’ symbolizes the silencing of people’s voice induced by power. If what we are saying is not listened to by the states, what is the difference between us and a banana in the state’s eyes?
In the middle of the parade, we were a little tired of all kinds of banners (because we had walked almost two kilometers with our cameras behind us), and suddenly a pleasant saxophone came from the crowd.It was ‘three men in red dragged their instruments’. Not just mine, the emotions of everyone around are mobilized at once, and everyone becomes cheerful and powerful again, just like when you upgrade into next level when playing video games. For us anthropologists, this is more like a ritual, accompanied by saxophone Sounded, the protesters called the slogan “climate justice” or “women’s rights” again and again. People’s anger erupted from the deafening voice. This emotion not only infected all those who participated in the protest, but also reached everyone on the street corner. It kept telling us the original intention of coming here, our community and the progress we have completed. Here, Emotions are definitely not irrational , it’s our justified motivations why we insist on!
In sum, although the banners of the protesters are different, the emotion behind them is the same, anger and dissatisfaction with the ‘others’. The emotion distinguishes ‘us’ and ‘others’ in the protest, and through various slogans and performances, which reinforce the collective identity.
Youth for the climate is a climate action movement, inspired by Greta Thunberg who started striking every Friday from August 2018 to demand climate action. The motivation of this protest is to manifest youth’s anger on the arrogant environment policy, which considers to facilitate global warming. In the protest, furious youths brought their different banners, encountering each other and integrating into a big community with the same goals. In this interview, we are delighted to have “Jellyfish Umbrella” as our interviewee to talk about his experience in social protest. His outlook and symbol meaning, his best friends, his interaction with the crowds, and human’s changing attitude.
Our interview with the Jellyfish Umbrella reveals the interplay between banners, emotions and protestor’s identities.
Full non-fictional interview could be found here: https://identityonthemove790859079.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/interview-of-jellyfish-umbrella/
Conflicted participation, Intersectionality, and Collective Identity
When it comes to a social movement, we suppose that outsiders often believe it’s a homogeny, cohesive affiliation with one fixed identity, demonstrated by shared vocal statements. Through participation in the Youth Strike for Climate with Greta Thunberg in Brussels on March 6,2020, we have the opposite conclusion: The social movement is composed of different identities of individuals, it is a process where different points of view struggle, negotiate, and compromise. Social protests, therefore, is a site of mobilizing identities.
It has been a long time since the youth protest movement began in Europe. The iconic leader Greta Thunberg, known for her school strikes for climate in Sweden, finally came to the heart of Europe this year. When we first arrived at Brussels central train station on March 6th, 2020, it was a cold, stormy and rainy day, however, it didn’t stop the marcher’s enthusiasm in fighting to push actions to tackle climate change. People from all over Belgium and neighboring countries gathered on the street side by side, shouting “what do we want? Climate justice!” and “My heart is warmer than the global heat!”. Slogans such as “Praying for conscious and brave global thinking leaders”[1]urged the EU and global community to revamp its weak climate policies. As news reported, around 100,000 people, mostly teenagers, took part in the march. For most youths in the march, they uphold a consensus that they are the major inhabitants of the planet in the near future, but failure in dealing with climate change by ‘adults’ today may steal their future away. Environment threats are the biggest risks the world is facing in 2020. “I thought what they are doing is not enough”, one protestor said to us with anger, “if there is no future, why do we still hold on to our economy?”. The march seems to be antagonistic against the EU employees, which represents a binary distinction between we/you, or youth/EU.
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To our surprise, there is one group called EU staff for climate constituted by EU staff. Each of them is from a different country. Contrary to youth identity which age plays a salient role, their identity is more complex and conflicted; One woman from Germany talks to us “Yes, we do work for the EU. But we are human, and we are also parents. We are worried about the environment and our kids’ future.” But would you feel conflicted to join this movement as an EU staff? We asked that woman. “Maybe at the first, but we will explain what we are fighting and we got accepted into this group”. As Polletta & Jasper (2001) argue, collective identity is fluid and relational, emerging out of interactions between different audiences. Therefore, collective identity is not fixed, but in the marches individuals interact with other people who are just curious or their opponents, then they claim themselves. In this case, the binary distinction of Youth(we) & EU (you) can’t apply no longer. Instead, ‘Youth’ becomes a group of people with less power to affect the decision-making process. Even though you are one of the EU staff, if you still share the shame emotions such as anger to the arrogant power holders, you can become part of youth. As a result, the range of youth identity extends itself from an age concept to the resistance of hegemonic power.
Intersectionality Fighting from afar
The International Women strike happened in a different light compared to the Youth Strike for Climate. We saw people of all age ranges, mostly women. We could see that the same stage was reused for this second event. New addition: around 20 information booths were set up along the rounded area outside Central Station. The weather was incredibly dull: dark clouds chased away the sky’s attempts to shed some sunlights, cold rain was killing off our exposed skin bit by bit. Nonetheless, the crowd was loud and dynamic.
We made way to an energetic group of women whose booth was filled with flyers and posters with quite graphic visuals. They were from Cameroon and were fighting for the women and children suffering under the Anglophone crisis.
“There are babies dying, and mothers too. So we came here today to let people know about the situation in Cameroon.” – a woman explained the reason why she was there.
“How do you wish to help in this situation?” – I asked.
“We think that we can let people know about the war that is happening there. We can make our story known in the media. And we can ask for international help. It [the crisis] has been going on for too long, but do you think many people know about it? No. Even the government is killing people. We cannot do much here. We just want people to know about it.”
We could see that the group welcomed donations as well, the money will then be sent to the communities in need in Cameroon. We found another women group that was fighting from afar as they attended the strike. It was such a pity we could not speak French as their best English speaker could hardly explain the group’s purposes.
It was a group of Kurdish women originating from many countries. They were fighting for women’s rights in the Kurdish community. What we could gather from the women was that in the last decades, equality has been enhanced significantly among the Kurdish as the results of consistent movements; there are still many lasting problems, however. In the event of Women’s Day, they showed their pride and courage in joining the fight for equality.
“Women can change the world” it says.
We could not help but think if this was the right platform for these women. They are fighting against the issues that are thousand miles away and are intensely specific to other societies. When these women take up the identity as Kurdish, or Cameroonian, can others relate to them?
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Perhaps their presentation brings intersectionality and diversity in the dialogue. Their voices would take part in the larger discourse of gender equality and liberation. Yet, to their benefits, we could imagine more potential platforms that can facilitate their causes, which should appeal to people who can relate to their situation. Though, we do see that more exposure to public discourse can gather attention from those sharing the same morals, hence strengthen and extend the community network. Being a woman is a shared experience, but the experience of being a woman differs radically across the globe. What is important, then, is the strong sense of collective identity that connects individually transnationally.
CONCLUSION
This research found out social protest, rather than a homogeneous assemblage with fixed identities, works as a site of mobilizing identities, where individuals encounter, negotiate, and perform their identity. Drawing on James Jasper’s previous emotional work (2011), we also argue that social protest as a ceremony, facilitating individuals’ emotional expression and forming collective identity. Here, protestors use banners and slogans as tools to invoke protesters’ emotions, which is not irrational, to connect each other with same feeling and maintain the motivativations for marching.
1). Firstly, we sort out two different kinds of emotions, shared emotion (for outsides, which distinct protestors with other groups) and Reciprocal emotion (for insiders, which bring protestors together and feel solidarity).
2). Secondly, we argue that emotion, as a relational social-cultural interaction, embedded in the banners, slogans and performance in social protest, invoking, facilitating, and transforming individual emotion into collective emotion. Hence, emotion plays a vital role in bringing people together in social protests.
3). Thirdly, we emphasize human agency in social protests. Our research demonstrates the dynamics of collective identity formation. For instance, the different views of femininity, from Cameroun, Kurdish to Belgium, constitute a cosmopolitan feminism identity in the Brussels protest.
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Reference:
Illouz, E. (2019). Emotions as commodities: Capitalism, consumption and authenticity (Routledge studies in the sociology of emotions 2). London New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Jasper, J. (2011). Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research. Annual Review of Sociology, 37(37), 285-303.
Polletta, F., & Jasper, J. (2001). Collective Identity and Social Movements. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 283-305.