719
Gratitude, Reciprocity, Optimism, Hope… New Ways of Disruption?
Abstract Submissions Closed
WG08 Society and Emotions (host committee)
Language: Spanish, French and English
Session Type: Oral
Being subject of depredation, social bearability mechanisms and sensibilities’ regulations, Global South societies are more and more normalized on consumption. However, what may seem to be individual solutions are taking new social perspectives.
In this context, gratitude, optimism, and hope are operative instruments. Catastrophic future images amplify the signs of hopelessness valuing the perspectives of a “Slow Science” (Stengers, 2015).
On the one hand, the need to cover civilizational failures has generated donation-gratitude relationship as a pacifying conflict mechanism. Hope, as anticipatory practice of the future, is based on multiple and diverse “feeling practices”. This inner space to experience some vital emotions favors gratitude as a necessary path to revaluing hope. The word gratitude is derived from the Latin gratia, meaning "favor;' and gratus, meaning "pleasing."” (Emmons 2007:4) In Mauss's (1999), gratitude appears as a gift. On the other hand, reciprocity, along with love and joy, are some of the "interstitial practices" we have been observing both from empirical and theoretical viewpoints. From a sociology of bodies/emotions, we articulate a theoretical scheme that sees these practices as key to the understanding of society today.
Finally, this session aims at opening a broad discussion regarding possible ways of generating fractures on the contemporary systemic domination regimes, encouraging an interdisciplinary perspective on gratitude, reciprocity, optimism and hope. We welcome then all types of research and experiences that questions, analyses, and/or reflects on reciprocity as a social practice, that may at least "pause" the contemporary neo colonial domination.