ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the significant contribution that the study of emotion and affect offers the ethnography of space and place. Research on emotive landscapes and emotive institutions, as well as the insight that emotions are always socially constructed and key to understanding the culturally constituted self and lived world are foundational. These ideas provide a basis for the ethnography of space and place where emotion is the sociocultural fixing of affect in individual lives through personal experience and meaningmaking. But while some contend that affect theory recapitulates the mind/ body dualities that plague the study of emotion, the addition of the concepts of affect, affective atmosphere and affective climate offer more for understanding space and place. These theoretical constructs, when employed in the study of the built environment, access the transpersonal domain and allow “feeling” to affect, circulate and infect more than one person. Affective atmosphere and affective climate also provide models of how to bring together the social, linguistic and cognitive dimensions of everyday life with the material environment.
