Shame and Anger in British Politics

Public lecture by Dr Ana Carolina (Carol) Balthazar, Lecturer in Social Anthropology at UCL.

Abstract

Engaging critically with recent interdisciplinary arguments about how repressed economic shame among right-wing voters leads to anger and rage against migrants, in this paper, I consider the lives of my retired (60+) research interlocutors living in Thanet, a seaside area in South East England that has witnessed the growth of right-wing sentiments. Building on years of ethnographic fieldwork in the area, whilst also drawing on my own positionality as a Brazilian migrant, I investigate how the shared sense of being outside of productive economic life at an older age connects (or not) to stigmatisation and sentiments of humiliation that inform political action among voters with different affiliations. In doing so, I hope to advance a theorisation of the role of emotions in politics that is particularly sensitive to the distinctive anthropological perspective on this timely debate. Alongside this, the paper speaks to classical anthropological inquiries into moral values by foregrounding the role of emotions within them.