Anxiety

This chapter addresses the role of anxiety in cultural geographies. It opens by introducing different philosophical and psychoanalytic conceptions of anxiety, with a particular focus on how it differs from fear. Building on this, the chapter considers anxiety, first, as immanently inscribed in culture and, second, as inextricably linked to space. The chapter highlights how cultural geographers have studied anxiety in recent years. It points out that a geographical perspective is particularly suited to examining anxiety as a ‘situated’ affect. While anxiety cannot be reduced to a specific form of culture or society, it appears throughout every culture and society in profoundly different ways. Nobody is entirely free from anxiety, but the possibilities of protecting oneself from it, living with it, and coping with it differ, and precisely this difference is of interest to geographers.