‘Demo version of a city’: buildings,affects, and the state in Astana

This article brings the concept of affect to the analysis of the relationship between buildings and political ideology, as a way of contributing to recent anthropological work on the state. It focuses ethnographically on the contradictory affects of the new built environment in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, where extensive renovation and construction have been under way since the early 2000s. On the one hand, spectacular new structures induced feelings of hope, pride, and enthusiasm for the state in some citizens. Simultaneously, the unfamiliar designs and material defects of the new built environment emanated affects of estrangement, lifelessness, disingenuousness, and instability. The article examines how these different affects were qualified and mediated discursively. Official ‘propaganda of emotion’ is juxtaposed with unofficial discursive forms: puns, rumours, and satirical literary fiction. It is argued that largely uncontrolled affects, rather than ideology, rendered ‘the state’ a plausible, if contradictory, ‘fictional reality’.