Occupy Trust: The Role of Emotion in the New Movements Marina Sitrin This article is part of the series Occupy, Anthropology, and the 2011 Global Uprisings One of the things that strikes me is the way that we talk to each other; we much more say “I feel” than “I think,” and I see this as related to our trying to really recognize each other. We also see this with our bodies. People hug and embrace so much, even the guys. Not that it is not about ideas, but there is this sense in the assemblies like, leave your political affiliations at the door. You just have to be present as who you are and recognize that you alone do not know the answer, and also see that together we can find answers. So it begins with “I feel” and it is about this affect that creates space for new relationships to emerge with one another. (Amin, New York, Occupy Wall Street, 2012) Something feels different in our new movements. Many things are different now—but what feels different is the feeling. Many in the new movements reflect on the importance of new social relationships, ones facilitated through the development of horizontal spaces and processes by which we can all speak, be heard, support one another, and act together. What we do not always reflect enough upon however is the feeling part of all of this. I began participating in Occupy before we occupied, when we were the New York City (NYC) General Assembly. Even then, when sitting in a circle in Tompkins Square Park in August, trust and care were a basis for what we were doing—perhaps without this Occupy might not have happened the way it has. Then I went to Greece, and people in the movements there were reflecting on trust and affect, especially in the neighborhood assemblies, and then again in Spain people spoke of the foundational affection and care for the other developing in the Plaza. Feelings are not often written about as a serious part of politics. Yet, how can we not reflect together on what we are doing, how we are doing it, and how it makes us feel? This is a place from which we organize, a tenant of creating a new politics. It is risky to write this. Emotion, you see, is frequently seen as something for women to write about, which I am. However, since the late 1990s, scholars have begun to write about affect, and the emotional responses provoked by and through organizing and action (see, for example, Goodwin et al. 2001), including recent work on global justice movements (cf. Juris 2008; Brown and Pickerill 2009; Roelvink 2008). These contributions open up important discussions of emotion within social movements, but here I am more interested in the politics of emotion, trust, and love as a foundational and self-reflexive dimension of movement organizing.[1] I thus write despite the risks in the same way that over 2,000 of us chose to trust one another in moving beyond what we imagined possible on the night of September 17, 2011. We dared to share something risky— a dream that something might change, perhaps not the spark of a national