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Current Emotion Research in Anthropology
Super Title: VIEW FROM A DISCIPLINE
Running Head: CURRENT EMOTION RESEARCH IN ANTHROPOLOGY
Current Emotion Research in Anthropology: Reporting the Field
Andrew Beatty
Brunel University, UK
Correspondence to:
Andrew Beatty
Department of Anthropology
School of Social Sciences
Brunel University
Uxbridge UB8 3PH
UK
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract
An internal critique of anthropology in recent decades has shifted the focus and scope of
anthropological work on emotion. In this article, I review the changes, explore the pros and cons
of leading anthropological approaches and theories, and argue that—so far as anthropology is
concerned—only detailed narrative accounts can do full justice to the complexity of emotions. A
narrative approach captures both the particularity and the temporal dimension of emotion with
greater fidelity than semantic, synchronic, and discourse-based approaches.
Keywords: anthropological approaches, ethnography, translation, narrative
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Introduction: Dialogue across Boundaries
A review of what anthropologists get up to—how they think about emotion—will look a little
different depending on whether one is talking en famille or to friendly neighbors over the fence.
Not many anthropologists are trained in psychology or philosophy; few can hope to keep abreast
of the booming interdisciplinary emotion literature. Those few specialists aside, we tend to take
what we find useful, cheerfully rummaging among theories like Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur, the
DIY enthusiast who picks out what fits his or her needs without always knowing what the
original item was intended for. Theoretical innocence about emotion might detract from the
usefulness of many anthropological studies for psychologists, though of course the difficulty of
reading across disciplines cuts both ways. Anthropologists grumble at accounts of “culture” or
“cultures” that don't register how contested these concepts have become in the last thirty years;
they shrug at “ethnographic” reports that scant the deep immersion that traditionally
characterizes anthropology. A further barrier is that terms of art have different meanings across
boundaries, stemming from diverse intellectual traditions. Embodiment in psychology concerns
the way in which emotion is embedded in physiology, in the production and recognition of facial
expression, in the neurology underlying empathy, and so on. In anthropology, embodiment leaves
physiology untouched, nerves unjangled. It denotes an anti-positivist perspective on “lived
experience” and “being-in-the-world” that draws heavily upon phenomenology (Csordas, 2002).
Phenomenology, in turn, means something rather different in anthropology and in experimental
psychology (where it often means no more than subjective feeling). It was first used in
anthropology by Hallowell (1955) to analyze the framing of human experience in what he called
the “culturally constituted behavioral environment”. Nowadays phenomenological approaches in
anthropology draw explicitly on Continental philosophy or join a parallel venture that one of its
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exponents, following William James, champions as “radical empiricism” (Jackson, 1989). The
emphasis here is on capturing the vivid immediacy of experience, from which meaning cannot be
separated. Anthropologists working in these traditions do not usually show much interest in the
broader currents of psychological and (analytical) philosophical writing on emotion. Readers will
be aware that affect now has similarly diverse, even incommensurate, meanings across
disciplines.
These hazards notwithstanding, I shall defend the view that anthropology can maintain a
dialogue with neighboring disciplines about emotion, providing not only stimulating evidence, as
it always has done, but critical challenges to current thinking. The key, I shall suggest, is in
keeping faith with the findings and insights of ethnography, which time and again have eluded
neat theoretical formulation. Innocent or not, the anthropologist can be relied upon to turn up
awkward and surprising facts. The problem is what to make of them, how to recognize them, and
how to write about them. When it comes to emotions, anthropologists have often skimped these
difficult questions, failing to capitalize on their greatest resource: the living evidence of the field.
Leaving aside the vast and various findings of world ethnography, my concern in this article will
be with unresolved conceptual and methodological issues. I want to suggest it is time for a
rethinking.
Whatever Happened to the Anthropology of Emotion?
An overview of highlights in the anthropology of emotion would show that the major
contributions have mostly been made some time ago. Briggs (1970), Levy (1973, 1984), Lutz
(1988), M. Rosaldo (1984), R. Rosaldo (1989), Shweder (1991), White (1990), and Wikan
(1990) staked out the key theoretical positions a generation ago and offered much of the best
evidence up until the millennium. (Long-term contributors, such as Shweder and White, are
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unusual.) So what has happened since? The apparent thinness of current emotion research is due
to several factors.
Paradigm Creep
A shift of emphasis in psychological anthropology away from emotion in favor of “subjectivity”,
“embodiment”, “personhood”, and “experience” has fruitfully complicated the issues, making
emotion one of a set of interrelated problem-aspects rather than a distinct topic or explicit focus
of interest (Biehl et al., 2007; Csordas, 2002; Jackson, 1989). The above litany needs quotes
because the key terms refer not to transparent concepts or standard fields of interest—unlike, say,
cognition (another growth area in anthropology)—but, in their fullest extension, to research
paradigms with distinctive theoretical traditions (some retrospectively constructed), canonical
authors, and specialized jargon. Cross-cutting these divergences, broadly assumed—if
continuously revised—central theoretical concepts have been ditched or dismantled in the search
for sharper, more manageable tools. “Culture” has given way to “cultural models”, “hegemony”,
and “discourse”; “society” to “sociality” and “relatedness”.
Dissolution of the “Subject”
Postcolonial theory, work in political economy, the postmodern critique, and a trend toward a
more political vision of the discipline have banished the representative cultural actor (The
Balinese, The Nuer) from the scene as fictions and thrown the emphasis onto how people
navigate within structured systems of power (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Thanks to the influence
of Bourdieu and Foucault, one might say actors have become politically instead of culturally
generic (culture being an aspect of power). Theorists have found new ways of ignoring—more
tendentiously, “abolishing”—the individual. The locus of emotion has evaporated.
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Absorption into Cognitive Science
Largely a thing apart and at odds with the above developments, a resurgent anthropological
interest in cognition joins interdisciplinary work in cognitive science and evolutionary
psychology. Some of this work touches on emotion. For example, Whitehouse’s (2004) theory of
“modes of religiosity”, though not centrally concerned with the nature of emotion, gives the
ritual elicitation of violent emotions a causal role in the transmission of religious practices in
non-literate societies.
Globalization
Globalization has shaken up the field, in both senses (the places we go, the things we do), forcing
a rethinking of what anthropologists should be looking at, how their enquiries should be framed,
and what methodologies to employ (Inda & Rosaldo, 2007). The old model of the researcher
alone in a remote village documenting the culture no longer passes muster. “Cultures” as
bounded, homogeneous isolates are gone; so too has the ethnographer as invisible recording
angel. In line with critical, postcolonial, and postmodernist questionings of social scientific
authority, the ethnographer is now a “positioned subject” (Rosaldo, 1989) in need of critical
scrutiny, not a neutral, harmless presence. Ethnic identities are fluid, pragmatic, often plural; old
distinctions between home and abroad, “us and them”, have disappeared. Increasingly,
researchers speak of diasporas, borderlands, transnationalism, “ethnoscapes”, and “cultural
flows” rather than peoples and cultures.
As these heterogeneous factors indicate, in the swirl of theoretical realignments and
global change, emotion research can no longer be surveyed as one among many areas of research
like, say, ritual, migration, or markets. The last such comprehensive effort (Lutz & White, 1986)
could not, I think, be repeated today. Emotion intersects with divergent research programs in
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disparate ways, in different theoretical languages, frustrating the kind of cumulative, inclusive
debate on common ground characteristic of this journal. Any anthropologist’s view is therefore
bound to be limited and partial. If this sounds like a counsel of despair, we should remember that
what most anthropological approaches have in common is a basis in and commitment to
ethnographic fieldwork. It is from this common ground—and with a view back to it: a validation
of fieldwork as the best source of anthropological insight—that I shall base my review.
What Is Emotion? The Ethnographic Challenge
Consider their diversity. Some emotions come with distinctive facial expressions (anger), some
without (regret). Some respond instantly to an external stimulus (surprise), others follow
introspection (remorse); some prompt action (disgust), others imply inaction (boredom); some
have an evolutionary pay-off (fear, love), others lack adaptive advantage (nostalgia). Given this
heterogeneity, it’s hardly surprising that a superordinate category of emotion has not been
reported from many of the places where anthropologists have worked. For Russell (1991,
p. 430), this is the principal challenge posed by ethnography. If a domain of emotion is
unrecognized or unnamed, the comparative project of recording and contrasting exotic emotion
terms seems threatened. For what is to count as an emotion? The very idea of an emotional
domain can lead us to misjudge similarly named behaviors as equivalent. It is not always clear,
for example, whether a reported instance of “shame” refers to a feeling, a form of etiquette, or an
unemotional evaluation of a situation (Russell, 1991; Beatty, 2005a, 2005b). Still, emotion is the
word we are stuck with. And if the historical question is why the category should have arisen in
Europe, the scientific and philosophical question is whether its cultural specificity vitiates its
general applicability. Can it be that our folk concept just happens to capture a human universal?
Or are scientific definitions notably different? Are they culture-free?
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A glance at the literature shows that, without being committed to a firm definition of the
object of study or a shared view of its reality, theorists in the human sciences and philosophy are,
indeed, able to agree on a rough area of discussion they call “emotion”. In such collections as
Ekman and Davidson (1994), Goldie (2010), and Manstead et al. (2004), contributors appear to
accept the usefulness of the English word to categorize certain socially embedded
psychobiological processes without agreeing about how such processes cohere, or how much
causal or definitional prominence should be given to such components as arousal, feeling,
appraisal, or facial expression. For some theorists “emotion” denotes a class of distinctive
processes conveniently labeled by the English word; for others it lacks any essential referent. But
how coherent is the concept if “emotions” are not natural kinds (Barrett, 2006; Scarantino, 2012)
and there is no agreement about what the word otherwise might mean?
A compromise position between realism and skepticism can be found in Averill’s (1994)
suggestion that emotion is a polythetic class, that is, a class composed of overlapping sets of
members belonging in some loose grouping not by virtue of exclusive identity but by sporadic
family resemblances. Needham (1975), from whom I have taken this definition, first explored the
implications of polythetic classification for anthropology, pointing out that many of the
categories used by anthropologists, such as religion, kinship, and marriage, have turned out, on
critical inspection (or on the evidence of ethnographic variation), to be polythetic; which meant
that generalizations based on the assumption that kinship—Needham’s field—was a
homogeneous category were false. This led him to such radical pronouncements as “there is no
such thing as kinship”. A trail of scholars in Needham’s wake announced the death of this or that
category. Yet the anthropological ship sailed on. And after languishing in the doldrums, kinship
stormed back onto the scene, albeit trimmed and tweaked into novel perspectives (e.g.,
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“relatedness”) that avoid some of the old essentialist assumptions. The key message was that
rather than abandoning the kinship concept altogether, one respected its polythetic configuration
and looked for regularities at a lower level, within a fuzzily-bounded field, while remaining alert
to connections across the boundary with, say, politics. This, I take it, is what emotion skeptics
like Shweder (1994) and Wierzbicka (1999) are advocating. Why else write a book called
Emotions across Languages and Cultures when the English word “emotion” does not “carve
nature at its joints” (Wierzbicka, 1999, p. 3)?
Granted this polythetic definition, the anthropologist can get to work. According to
Shweder (2004, p. 83), “emotion is a complex synthetic notion; and particular emotions (e.g.,
sadness, envy, guilt, and love) are derivatives of various combinations of wants, beliefs, feelings,
and values.” The anthropologist’s job, on this view, would be to investigate such combinations
without a prior commitment to that notional whole, “emotion”. In similar terms, Wierzbicka
(1999, p. 24) proposes investigating “questions focusing on what people think, feel, want, know,
say, and do; what happens in their bodies; how the thoughts, feelings, wants, and bodily events
are linked… and what role the feelings…play in the stream of life”. This proposal, which
encompasses a great deal while apparently taking little for granted, offers a robust basis for
ethnographic research. Nonetheless, those who see emotion as having some theory-independent
reality or integrity (e.g., Manstead et al., 2004; Mulligan & Scherer, 2012) might wonder at the
rationale of a comparative project whose central organizing concept is in doubt.
Fortunately for dialogue, both relativists and realists are interested in how appraisals,
feelings, words, and actions are variably linked, however those linkages may be conceived.
Shweder (1995, 2004) is prepared to suggest that the linkages might not point to something that
we would call emotion. Indeed, to assume otherwise is to prejudge the case and rule out the
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possibility that in other cultural settings appraisals, feelings, and behavior might not hang
together in ways familiar to us. He argues that we must be open to the possibility—attested by
ethnography (Levy, 1973, 1984)—that the death of a loved one may be experienced as fatigue or
illness rather than “emotionalized” as “sadness”. This would not be altogether surprising given
that, as Lutz (1988, p. 100) writes of Ifaluk (and as many ethnographers testify), “emotion,
thought, and body are seen in ethnotheory as intimately linked through their roles in illness.” But
a non-emotional response would depend on the possibility that cultural practices don’t merely
shape experience but can override putatively universal processes. “Emotionalizing”, on this
view, would consist in consciously dwelling on the personal dimension of loss, thinking about
the feeling. It would be an open question which kinds of experience are emotionalized or not in a
given cultural setting.
Shweder is, I believe, onto something here, and his deconstructive method is useful for
the fieldworker. It helps to makes sense of a puzzling episode in my Javanese fieldwork (Beatty,
2009, pp. 245–258) when the headman of my host village, publicly humiliated by Islamist critics
in the mosque on the Prophet’s Birthday and unable to face them down, suddenly sank back in a
faint—“dizzy”, he croaked—and fell mysteriously ill. He hadn’t emotionalized his response to
an event that might otherwise have prompted expressions of shame or anger. Although I cannot
precisely know the string of thoughts and feelings leading up to his collapse, seated next to him I
was party to his deliberations as he whispered to me and passed me notes. He was paralyzed by
hesitation—whether to respond or submit. A Javanese adage I often heard when conflict loomed
goes: “Aja kalah, ngalah!” “Better to concede than be defeated!” Sometimes one can’t oppose
brute force, stupidity, or craziness, so one yields, as a tree bends to the wind, and survives. The
headman explicitly deliberated in this way but evidently felt the attack as overwhelming: he
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could neither accept defeat nor shrug in face-saving concession. So how did he construe the
assault—or, in Shweder’s preferred sequence, the feeling? In some sense, evidently, he did not
emotionalize it; that is, he didn’t interpret the event or the feelings evoked in terms that entailed
the locally predictable emotions. To put this in English terms (and setting aside the question of
their cross-cultural validity), his social defeat was less a shaming disgrace or angering affront
than something like a physical blow: so it materialized. Accordingly, his slow recovery was not
effected through emotional introspection or catharsis (as we, in his place might have it), nor
through angry revenge or a public expiation of shame. Instead, he outflanked his critics. Victory
was the cure.
I think also of the ploughman who one day welcomed me into his house shortly after
finding his buffalo—his sole means of livelihood—poisoned in the stable. His perfect composure
and broad smile gave nothing away. (I heard about the buffalo later.) This was not simply an
instance of Javanese display rules, miraculous self-control, or even—I hope—of extreme
ethnographic dullness on my part. The links between event, appraisal, feeling, and expression
were not what I could have expected or could even have recognized, though we had been
neighbors for two years and I knew the man fairly well. Again, something in the sequence of an
emotion episode appears to have been short-circuited, truncated, or overcome: exhibiting less,
implying more, than what might have been expected.
In Shweder’s analysis (which in this respect is Jamesian), the emotion is an interpretation
of the feeling, rather than an interpretation of the eliciting event. Emotions are “complex
narrative structures that give shape and meaning to somatic and affective experiences” (1994, p.
37). I’m not persuaded that the sequence is necessarily so. My Javanese cases are equivocal; but
so too is introspective knowledge. Sometimes we scan our feelings as a touchstone of what really
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matters to us: “Do I really love her?” More often the touchstone is the affecting situation: “Was
that really meant as an insult? Should I be angry?”
But however the parts fit together, the challenge remains. Ethnography throws up
examples that contradict our expectations of how emotions work, prompting doubts about
whether they qualify as emotions, and therefore whether there are such things—cross-culturally
and unambiguously—as emotions (as opposed to diverse combinations of appraisals, feelings,
etc.). As ever, it is the exceptions that present the greatest challenge. I have mentioned two
instances of my own already. A famous example that bears revisiting is that of Levy’s Tahitian
informant, a man abandoned by his wife, who “interpreted his feelings about separation as some
sort of vague sickness” (Levy, 1973, p. 304). On Shweder’s view (1994), one could not apply the
concepts of “sadness” or “emotion” here because the feeling has not been emotionalized. In
another Tahitian example, a man seen crying at the grave of his wife is assumed by witnesses to
be feeling remorse for his infidelities rather than—as we should suppose—sadness for his recent
loss (Levy, 1973, pp. 298, 301). This is a different kind of evidence from the self-reported
malaise of the deserted husband. Nevertheless, in all such cases, the ethnographer argues,
Tahitians “hypocognize” sadness (Levy, 1984, p. 227). Lacking an equivalent word, perhaps
lacking the concept altogether, and without the cultural formulas and expectations of prolonged
grief, they have no means of packaging their feelings and thoughts as anything like sadness and
do not recognize or expect persisting sadness in others. Troublesome feelings following loss are
interpreted, instead, as possession by the departed spirit (Levy, 1973, p. 299; 1984). For Levy,
this implies misrecognition of the primary apprehension, a culturally imposed cognitive mistake
rather than a simple absence of the (to us) predictable emotion. Like Shweder, Levy makes the
interpretation contingent on the feeling. (The abandoned husband obsesses about his loss, so it’s
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not the event or what Lazarus (1994) calls the core relational theme that is underrated, only the
bad feeling.)
Despite the wealth of cultural information presented in Tahitians, these much discussed
examples are reported in scant terms, with minimal concrete observation, and mixed with
hypothetical cases. We know nothing of the background of the individuals, the quality of their
relationships, the history of separations, or how normal the individuals are. The absence of
idiosyncratic particulars and the recourse to general cultural factors and folk psychology make it
hard to compare among cases and across cultures. I cannot easily apply Levy’s analysis to my
Javanese friends whose reactions, in any case, are not especially typical, even of the men
themselves. To make sense of them you need a good deal of biographical background and
narrative context. Levy’s Tahitians are presented as both typical and fully explained by
immediate context; yet only in the general terms of cultural logic do the examples carry
conviction. On a human level, as persons with particular relations and histories, they remain
enigmatic, merely exotic. Indeed, the reader cannot help wondering whether the sharpening of
the argument, the distillation of a generalization, exaggerates the difference. Is there, as in Ifaluk
and Java, a close association between emotion and illness that might explain why a man haunted
by his wife’s departure should experience “vague illness”? Or are there untold stories that
explain the underrating of the feelings associated with loss? Something is missing, but we should
not assume it is missing from the Tahitians.
If I have labored an old example, it is because Levy’s ethnography has featured in many
discussions of emotion, besides serving as the model for subsequent “person-centered
ethnography”. It remains unsurpassed in its comprehensiveness, but the problems with its
presentation of emotion have not been properly identified or overcome. And there is a further
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lesson. If, as is often the case with cross-cultural comparison, compression, selection, and
narrative omission enhance difference, so does the inverse stereotyping of “Euro-American
culture”, the usual point of departure.1 We emotionalize, they somatize. We feel sadness, they
feel fatigue. Yet anyone who has attended a modern English funeral cannot be surprised by
Tahiti. The collective determination to put on a good face, the cheerful tributes celebrating the
life of the deceased, and the sheer lack of solemnity would have seemed unaccountable fifty
years ago. And we learn from the latest draft of DSM-V that grief lasting more than a few weeks
is to be classed as pathological. We are all becoming “Tahitians”.
Emotions in Translation
Evan-Pritchard, in an apocryphal statement, described anthropology as “the translation of
culture”. In her pathbreaking book, Unnatural Emotions, Lutz writes: “The process of coming to
understand the emotional lives of people in different cultures can be seen first and foremost as a
problem of translation” (1988, p. 8). Wisely, Lutz extends the problem of translation to “tears
and other gestures, and…audience reaction to emotional performance”, but her emphasis is on
language use, or “discourse”.2 This does not extend, however, to the inclusion of natural
dialogues or ethnographic narrative; nor does discourse, in her presentation, have much historical
resonance or time-depth. As with Levy, her examples are in the present and exist only in the
present. They are mostly typifying and shorn of particularity. Indeed, an exclusion of
idiosyncratic background (if one can call what is most significant for any individual background)
is a matter of principle: “cultural and historical factors supersede the individual in explanatory
import” (p. 229, n.1).
What underpins Lutz’s approach is its strong sociologism, an attribute she shares with
Michelle Rosaldo, another pioneer of constructionism in the anthropology of emotion. “Talk
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about emotions is simultaneously talk about society,” she writes (1988, p. 6). In the same vein,
Rosaldo (1984, p. 142) declares: “selves and feelings, shaped by culture, may be understood in
turn as the creation of particular sorts of polities.”
Lutz’s position is the ne plus ultra of constructionism, the “unnaturalness” of emotions
consisting precisely in their cultural composition, their embedding in social processes.
Accordingly, the causal nexus of Ifaluk emotion, in Lutz’s analysis, is functional. Ifaluk
emotions take the shape they do because of the constraints of living in large, intimate households
on a small, crowded island at the mercy of the elements. The great originality of the book,
however, lies not in this functionalist thesis but in the exploration of “emotional meaning” and its
pragmatic interweaving with social processes.
In common with constructionists like Averill and Bedford, Lutz presents a view of
emotions—or at least emotional discourse—as pragmatic ploys whose meaning and function can
be explained almost entirely through situational context. All the more surprising, then, that the
ethnography contains very few detailed firsthand accounts. In fact, there is only one episode
witnessed by the author that extends over more than a couple of lines (Lutz, 1988, pp. 125–127),
and this concerns the death of a child: not an event likely to be rich in emotional nuance or
backstory. In fact, Unnatural Emotions is largely free of particular persons, histories, and
narratives—just those things which, I suggest, give emotions their force and resonance, their
quality as emotions, distinct from other kinds of opinions, moral judgments, and speech acts. It is
free of “natural emotions” because it depends mostly on data obtained from interviews, selfreports, card-sorting classifications, and hypothetical examples. The picture that emerges of
emotion as a function of social situations—and generic situations at that—is also a function of
the methodology.
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Nevertheless, if we take emotions in an expanded sense (as ploys, ways of talking about
society, etc.), Lutz marks a step forward, a means to understanding other kinds of sociality
unimaginable within a Western individualist mindset. Her discourse-centered approach has much
in common with that of White (1990, 2005), whose work on another Pacific society explores the
political and moral role of emotional rhetoric. White shows how in the Solomon Islands, public
debate enables the reframing of conflict situations by the indirect means of emotion talk or
“disentangling”. Through participants’ narration of events, “anger”, which encodes a scenario of
retribution, gives way to “sadness”, which implies a peaceful outcome. “Disentangling” is not
mere social commentary: it has a pragmatic effect on the assembly, engendering pro-social
emotions. White calls it an example of an “emotive institution”.
Having read Lutz and White, I find I am better able to understand the impassioned
oratory of Nias, a tribal society in Indonesia where I carried out fieldwork in the mid-1980s. A
hundred years earlier (when James and Darwin were publishing their pioneering studies), a
German missionary was similarly puzzling over Niasan emotion idioms. In preparation for his
Bible translation, Sundermann (1887) recorded 88 terms referring to the heart, including such
bizarre collocations as “my heart has an unhulled grain” (suspicious) and “feeling as though my
heart has swallowed a ball of cat’s fur” (seriously disgruntled). Aside from “hot-hearted”
(angry), “broken-hearted” (disappointed) and a few others with rough equivalents, most cardiac
terms were not readily comprehensible. Even the simpler phrases could be misleading. “Painfulhearted” meant “feeling resentful/spiteful”; “clear-hearted” meant “content”. And there was an
overlap with non-emotional feelings and thoughts: ebolo dödö “broad-hearted” = patient; aboto
ba dödö “broken in the heart” = understand; other heart terms referred to thirst and tiredness.
Sundermann’s approach depended on finding dictionary-like equivalences (he went on to write a
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German-Nias dictionary), so naturally he drew many blanks. What did it mean to have a
scorched or squeezed heart, or to “have a curly hair in the heart”? And how to explain the
preponderance of negative terms? Niasan heart-speech seemed to map a vast region of
discomfort and grievance unsuspected even by the grim Lutheran missionaries.3 A century later,
I was similarly perplexed. The fact that most of the terms in use refer not to personality traits but
to feelings is all the more puzzling, suggesting a cognitive clustering at the lower end of the
emotional keyboard. (A man reported as aukhu dödö, “hot-hearted”, is allegedly angry rather
than irascible.) Yet heart-speech in Nias is best understood as a mode of public oratory, not a
native psychology. People declare their hearts at weddings and feasts when the intention is to
win concessions in ceremonial exchange or fend off the other party’s demands for pigs and gold
(Beatty, 2012). Although their speeches are often passionate, the pleas and rebuffs of “scorched”
and “shriveled” hearts are pragmatic, even political, as speakers jockey for position. So the
auditors do not look for signs of authentic feeling in a speaker parading a scorched heart (though
they might anticipate a certain move); nor do they question his sincerity. In most cases heart
terms do not describe actual feelings, either occurrent or past; nor do they index behavior. Away
from the public stage, there is no cat’s fur feeling. In ordinary speech a much smaller set of terms
is used for emotions—simple rather than metaphorical and with cognates in other Austronesian
languages (e.g., ata’u = afraid; cf. Malay takut, Ifaluk metagu).
Should the more outlandish heart idioms nevertheless qualify as emotion terms? By most
definitions, they check all the boxes. They are announced and enacted with passion; they
provoke an emotional response; they imply a “normative judgment about one’s situation”
(Solomon, 1980, p. 258); and they imply action tendencies (of refusal, gratitude, threat, and
evasion), which is why they have rhetorical force. In many respects, heart speech is enacted
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emotion—otherwise it wouldn’t work. But the emotions actually experienced—by the speakers
and the people they are talking about—are different from the affairs of the heart reported. There
is a distance between the mixed, undeclared emotions animating the contending parties and the
manipulative, positional soul-searching of the orators who represent them. Yet although the
auditors recognize posturing for what it is, they are nevertheless moved. This, precisely, is the
power of oratory. If the job is well done, the targets feel constrained to concede, to throw in an
extra pig or grain of gold: their hearts are truly squeezed. What matters if the speaker’s heart is
not really scorched? We gain little by qualifying his phrases as pretend emotions or
psychological impossibilities. Far more is to be gained by recognizing the layered context of
staged emotion, its background in interwoven histories, and its relation to unvoiced emotions,
past and present.
From Discourse to Narrative
The language of the heart in Nias is performative, a tactic in the game of exchange. Emotion
speech is at once a form of politics, a technique of micro-management, and a rhetoric of moral
suasion: on this we can agree with the cultural constructionists. But there is a life beyond the
stage, an emotional hinterland, both shared and intensely personal, that is not captured in talk
alone and for which there are no stage directions, no simple cultural grammar. To make sense of
it one needs time-depth and a thorough knowledge of plots and players, the people who inhabit
the roles. A debate is a moving tableau of real persons locked into evolving stories, stories that
motivate and overflow the confines of the debate. The “tactical uses of passion”, in Bailey’s
phrase (1983), imply narrative structures and call, in turn, for narrative ethnography, not mere
diachronic modeling.
Current Emotion Research in Anthropology
19
If this narrative claim is true of set-piece oratory, with its well-defined positions and
tropes and its indirect relation to occurrent emotion, it applies all the better to everyday
emotions. The reasons are twofold. Firstly, as diverse theorists have emphasized, emotions are
nothing if not particular. Unlike values or norms, which by definition are widely shared,
emotions refer compellingly to an individual’s or group’s situation. In Rosaldo’s (1984, p. 143)
phrase, they are “embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that ‘I am
involved’”. Lutz (1988, p. 71) has pointed out that in the American value system, “the
subjectivity of emotions…gives them a fundamental—even sacred—role in individuating the
person…From this perspective, emotions are Me in a way that thoughts are not.” Yet even in
places like Ifaluk, where emotions are not so conceived—where they are often predicated of
“us”—they remain first-person experiences, felt in “our insides”; indeed, emerging from “our
insides” (p. 95). Javanese like to say that at the level of rasa (feeling/consciousness) we are “all
the same”; but they do not deny the individuality of the experiencing self. Solomon (1995,
p. 191), in an East-West comparison, agrees: The personal aspect of an emotion derives from the
individual’s “perspective, background, fears, and concerns,” not from the feeling.
The peculiar egocentricity of emotion, which psychologists and philosophers have
remarked upon (Barrett, 2006; Ben-Ze’ev, 2010; Roberts, 1988), is not contradicted by shared
experiences or patterns of emotion that are culturally typical. The critical point is to recognize
that our emotions are always more than cultural formulas and social structural positions require.4
My anger, hope, and regret make sense against a background of cultural expectations and social
possibilities, but they take shape within the unique circumstances of a life, which is why they are
mine alone. The me-focus of emotions—which transcends contrasts between individualist and
Current Emotion Research in Anthropology
20
sociocentric ideologies—positively requires a descent to particulars. Only ethnographic narrative
can capture this particularity.
The second reason why emotion implicates narrative is again to do with how emotions
are constituted. Pride, shame, contempt, even fear and anger, are not only tailored to individual
experience, they unfold over time; they tell a story. This obvious fact is often neglected. A focus
on emotions of short duration (of the kind easily produced in the lab) misleads about the role
emotions play in our lives. Likewise, an ethnographic emphasis on stereotyped behaviors
(avoidance, respect) tends to mask the temporal dimension that inflects even formalized
relationships. Take the case of rural East Java, where fathers and adult sons make reluctant
companions and don’t generally sit together—a mild avoidance recognized in seating
arrangements at feasts. The slight awkwardness that prevails has its roots in deeply held values
of respect, socialization practices, and ideas about personhood—structurally, sons “replace” their
fathers and are felt to be in mystical competition with them (Beatty, 2009; H. Geertz, 1974). But
the statistical average—the stereotyped emotion—doesn’t begin to capture the reality. Even in
the cases that most conform to type there are always personal stories and previous emotional
encounters that color the relation, often in contradictory ways, and give it its meaning and
peculiar tone. It is those past encounters—culturally framed but underdetermined—that are most
significant to any given relationship and help explain the course of an emotional episode.
Of the objections that might be offered to a narrative approach, two are most challenging:
that it gives an illusion of coherence, and that narrative accounts may be culturally inappropriate.
In his study of the Yolmo of Nepal, Desjarlais forswears conventional narrative because “in
conveying suffering to others, villagers tend not to tell sequential accounts of how they hurt or
heal, but rather to ‘tell images’ that portray their plights: a witch’s bloody assault, the ‘casting’ of
Current Emotion Research in Anthropology
21
grief from the body” (1992, p. 31). On this view, it is inappropriate to impose a narrative
structure on emotion where none has been offered. To recall an earlier example, if the Tahitians
don’t emotionalize certain feelings, nor would they make sense of them narratively. The narrator
falsifies.
But the point must be conceded only if we stick to articulated feelings. Few
ethnographers would so limit themselves. Besides, we all know cases of individuals who seem
unaware they are jealous, angry or in love. It’s precisely through narrative, not self-report, that
we are able to construe their cases. The fitting together of actions, responses, expressions, and
language in a temporal sequence that respects particularities—in a word, narrative—explains
what the passionate actor herself cannot see or say. For the same reason, one should treat selfreported emotion and autobiographical narrative (especially as told to a cultural outsider) with
caution. The shaping and revision involved distort the original experience. As White (1994,
p. 231) puts it, if emotions are “fundamentally relational”, one cannot analyze them out of
context. Taking his point strictly, we should insist on the living context: the remembered context
is altogether a different thing.
As to the question of whether narrative might be wholly alien to a certain people, the case
remains to be proven. Even supposing an aversion to psychological explanations of behavior
such as Mead (1972, p. 107) found in Samoa, or granted a dogma of the “opacity of other minds”
such as is widely reported in the Pacific (Hollan & Throop, 2011), people everywhere need to be
able to read behavior, fathom motives, assign significance, and apportion blame (Bruner, 1990).
A sense of the evolving structure of persons-in-situations is therefore built into human sociality,
whether the apprehensions are worked up into fully-fledged narratives, transformed into visual
images, tactfully downplayed, or altogether denied.
Current Emotion Research in Anthropology
22
New Developments
Boster (2005) lists empathy, alongside “mapping” and translation, as one of three methods open
to the ethnographer in comparing “emotion systems”. As anthropologists have reconsidered the
dynamics of fieldwork, pondering the epistemological quandaries of participant-observation and
the basis of anthropological knowledge in the human encounter, the question of empathy has
become increasingly salient. The revival of interest has a number sources, among them the
rediscovery of Briggs’s (1970) classic account of fieldwork among the Inuit, Rosaldo’s (1989)
still-influential essay on the anthropologist as “positioned subject”, and person-centered
ethnographies such as Wikan’s (1990) Balinese study, with its zeitgeist-capturing title,
Managing turbulent hearts. These works explored the researcher’s ambivalent positioning in the
field and the possibility of knowing through feeling; in different ways they testified to common
factors in human experience that challenged the prevailing relativism of the time.
Recent work has reopened the debate (for a skeptical review of the topic, see Beatty
2005a, 2010). Hage’s (2009) focus, for example, is on the shared experience of hosts and guests.
Do the researcher’s emotions in the field offer insight or illusion? That depends, says Hage, on
the overlap not only in situation and cultural framing but in intentions, stakes, and personal
formation. Hage’s interest is in “political emotions”. “Are there such things as emotions that are
sui generis political, or are there merely emotions in general that we end up investing in various
spheres of social life, the sphere of politics being one among many” (2009, p. 60)? A familiarity
with the non-anthropological literature might have helped here, but to answer the question Hage
considers how his own sentiments, as a secular Lebanese exile, differed from those of his
Muslim hosts in confronting the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006. His friends could not feel
hatred for an anthropomorphized state as Hage could. Their engagement—their political
Current Emotion Research in Anthropology
23
emotions—required something different from the passive frustration of the intellectual, namely
an emotive identification with the resistance that turned them into actors in the conflict, not mere
witnesses or victims. They felt differently because they confronted a practical enemy, not an
ideological adversary. Hage comes to see that his own vacillation between participation and
observation—his semi-identification—limited the possibility of empathy.
Drawing on the historian Rosenwein’s notion of “emotional communities”, Dureau
(2012) found that the experience of her child falling sick in the field did not permit a privileged
understanding of mothers in the Western Solomons. Their expressions of maternal love take
shape against a background of food shortages, disease, and life chances starkly different from
those of the Western researcher. “Against such claims of experiential knowing, I became
increasingly aware that with better understanding of women’s lives I felt deeper sympathy but
less emotional congruence, grasping taru [“love”] as I recognized the relative superficiality of
our similarities”(p. 146).
Examples pro and contra empathy-as-method could be multiplied; but only in longer
works can the reader really judge what has been achieved. At novelistic length, there is enough
circumstance, plot, and characterization to place and evoke emotions. Briggs (1970), ScheperHughes (1992), and Abu-Lughod (2000) offer the outstanding examples of insightful accounts
informed by a self-conscious but unshowy ethnographic empathy. In each case, a scrutiny of the
ethnographer’s motives and feelings offers insights into local constructions of emotion. Once
again, narrative provides the necessary scaffold.
Curiously, none of these works has much overlap with more conventionally empirical
studies of empathy as an ethnographic topic, such as Hollan and Throop’s (2011) recent volume
on Pacific societies, or Goluboff’s (2008) study of Azeri Jewish lamentation. The former looks at
Current Emotion Research in Anthropology
24
empathy (or its denial) among people who hold to “the opacity of other minds”. The latter joins
the mainstream of recent anthropological work on emotion in analyzing how specific emotions
are generated, the work they do in social reproduction, and how they shape subjectivities. In
Azerbaijan, the job of the paid mourner is to bring individual sorrows together in a common
lament: “she transformed their personal sorrow into an empathetic statement of communal
suffering” (p. 90). The bottom line is political: Weeping functions as an enactment of “female
subjectivity firmly located in patriarchal kinship obligations”.
A similar concern with the emotional fashioning of subjectivity—or for that matter the
political fashioning of emotion—animates much recent work on trauma and memory, an
expanding enterprise that crosses disciplinary lines and variously comments on and criticizes the
trauma industry (see examples in Biehl et al., 2007). Beyond the scope of the present article,
much of this work has its roots in Foucault (especially as refracted through Hacking), Critical
Theory, postcolonial theory, and approaches from political economy.
Other work seeks new emotional configurations in non-traditional settings. What, for
example, is the nexus between emotion and social mobility in a globalizing world? What
structures of feeling (nostalgia, homesickness, loss, hope) are created by migration or work in the
modern industrial zone (Boelstorff & Lindquist, 2004)? Svašek and Skrbiš (2007) consider the
“emotional dynamics of transnational family reunions” and ask how people adapt to the alien
emotional climate of their home from home. They find that migrants’ distress is often
medicalized in the West, “emphasiz[ing] the sharp edges of universalizing discourses of
emotions in contexts of power inequality” (p. 375). Studies of this kind testify once again to the
value of ethnography in extending our knowledge of how persons relate to contexts and how
experience is shaped by broader forces.
Current Emotion Research in Anthropology
25
Conclusion
Anthropology’s contribution to the study of emotion is at once comparative and critical. Its
special method, ethnographic fieldwork, affords unique insights into cultural diversity and the
many ways of being human. But if we are to realize those insights and continue to unsettle
established categories in the human sciences, we must be faithful to the experience, thinking
harder about what goes on in the field and about how we recognize, record, and write about
emotion in other cultural settings. Interviews have their uses, but only detailed naturalistic
observation that preserves the full narrative context can capture emotions in all their complexity.
A major task for anthropology in the years ahead will be to rediscover the particularity of
emotion and its temporal dimension which only narrative can adequately capture. For as
Nussbaum (2001, p. 177) observes, “all human emotions are in part about the past, and bear
traces of a history that is at once commonly human, socially constructed, and idiosyncratic”.
Current Emotion Research in Anthropology
26
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Endnotes
1
For a systematic comparison, pitched at the level of ideology rather than experience, see Lutz, 1988.
2
For a comprehensive review of linguistic approaches to emotion, see Wilce, 2009.
3
White (1994, p. 226) sees in the high proportion of negative terms in emotion vocabularies “a reflection of
the moral work that emotion words and expressions perform in ordinary discourse.”
4
This point does not depend on methodological individualism or an individualist ideology. The claim is not
that individuals are the exclusive locus of emotions, that emotions are generated and contained within the
self; only that they are personal and perspectival. The me-focus is often a we-focus, or, if predicated of others,
a they-focus.