Anthropology and emotion

Abstract

Abstract:The centrality of emotion in thought and action is increasingly recognised in the human sciences, though basic questions of definition and scope remain unresolved. Where do emotions begin and end? How should we identify and analyse them? How write about them? Ethnographic fieldwork, as pioneered by Malinowski, offers powerful insights into the place of emotion in social life; but emotions are peculiarly difficult to capture in the generalizing format of case study and ethnographic summary. In this lecture I argue that semantic, structural, and discourse-based approaches tend to miss what is most important -what counts for the persons concerned and therefore what makes the emotion. I review the conceptual and methodological issues and conclude that only a narrative approach can capture both the particularity and the temporal dimension of emotion, restoring verisimilitude and fidelity to experience. Section/Category: Social AnthropologyAuthor Comments: Dear EditorFollowing your emails of 17 and 18 December, I have made the additions advised, in sentences and footnotes at various places: pp.9, 12, 20, 26, n1, n 6. I found I couldn't do all this in a single paragraph, so it made sense to allocate the points at relevant places. I hope this now supplies enough information "situating this argument in relation to your other published and forthcoming work on emotion". The additions are all highlighted in yellow. I have made a few cosmetic cuts to allow space for these additions. The total word count, including Abstract, is 10,594: just under the 10,600 you kindly permitted me.best, Andrew Beatty Powered by Editorial Manager® and ProduXion Manager® from Aries Systems Corporation 1 Anthropology and EmotionEmotion researchers, it is often said, irresistibly call to mind the fable of the blind men and the elephant, each right in his own way, none getting the whole beast (Russell 2003: 145). Where does emotion begin and end? Is it a matter of interpretation, feeling, category, situation, response, expression, or some or all of these? Perhaps there is no beast to capture and the 'whole' is a chimera: not an elephant but a unicorn. Yet the lack of palpable substance or enclosing skin, far from casting doubt on the enterprise, has spurred ever-greater efforts at definition and synthesis. The problem -the 'blindness' -is less in the selectivity than in the partiality that leads so often to the formula (always in protesting italics), 'X is the emotion'. For William James (1884), our feeling of bodily change is the emotion; for the psychologist Nico Frijda (2004), it's the "action tendency"; for the philosopher Robert Solomon (1993: 125), the judgment; and so on, through the many formulasof facial expression, semantic structure, and discourse -that make similar claims of equivalence. The definitional problem can't be made to go away by putting all the parts together, because the parts may be only contingently related; some parts may be more essential than others (an elephant is still an elephant without its tail); and, of ...

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