Emotions in the Field: What Are We Talking About?

Abstract

In the anthropology of emotion, rival approaches -cultural relativism and a universalism based on common humanity or shared experience -imply different forms of engagement in the field. This article, a sceptical appraisal, suggests that ethnographers commonly fail to build the diversity of emotional practice into their accounts and have therefore provided a flawed basis for theorizing and comparison. With reference to two Indonesian cases -Nias and Java -I suggest that the domain of emotion is diversely bounded cross-culturally and is inconsistently constructed in particular contexts. This has critical implications for fieldwork methodology, cross-cultural comparison, and theories of human development.Picture the situation, common enough in the field: two parties face each other in argument. One seems to appeal to the emotions of the other, or refers to a feeling or to the suffering of her own side to press an advantage; but the words have no equivalent in English, and there is no corresponding show of emotion. The verbal formulas suggest something 'emotional'; but neither context nor human sympathy can supply us with an interpretation. So what do we do?Another snapshot from the field: a mother is correcting her small son in front of others, saying he has done wrong and should be 'ashamed'. He is sent out to the sound of laughter. Or, again, a child is made to stand up in a show of 'respect' to a stranger, or told to express 'gratitude'. What is going on? Having learned the local language, we know roughly what the vocabulary of emotion means among adults (we know how to use it); but what is its function here: descriptive, performative, educative, or what? What is the relation between word and feeling? And how does the child understand the word?Such questions lead quickly to general problems of methodology and epistemology: problems of cultural relativism, translation, empathy, and the sharing or otherwise of experience. But their challenge to the ethnographer in the field should not be brushed aside. For if we cannot reliably recognize emotion away from home -or if we naïvely assume that we know what counts as such -our theoretical generalizations are unfounded and will, in turn, lead us to misconstrue particular cases. For the anthropologist, the problem of what constitutes emotion begins and ends in the field.In the 'anthropology of emotions' (the framing of a subfield rather begging the question) a number of quite different approaches have been tried. Emo-

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