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Current Emotion Research in Anthropology 1

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]


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


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


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


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.


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


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?


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.,


“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


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


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


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


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


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


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, self-

reports, 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.


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. “Painful-

hearted” 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


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


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.


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


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


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 self-

reported 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.


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


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), Scheper-

Hughes (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


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.


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”.


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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.

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