Current Emotion Research in Anthropology1
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:
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 enfamille or to friendlyneighborsover 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 needswithout 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 shrugat“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 anthropologistcan 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 willbe with unresolved conceptual and methodological issues. I want to suggest it is time for a rethinking.
WhateverHappened 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-termcontributors, 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 termsrefer 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 (IndaRosaldo, 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 fromthis common ground—andwith 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 emotionskeptics 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 polytheticdefinition, 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., Mansteadet 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 illnessrather 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 methodis 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.)