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DOI: 10.1177/1754073913490045 2013 5: 414Emotion Review

Andrew BeattyCurrent Emotion Research in Anthropology: Reporting the Field

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Emotion ReviewVol. 5, No. 4 (October 2013) 414 422

The Author(s) 2013ISSN 1754-0739DOI: 10.1177/1754073913490045er.sagepub.com

Introduction: Dialogue Across Boundaries

A review of what anthropologists get up tohow they think about emotionwill 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 philoso-phy; few can hope to keep abreast of the booming interdiscipli-nary emotion literature. Those few specialists aside, we tend to take what we find useful, cheerfully rummaging among theories like Lvi-Strauss 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 anthropo-logical studies for psychologists, though of course the difficulty of reading across disciplines cuts both ways. Anthropologists grumble at accounts of culture or cultures that do not regis-ter how contested these concepts have become in the last 30 years; they shrug at ethnographic reports that scant the deep immersion that traditionally characterizes anthropology. A fur-ther 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 antipositivist 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 to analyze the framing of human experience in what he called the culturally constituted behavioral environment (1955, p. 87). Nowadays phenomenological approaches in anthro pology 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 experi-ence, 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) philo-sophical 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 also 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

Current Emotion Research in Anthropology: Reporting the Field

Andrew BeattyDepartment of Anthropology, Brunel University, UK

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 thatso far as anthropology is concernedonly 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.

Keywordsanthropological approaches, ethnography, narrative, translation

Corresponding author: Andrew Beatty, Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK. Email: [email protected]

490045 EMR5410.1177/1754073913490045Emotion ReviewBeatty Current Emotion Research in Anthropology2013

VIEW FROM A DISCIPLINE

Beatty Current Emotion Research in Anthropology 415

about them. When it comes to emotions, anthropologists have often skimped these difficult questions, failing to capi-talize 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 unre-solved conceptual and methodological issues. I want to sug-gest 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. Z. 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 hap-pened 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, person-hood, 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, Good, & Kleinman, 2007; Csordas, 2002; Jackson, 1989). The previous litany needs quotes because the key terms refer not to transparent concepts or standard fields of interestunlike, say, cognition (another growth area in anthropology)but, in their fullest extension, to research paradigms with distinctive theo-retical traditions (some retrospectively constructed), canonical authors, and specialized jargon. Cross-cutting these diver-gences, broadly assumedif continuously revisedcentral 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 disci-pline 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 ignoringmore tendentiously, abolishingthe individual. The locus of emotion has evaporated.

Absorption Into Cognitive Science

Largely a thing apart and at odds with the other factors, a resur-gent anthropological interest in cognition joins interdisciplinary work in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Some of this work touches on emotion. For example, Whitehouses (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 nonliterate societies.

Globalization

Globalization has shaken up the field in both senses (the places we go, the things we do), forcing a rethinking of what anthro-pologists 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 ethnog-rapher as invisible recording angel. In line with critical, post-colonial, and postmodernist questionings of social scientific authority, the ethnographer is now a positioned subject (R. Rosaldo, 1989) in need of critical scrutiny, not a neutral, harm-less presence. Ethnic identities are fluid, pragmatic, often plu-ral; 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 theo-retical 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 anthropologists view is there-fore 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 groundand with a view back to it: a validation of fieldwork as the best source of anthropological insightthat I shall base my review.

What Is Emotion? The Ethnographic ChallengeConsider their diversity. Some emotions come with distinctive facial expressions (anger), some without (regret). Some respond instantly to an external stimulus (surprise), others follow intro-spection (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 is hardly surprising that a superordinate cate-gory of emotion has not been reported from many of the places

416 Emotion Review Vol. 5 No. 4

where anthropologists have worked. For Russell (1991), 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 threat-ened. 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 (Beatty, 2005a, 2005b; Russell, 1991). Still, emotion is the word we are stuck with. And if the historical question is why the cat-egory should have arisen in Europe, the scientific and philo-sophical question is whether its cultural specificity vitiates its general applicability. Can it be that our folk concept just hap-pens to capture a human universal? Or are scientific definitions notably different? Are they culture-free?

A glance at the literature shows that, without being commit-ted 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, Frijda, and Fischer (2004), con-tributors appear to accept the usefulness of the English word to categorize certain socially embedded psychobiological pro-cesses 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 expres-sion. 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 Averills (1994) suggestion that emotion is a poly-thetic 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 anthro-pology, pointing out that many of the categories used by anthro-pologists, 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 kinshipNeedhams fieldwas a homogeneous category were false. This led him to such radical pronouncements as there is no such thing as kinship (Needham, 1971, p. 5). A trail of scholars in Needhams wake announced the death of this or that category. Yet the anthropo-logical 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, emotion is a complex syn-thetic notion; and particular emotions (e.g., sadness, envy, guilt, and love) are derivatives of various combinations of wants, beliefs, feelings, and values (2004, p. 83). The anthropologists job, on this view, would be to investigate such combinations without a prior commitment to that notional whole, emotion. In similar terms, Wierzbicka 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 (1999, p. 24). 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 inter-ested in how appraisals, feelings, words, and actions are variably linked, however those linkages may be conceived. Shweder (1994, 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 possibilityattested 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 writes of the people of Ifaluk, Micronesia (and as many ethnographers tes-tify), emotion, thought, and body are seen in ethnotheory as intimately linked through their roles in illness (1988, p. 100). But a nonemotional response would depend on the possibility that cultural practices do not 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 decon-structive method is useful for the fieldworker. It helps to make sense of a puzzling episode in my Javanese fieldwork (Beatty, 2009, pp. 245258) when the headman of my host village, pub-licly humiliated by Islamist critics in the mosque on the Prophets birthday and unable to face them down, suddenly sank back in a faintdizzy, he croakedand fell mysteri-ously ill. He had not 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 hesitationwhether 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 cannot oppose brute force, stupidity, or craziness, so one yields, as a tree bends to the wind, and sur-vives. The headman explicitly deliberated in this way but evi-dently felt the attack as overwhelming: He could neither accept defeat nor shrug in face-saving concession. So how did he con-strue the assaultor, in Shweders preferred sequence, the feel-ing? In some sense, evidently, he did not emotionalize it; that is, he did not 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 anger-ing affront than something like a physical blow: so it material-ized. 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 buffalohis sole means of livelihoodpoisoned 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 evenI hopeof extreme ethno-graphic 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 2 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 Shweders analysis (which in this respect is Jamesian), the emotion is an interpretation of the feeling, rather than an inter-pretation of the eliciting event. Emotions are complex narrative structures that give shape and meaning to somatic and affective experiences (Shweder, 1994, p. 37). I am not persuaded that the sequence is necessarily so. My Javanese cases are equivocal; but so too is introspective knowledge. Sometimes we scan our feel-ings 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 expecta-tions of how emotions work, prompting doubts about whether they qualify as emotions, and therefore whether there are such thingscross-culturally and unambiguouslyas 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 Levys Tahitian inform-ant, a man abandoned by his wife, who interpreted his feelings about separation as some sort of vague sickness (Levy, 1973,

p. 304). On Shweders 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 thanas we should supposesadness 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 lack-ing 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 aban-doned husband obsesses about his loss, so it is 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 (Levy, 1973), these much discussed examples are reported in scant terms, with minimal concrete observation, and mixed with hypothetical cases. We know nothing of the back-ground 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 Levys 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. Levys 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 con-viction. 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 wifes departure should experience vague ill-ness? 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 Levys eth-nography has featured in many discussions of emotion, besides serving as the model for subsequent person-centered ethnogra-phy. It remains unsurpassed in its comprehensiveness, but the problems with its presentation of emotion have not been prop-erly 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 mod-ern English funeral cannot be surprised by Tahiti. The collective determination to put on a good face, the cheerful tributes cele-brating the life of the deceased, and the sheer lack of solemnity would have seemed unaccountable 50 years ago. And we learn from the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) that grief lasting more than a few weeks is to be classed as pathological. We are all becoming Tahitians.

Emotions in TranslationEvans-Pritchard, in an apocryphal statement, described anthro-pology as the translation of culture. In her pathbreaking book, Unnatural Emotions, Lutz writes: The process of com-ing 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 reso-nance or time-depth. As with Levy, her examples are in the present and exist only in the present. They are mostly typify-ing and shorn of particularity. Indeed, an exclusion of idiosyn-cratic 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 (Lutz, 1988, p. 229, n. 1).

What underpins Lutzs 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 (Lutz, 1988, p. 6). In the same vein, M. Z. Rosaldo declares: selves and feelings, shaped by culture, may be understood in turn as the creation of particular sorts of polities (1984, p. 142).

Lutzs (1988) position is the ne plus ultra of construction-ism, the unnaturalness of emotions consisting precisely in their cultural composition, their embedding in social processes. Accordingly, the causal nexus of Ifaluk emotion, in Lutzs anal-ysis, 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 function-alist 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 emotionsor at least emotional dis-courseas 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 epi-sode witnessed by the author that extends over more than a

couple of lines (Lutz, 1988, pp. 125127), and this concerns the death of a child: not an event likely to be rich in emotional nuance or backstory. Unnatural Emotions is largely free of particular persons, histories, and narrativesjust those things which, I suggest, give emotions their force and resonance, their quality as emotions, distinct from other kinds of opin-ions, 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 hypo-thetical examples. The picture that emerges of emotion as a function of social situationsand generic situations at thatis also a function of the methodology.

Nevertheless, if we take emotions in an expanded sense (as ploys, ways of talking about society, etc.), Lutz (1988) 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 prag-matic effect on the assembly, engendering prosocial emotions. White calls it an example of an emotive institution.

Having read Lutz and White, I find I am better able to under-stand 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, pp. 293298) 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 cats fur (seriously disgruntled). Aside from hot-hearted (angry), broken-hearted (disappointed), and a few others with rough equiva-lents, most cardiac terms were not readily comprehensible. Even the simpler phrases could be misleading. Painful-hearted meant feeling resentful/spiteful; clear-hearted meant con-tent. And there was an overlap with nonemotional feelings and thoughts: ebolo dd broad-hearted = patient; aboto ba dd broken in the heart = understand; other heart terms referred to thirst and tiredness. Sundermanns approach depended on find-ing dictionary-like equivalences (he went on to write a GermanNias 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, sug-gesting a cognitive clustering at the lower end of the emotional


keyboard. (A man reported as aukhu dd, 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 psy-chology. People declare their hearts at weddings and feasts when the intention is to win concessions in ceremonial exchange or fend off the other partys 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 cats fur feeling. In ordinary speech a much smaller set of terms is used for emotionssimple rather than metaphorical and with cog-nates in other Austronesian languages (e.g., atau = afraid; cf. Malay takut, Ifaluk metagu).

Should the more outlandish heart idioms nevertheless qual-ify 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 judg-ment about ones situation (Solomon, 1980, p. 258); and they imply action tendencies (of refusal, gratitude, threat, and eva-sion), which is why they have rhetorical force. In many respects, heart speech is enacted emotionotherwise it would not work. But the emotions actually experiencedby the speakers and the people they are talking aboutare 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 neverthe-less 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 speakers 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 rec-ognizing the layered context of staged emotion, its background in interwoven histories, and its relation to unvoiced emotions, past and present.

From Discourse to NarrativeThe 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 micromanagement, and a rhetoric of moral sua-sion: 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 thor-ough 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 Baileys (1983) phrase, 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 rea-sons 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 compel-lingly to an individuals or groups situation. In M. Z. Rosaldos phrase, they are embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that I am involved. (1984, p. 143). Lutz has pointed out that in the American value system, the subjectivity of emotions gives them a fundamentaleven sacredrole in individuating the person From this perspective, emotions are Me in a way that thoughts are not (1988, p. 71). Yet even in places like Ifaluk, where emotions are not so conceivedwhere they are often predicated of usthey remain first-person expe-riences, felt in our insides; indeed, emerging from our insides (Lutz, 1988, 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 EastWest comparison, agrees: The personal aspect of an emotion derives from the individuals perspective, back-ground, fears, and concerns, not from the feeling.

The peculiar egocentricity of emotion, which psychologists and philosophers have remarked upon (Barrett, 2006; Ben-Zeev, 2010; Roberts, 1988), is not contradicted by shared expe-riences 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 emotionswhich transcends contrasts between individualist and sociocentric ideologiespositively 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, con-tempt, 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 emo-tions 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 do not generally sit togethera mild avoidance recognized in seating arrangements at feasts. The slight awkwardness that prevails has its roots in deeply held val-ues of respect, socialization practices, and ideas about person-hoodstructurally, sons replace their fathers and are felt to be in mystical competition with them (Beatty, 2009; Geertz, 1974). But the statistical averagethe stereotyped emotiondoes not begin to capture the reality. Even in the cases where most


conform to type there are always personal stories and previous emotional encounters that color the relation, often in contradic-tory ways, and give it its meaning and peculiar tone. It is those past encountersculturally framed but underdeterminedthat 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 inap-propriate. In his study of the Yolmo of Nepal, Desjarlais for-swears 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 witchs 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 do not 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 is 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 particularitiesin a word, nar-rativeexplains 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 dis-tort 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 suppos-ing an aversion to psychological explanations of behavior such as Mead (1928/1972, 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; Carrithers, 1992). 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 DevelopmentsBoster (2005) lists empathy, alongside mapping and transla-tion, as one of three methods open to the ethnographer in com-paring emotion systems. As anthropologists have reconsidered the dynamics of fieldwork, pondering the epistemological quan-daries of participant-observation and the basis of anthropologi-cal 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 Briggss (1970) classic account of fieldwork among the Inuit, R. Rosaldos (1989) still-influential essay on the anthropologist as posi-tioned subject, and person-centered ethnographies such as Wikans (1990) Balinese study, with its zeitgeist-capturing title, Managing Turbulent Hearts. These works explored the researchers ambivalent positioning in the field and the possibil-ity 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). Hages (2009) focus, for example, is on the shared experience of hosts and guests. Do the researchers 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 for-mation. Hages 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 (Hage, 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 engagementtheir political emotionsrequired something different from the passive frustration of the intellectual, namely an emotive identification with the resist-ance that turned them into actors in the conflict, rather than 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 participa-tion and observationhis semi-identificationlimited the possibility of empathy.

Drawing on the historian Rosenweins notion of emotional communities, Dureau (2012) found that the experience of her child falling sick in the field did not permit a privileged under-standing of mothers in the Western Solomons. Their expressions of maternal love take shape against a background of food short-ages, disease, and life chances starkly different from those of the Western researcher. Against such claims of experiential know-ing, I became increasingly aware that with better understanding of womens lives I felt deeper sympathy but less emotional con-gruence, grasping taru [love] as I recognized the relative superficiality of our similarities (Dureau, 2012, 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 ethnog-raphers 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 Throops (2011) recent volume on Pacific societies, or Goluboffs (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 suf-fering. The bottom line is political: Weeping functions as an enactment of female subjectivity firmly located in patriarchal kinship obligations (Goluboff, 2008, p. 90).

A similar concern with the emotional fashioning of subjectivityor for that matter the political fashioning of emotionanimates much recent work on trauma and memory, an expanding enterprise that crosses disciplinary lines and vari-ously 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 nontradi-tional 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 (Boellstorff & Lindquist, 2004)? Svaek and Skrbi (2007) consider the emo-tional 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 dis-courses of emotions in contexts of power inequality (Svaek & Skrbi, 2007, 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.

ConclusionAnthropologys 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 recog-nize, record, and write about emotion in other cultural settings. Interviews have their uses, but only detailed naturalistic obser-vation 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 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 idi-osyncratic (2001, p. 177).

Notes1 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 sees in the high proportion of negative terms in emotion vocab-

ularies a reflection of the moral work that emotion words and expres-sions perform in ordinary discourse (1994, p. 226).

4 This point does not depend on methodological individualism or an individualist ideology. The claim is not that individuals are the exclu-sive 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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