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Current Emotion Research in Anthropology: Reporting the Field

Andrew Beatty
Emotion Review 2013 5: 414
DOI: 10.1177/1754073913490045
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490045
2013

EMR5410.1177/1754073913490045Emotion ReviewBeatty Current Emotion Research in Anthropology

VIEW FROM A DISCIPLINE

Current Emotion Research in Anthropology:

Reporting the Field

Emotion Review
Vol. 5, No. 4 (October 2013) 414422
The Author(s) 2013
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073913490045
er.sagepub.com

Andrew Beatty

Department 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.

Keywords
anthropological approaches, ethnography, narrative, translation

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 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 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 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 do not register 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 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 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
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 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

Corresponding author: Andrew Beatty, Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK. Email: Andrew.Beatty@brunel.ac.uk

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Beatty Current Emotion Research in Anthropology 415

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. 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 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,
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 theoretical traditions (some retrospectively constructed), canonical
authors, and specialized jargon. Cross-cutting these divergences, 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 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 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 resurgent 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 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, 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, 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 anthropologists 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 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

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 is hardly surprising that a superordinate category of emotion has not been reported from many of the places

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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 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
(Beatty, 2005a, 2005b; Russell, 1991). 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, Frijda, and Fischer (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 Averills (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 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 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, 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 (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 theoryindependent reality or integrity (e.g., Manstead etal., 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
(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 testify), 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 deconstructive 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, publicly 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 mysteriously ill. He had not emotionalized his response to an event that
might otherwise have prompted expressions of shame or anger.

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Beatty Current Emotion Research in Anthropology 417

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 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 assaultor, in Shweders preferred sequence, the feeling? 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 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 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 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
2 years and I knew the man fairly well. Again, something in the
sequence of an emotion episode appears to have been shortcircuited, 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 interpretation 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 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
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 informant, 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 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 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 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 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 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 wifes 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 Levys 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

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418 Emotion Review Vol. 5 No. 4

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 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 Translation
Evans-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 (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 constructionism, the unnaturalness of emotions consisting precisely in
their cultural composition, their embedding in social processes.
Accordingly, the causal nexus of Ifaluk emotion, in Lutzs 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 emotionsor at least emotional discourseas 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. 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 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 situationsand 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 (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 pragmatic 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 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, 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), brokenhearted (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 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 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

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Beatty Current Emotion Research in Anthropology 419

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 psychology. 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 cognates in other Austronesian languages (e.g., atau = 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 ones 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 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 soulsearching of the orators who represent them. Yetalthough 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 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 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 micromanagement, 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 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 welldefined 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 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 experiences, 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, background, fears, and concerns, not from the feeling.
The peculiar egocentricity of emotion, which psychologists
and philosophers have remarked upon (Barrett, 2006; BenZeev, 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 emotionswhich 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 do not generally sit togethera
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 personhoodstructurally, 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

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420 Emotion Review Vol. 5 No. 4

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 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 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 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, narrativeexplains 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 (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 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 Briggss (1970)
classic account of fieldwork among the Inuit, R. Rosaldos
(1989) still-influential essay on the anthropologist as positioned 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 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). 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 formation. 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 nonanthropological 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 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, 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 participation 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 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 womens lives I felt deeper sympathy but less emotional congruence, 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 ethnographers motives and feelings offers insights into local

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Beatty Current Emotion Research in Anthropology 421

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 suffering. 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 variously comments on and criticizes the trauma industry (see
examples in Biehl etal., 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 nontraditional 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 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 (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.

Conclusion
Anthropologys 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 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 (2001, p. 177).

Notes
1
2
3

For a systematic comparison, pitched at the level of ideology rather

than experience, see Lutz (1988).
For a comprehensive review of linguistic approaches to emotion, see
Wilce (2009).
White 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 (1994, p. 226).
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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