Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions

Abstract

A coherent account of emotional change must find a dynamic, a vector of alteration, outside the discursive structures and normative practices that have monopolized ethnographic attention in research on affect. But this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional expression. Emotion talk and emotional gestures are not well characterized by the notion of “discourse” derived from the poststructuralist theories of Foucault or by that of “practice” derived from the theoretical writings of Bourdieu, Giddens, and others. These concepts do not capture the two‐way character of emotional utterances and acts, their unique capacity to alter what they “refer” to or what they “represent”–‐a capacity which makes them neither “constative” nor “performative” utterances but a third type of communicative utterance entirely, one that has never received adequate theoretical formulation. An attempt is made to formulate a framework for emotional utterances, and the framework is applied to a number of examples.