The Anthropology of Emotions

Abstract

Interest in has burgeoned in the last decade, not only in anthropology, but in psychology (e.g. 5, 77,113, 141), sociology (e.g. 72, 81), philosophy (e.g. 153, 177), history (e.g. 180), and feminist studies (e.g. 176). A concern to understand the role of the emotional in personal and social life has developed in response to a number of factors, including dissatisfaction with the dominant cognitive view of humans as mechanical information processors, renewed concern with understanding sociocultural experience from the perspective of the persons who live it, and the rise of interpretive approaches to social science that are more apt to examine what has previously been considered an inchoate phenomenon. The past relegation of emotions to the sidt:unes of culture theory is an artifact of the view that they occupy the more natural and biological provinces of human experience, and hence are seen as relatively uniform, uninteresting, and inaccessible to the methods of cultural analysis. In going beyond its original psychobiological framework to include concern with emotion's social relational, communicative, and cultural aspects, emotion theory has taken on new importance for sociocultural theory proper. These cultural approaches have made it possible for a broad range of anthropologists, including those traditionally hostile to psychological, to sustain an interest in emotion so construed.