240512 VO MM3 Anthropology of emotions (2024W)

The course will involve a close reading of five classic book-length ethnographies on the emotions. The anthropological method will be contrasted with an analytic model drawn from cognitive psychology and phenomenology that views emotions as embodied appraisals. In this way the undeniable cultural diversity of emotion regimes can be squared with the equally evident idea that affects are human universals.

Our ability to register, process and understand emotions is crucial to how we act in particular circumstances. We judge particular emotions to be positive or negative, and such appraisals elicit a corresponding response. The emotions may refer to private feelings and personal moods or deal with social relations and collective matters. Since emotions motivate and orient action even in matters not concerned with private feelings, appraisals play a key role in deliberations. The feeling may be our own or someone else's, we either experience it ourselves or appraise emotions others express. In sum, emotions are the way we make fundamental judgments on the rightness or wrongness of social acts. Thus one essential question for an anthropology of emotions is whether and in what ways affect is responsive to reasons (unit 1). One view is that emotions are basic and primary to cognition. The idea is that affect judgments are inescapable (hard to control), irrevocable (you cannot be mistaken about affect), implicate the self, difficult to verbalize, and separable from cognitive content. Feelings are experientially prior to ideas. The opposite view is that emotional experience depends on a cognitive judgment on the relationship between a person and their environment. The idea is that emotions are first-person judgements on the achievement of our goals. The primary appraisal of goal achievement is followed by a secondary appraisal of the available coping options. The same event can trigger different appraisals, and thus different emotional responses, in different individuals and settings. Hence the appraisal and response are relative to cultural representations of emotion and to the words which a culture has available to identify and describe emotional states.

The second essential question (unit 2) for an anthropology of emotions concerns the relationship between self-appraisal and other-appraisals. In framing the first essential question the focus has clearly been on appraisals of our own affects (physiology) and goal achievements (cognitions). No less important and interdependent with self-appraisals is our ability to read other people’s emotions in facial expressions and in culturally regulated practices of hiding or displaying their feelings. This is because the same display rules that allow me to read other people’s faces also constrain me in expressing my own emotions. Accordingly, a complete analysis of emotion appraisal must consider not only subjective awareness of body responses (part ii) and cognitions (part iii), but also expressive behavior both natural (part iv) and mediated by display rules (part v).

Individual units in part ii) will discuss the physiology of anger and fear (unit 3), its possible absence in emotions like shame or pride (unit 4), and the question of what basic emotions are (unit 5). Part iii) discusses standard descriptions of emotions ('sadness is the experience of irrevocable loss', unit 6); emotions absent from, or for which there is no word in, a culture (unit 7); and the contrast of hypercognized vs hypocognized emotions (unit 8). Part iv) will distinguish between emotions involuntarily evinced (unit 9), emotions knowingly expressed (unit 10), and emotions conventionally displayed (unit 11) by facial expressions, gestures, discrete acts or continuous practices. Units in part v) will discuss a display rule against expressing anger (unit 12), the difficulty to hide actual feelings behind displays (unit 13), and rules for different secondary appraisals of the same identified emotion (unit 14).