Anthropology of Emotion

Abstract

Emotions have always appeared in anthropological monographs—in the study of kinship or ritual, for example—but for a long time they were either taken for granted or judged to be beyond the scope of the discipline. They became an object of study in their own right only in the second half of the twentieth century, with the development of various branches of psychological anthropology. Many debates have focused on the possibility of studying the inner states of others, and even of endorsing the Western definition of emotion as an inner state. The 1980s were marked by reflections on native concepts of emotion, and by the radical decision made by some anthropologists to locate emotion in discourse and to repudiate psychological concerns. This period was also marked by major developments in linguistic anthropology, which threw light on the embedding of affect in language, beyond the gloss of emotion words. In a way, the label “anthropology of emotion” refers to a specific moment in the history of the discipline, although anthropologists are still as interested as ever in the topic. Later research in the field has faced two main challenges, which are still relevant today. On the one hand, how is it possible to avoid reducing emotion to emotion talk while also taking seriously the methodological and epistemological critique that led to the discursive turn? On the other hand, how can we grasp variations in affective intensity, which can be a property of things or situations, while not dismissing earlier research on specific emotions such as anger or grief, nor the definition of emotions as discrete events in the flow of affective life?