Moralizing emotion: A breakdown in Thailand

Abstract

Emotional practices serve as privileged sites for moral action in a Buddhist community in Northern Thailand. In this article I draw out some of the theoretical implications of this emphasis for the study of morality, combining an anthropological focus on moments of moral breakdown with a psychological claim about the importance of emotion in moral practice. I do this through a case of emotions experienced surrounding a Northern Thai man afflicted with a severe alcohol-related illness. I trace the emotions experienced by the man, his friends, and his family during this difficult time, and analyze the ways in which their emotions are moralized within their community. Contrasting these emotions with quite different reactions raised by the same situation by members of a nearby Christian Karen community, I show how such emotions are broadly connected to locally constructed religious ideas about the value of calmness and the letting go of affective attachments. Through this study I argue that emotions provide new evidence for culturally variable expressions of morality, less as the underpinning of moral judgments and more as objects of moral assessments, and in doing so suggest a new theoretical and methodological domain for the anthropological study of morality.