Whose emotions? Boundaries and boundary markers in the study of emotions

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay highlights the ‘boundary work’ accomplished through the identification and labelling of emotion with respect to the representation of communities and their memberships, the marking of group inclusion or exclusion, and the uses of emotion for shoring up, defining, and strengthening identities. It distinguishes between emotional self-identifications, the labelling practices that are used to mark the emotions of others, and the performances of emotions and practices of marking that are used for social mobility, for making claims to represent others, and for social reproduction. Bringing the author’s analysis of representations of emotion in the context of Telugu-speaking southern India into conversation with the essays in this volume, the essay identifies five different types of socio-cultural work that the performance, representation, and marking of emotion can perform. These include: (1) establishing one’s own membership in a group; (2) incorporating others; (3) staking a claim to represent others; (4) marking distinctions; and (5) reproducing existing social distinctions. While not an exhaustive list, nor always mutually exclusive, these categories are intended to illustrate a series of examples that provide a context for thinking about what is at stake in the representation, performance, and marking of emotion. The essay concludes with a recommendation to be attentive to the specific contexts in which emotion is performed, marked, or represented, and to ask who is doing the marking of emotion, what their relationships are to those who are marked as experiencing or displaying specific emotions, and what work such actions accomplish for those doing the marking.