A VIRTUAL SEMINAR SERIES OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

NEW DATE:  Monday 27 March 2023 at 4.00-6.00pm (GMT)

This is an online event. You can register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ntt5WYN7TCSJqJq1VRMpgQ 

 

  

Emotional Worlds:
Beyond an Anthropology of Emotion

 

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author – Dr Andrew Beatty (Brunel University) and reviewer Prof Thomas Stodulka (Freie Universität Berlin).

Are emotions human universals? Is the concept of emotion an invention of Western tradition? If people in other cultures live radically different emotional lives how can we ever understand them? Using vivid, often dramatic, examples from around the world, and in dialogue with current work in psychology and philosophy, Andrew Beatty develops an anthropological perspective on the affective life, showing how emotions colour experience and transform situations; how, in turn, they are shaped by culture and history. In stark contrast with accounts that depend on lab simulations, interviews, and documentary reconstruction, he takes the reader into unfamiliar cultural worlds through a 'narrative' approach to emotions in naturalistic settings, showing how emotions tell a story and belong to larger stories. Combining richly detailed reporting with a careful critique of alternative approaches, he argues for an intimate grasp of local realities that restores the heartbeat to ethnography.

 

The book is published by Cambridge University Press, who kindly offer a discount for the book which will be shared with event attendees during the event. More info here.

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The review

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 27 (4) December 2021, pp1021-1022

Thomas Stodulka

Anthropological studies of emotion-related phenomena have contributed to some of the discipline's finest ethnographies since the 1920s. After a period in which emotion has been out of anthropological focus, a group of mostly American psychological anthropologists have, since the 1980s, established a systematic anthropology of emotion. Since then, ethnographies of emotion, feeling, or sentiments have flourished, and have also expanded in British, continental European, and Southeast Asian anthropologies. Although Andrew Beatty's book largely ignores the substantial works of these exponentially growing academic landscapes, Emotional worlds is an impressive companion to an ethnographically rooted interdisciplinary piece of research. Despite its exclusively Anglocentric focus, Beatty's book is a formidable theoretical overview that is based on thirty years of ethnographic engagement in Indonesia. The book must be placed in the company of the anthropology of emotion's finest authors, such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Robert Levy, Jean Briggs, Karl Heider, Michelle and Renato Rosaldo, Catherine Lutz, Lila Abu-Lughod, Douglas Hollan, and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler.

The book combines the author's previous contributions to the anthropology of emotion with episodes and narratives from fieldwork in Nias and East Java. Beatty is committed to criticizing the methods and core concepts of psychological, sociological, and certain variants of anthropological research on emotion. His argument for an exclusively narrative approach to the study of emotion-related phenomena is elegantly written and convincing. However, fellow anthropologists who combine, triangulate, and juxtapose different methods, and engage with scholars from other disciplines (beyond linguistics, the only discipline aside from philosophy Beatty does not criticize as reductionist), might wonder why it is such a bad idea to go beyond ‘talking over the fence’ (as the author himself suggests).

The book excels as a prolegomenon for a narrative anthropology of emotion-related phenomena in content, theorization, and writing style. The prose is delightful, and sometimes elegantly witty. The radical narratological approach is a perfect match for Beatty's theoretical and epistemological preferences, and his compelling adoration for fieldwork immersion, empathy, and emotional and long-term engagement with interlocutors and communities is exhilarating. Unfortunately, the book does not inspire in term of methods, which seem to be reduced to participant observation and its narrative documentation through audio-recordings and fieldnotes. But methods are clearly not the book's main concern.

Part I, ‘Groundings’, emphasizes the strength of an ethnographically rooted study of emotional expression, feeling, and rhetoric by drawing on long-term fieldwork in Nias and Java. In Part II, ‘Narrative’, we learn why a narrative approach is fundamental to the (comparative) study of emotion and related phenomena: ethnographic openness, cultural relativism, linguistic diversity, the willingness to learn from the field, allowing oneself a long-term perspective, and respecting emotion-related temporality. All this goes into the service of carefully crafted, socially positioned representation through writing. The first two parts are a compelling introduction for the interested anthropologist.

To the involved reader, the book's third and last part, titled ‘Perspectives’, is a thought-provoking read. It comprises a powerful anthropological critique of the affective turn and affect studies, which elucidates the discomfort some anthropologists may feel with an increasingly arbitrary theoretical genre devoid of method, human emotionality, and its felt consequences. Affect studies can be tiresome to anthropologists of emotion because of its imprecision and opaqueness, and because they hijack narrative approaches such as Beatty's in the service of speculative jargon without social and emotional consequences for those ‘affected’ by objects and materialities. Affect studies can obscure the researcher's methodology, and render thorough fieldwork unnecessary, even a hindrance. Fieldwork precision and personal immersion are sacrificed for the sake of a good story. Beatty argues that ‘the action [in much affect-centred work] is happening on the page, not in the field’ (p. 211), declaring that there are no ‘people’ in affect studies (pp. 226-7). Affect studies authors aim to animate objects and de-animate persons within a loosely grounded fieldwork and unemotional ethnography, where no intimacies between people seem to arise. Beatty's conclusion – that in affect studies ethnography is made subordinate to theoretical reasoning – is a claim that will win sympathy from sceptics of affect theory. Although he ignores those ethnographies which sit astride both affect and emotion studies and aim to combine the strengths of both paradigms, many anthropologists will unite behind the book's most substantial claim: ‘The affect paradigm excludes the shared life that is the strength of fieldwork, the possibility of human connection and the source of so many anthropological insights’ (p. 225).

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