Five - Persons and Particulars

Summary

In chapter 6 I explore the biographical dimension of emotional episodes and show what happens when this is ignored, finishing with two examples of emotionally vital ethnography (Briggs on the Utku; Abu-Lughod on the Bedouin). The objective is to boost realism and thereby enhance scientific validity and readability. The personal reference of emotions, their sine qua non, has been scanted in most scientific and anthropological accounts because of a reliance on generic or hypothetical examples; yet the particularities that make an emotion mine or yours cannot be reduced to subject position. Social constructionist accounts and approaches through ‘discourse’ depend on generic emotions among generic social types. The past experiences, personal confrontations, non-linguistic behaviour, and unvoiced reflections—not to mention the feelings—that contribute to occurrent emotions lie hidden in methods that prioritise and isolate verbal performance and stereotypical script-definition. A thoroughgoing relativism mistakes ideology for living practice, erecting barriers to the cross-cultural apprehension of emotion. I show that a reliance on verbal forms or a preference for verbally expressive cultures is not essential to narrative anthropology: all that is required is a sense of the evolving structure of persons-in-situations, which is intrinsic to social life.