Conclusion

Summary

The conclusion summarises the ways in which a narrative approach to emotion captures key aspects of experience and the complex role of emotion in social life, restoring what gets scanted in conventional ethnography and lab science. Narrative is implicated in emotion in several ways. 1) in the constitution and construal of emotion: emotions are threads in a weave of situated persons-with-histories; 2) emotions encode scripts for action and explain past, present and future behaviour; 3) emotions serve as tools of moral suasion, changing situations, recasting events in ways that narrative alone can capture; 4) emotions fit into, comment on, and shape, social dramas: they pertain to competing narratives; 5) narrative - especially in the form of plots - is about reversals of fortune, emotionally-productive situations; 6) emotions have a time-depth and a biographical resonance that elude synchronic analysis and can only be recovered through narrative. A narrative account of emotion illuminates not only the tangle of pressures and constraints but also the possibilities inherent in the situation that the passionate person registers and weighs.