Emotion: Cultural Aspects. Pp. 1374-7 in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

Jack Barbalet The relationship between emotions and culture has been discussed ever since there was interest in what it means to be human, and since then that relationship has been contrastingly characterised as either inimical or reconcilable. Culture can be understood as the defining values, meanings and thoughts of a local, national or supranational community. When emotions are conceived in terms of psychological feelings and physical sensations, then they appear inimical to culture. This is because such a perspective suggests the involuntary nature and disorganizing consequence of emotions. The opposition between cognition as reason and emotion, implicit in this representation, is classically defended in Platos critique of dramatic poetry in the Republic, for instance. Platos supposition that emotion is pleasure or pain dissociated from thought or knowledge was corrected, however, by Aristotles more comprehensive appreciation of emotion as not merely physical but also cognitive, in which culture and emotions are reconciled. In his treatment of anger, for instance, in Rhetoric, Aristotle agrees that emotion has a biological component, the physical sensation of pain, and also a complex cognitive component, including perception of an undeserved slight and an intention, desire for revenge. Thus Aristotle distinguishes between emotions in terms of both the different physical sensations associated with them and also their different cognitive or cultural elements: hatred and anger are different not just in their physical sensations, but also in the way in which each emotion conceives its object as when Aristotle says that anger has an individual as its object whereas hatred applies to classes such as thieves or informers. Similarly, fear and shame are distinguished not just physically but cognitively, as expectation respectively of immanent harm or disgrace. There is something else, then, that should be noticed in this account even though Aristotle does not make it explicit, namely that imagination is important in the experience of emotion. Thus culture is unavoidable in emotion through a number of routes. The situation that provokes an emotion, as opposed to the physical or biological structure that supports it, is broadly cultural, and so is the intention it promotes; finally, thought itself or imagination may lead to emotional experience. The different conceptions of the relation between emotion and culture found in Plato and Aristotle stand as models for all subsequent statements. Relevant changes in accounts of emotions since classical Athens have been improvement in understanding the physical structures and processes underlying emotions, but also a difficulty in maintaining the methodological reach of Aristotles approach to the cultural dimensions of emotions. In the Middle Ages, for instance, because the only emotional commitment approved by the Church was love of Christ, emotions were seen as ardent, vehement, and overpowering, as passions, a term unavoidably also associated with Christs suffering. Any emotion apart from Christian devotion was thus regarded as subversive of religious faith and correspondingly condemned as irrational. By the 16th and17th centuries, probably through the emergent significance of market exchanges and diplomacy in which it was necessary to form a view of the intentions of others, an operational interest in emotions loosened from theological prejudice and emphasizing their expressive and rhetorical significance became the subject of

numerous publications in France, Spain and England. This trend was consummated in the 18th century discussion of moral sentiments, in which moral meant not merely ethical but especially social and cultural analysis, and sentiments implied the cognitive even intellectual content of emotions and feelings. From the 19th century, however, treatment of emotion focussed on its physical basis at the expense of its ideational components, a development encouraged by enormous strides in anatomical, physiological and neurological sciences. This trend was reinforced by subsequent psychological experimentation that treated only those emotions amenable to laboratory investigation visceral, reactive and of short duration and thus reinforced the partial and limited idea that emotions disrupted thought and were therefore inimical to culture. By the 1980s the cultural dimensions of emotions were again given their due. In some quarters this meant a focus on the cognitive elements of emotion to the exclusion of anything else. This arose through a number of factors but was legitimated intellectually by broad recognition of the significance of what psychologists call the cognitive appraisal process, namely that the type and intensity of an emotion elicited by an event depends on the subjects interpretation and evaluation of perception of its circumstance and environment. Psychologists recognized that this process is extremely complex involving both inordinately rapid and automatic central nervous system processes as well as more controlled and conscious activities, sociologically described as interpretation and definition of the situation. The neurological revolution in emotions research came from focus on the first aspect of this process and the constructionist theory of emotions from the second. The majority of sociologists and anthropologists and large numbers of psychologists and philosophers who have written on emotions over the last 25 years believe that emotions are constructed by cultural factors. The constructionist position holds that emotional experiences depend on cultural cues and interpretations, and therefore that linguistic practices, values, norms, and currents of belief constitute the substance of experience of emotions (McCarthy 1994). Biological and even social structural factors are irrelevant for this approach. A corollary of constructionism is that persons can voluntarily determine the emotions they experience, that the cultural construction of emotions entails emotions management. The constructionist approach has enlivened discussion of emotions and drawn attention to the ways in which emotions are differentially experienced across societal divisions and through historical time. The object of any emotion will be influenced by prevailing meanings and values, as will the way emotions are expressed; thus what is feared and how people show fear, indeed how they may experience fear, will necessarily vary from culture to culture. The strength of this perspective is demonstrated by the fact that emotions attract cultural labels or names. In this way emotions become integrated into the broader conceptual repertoire of a culture and prevailing implicit cultural values and beliefs are infused into the meaning of named emotions (Russell 1991). Thus the notorious difficulty of translating emotions words from one language to another. But by treating emotions exclusively as strategic evaluations derived from local meaning systems the constructionist approach is arguably itself captive of cultural preferences. It is important to remember that emotions that escape cultural tagging are not thereby without individual and social consequence. Indeed, there is much evidence that socially important emotions are experienced below the threshold of

conscious awareness and cannot be fully accounted for in only cultural terms (Scheff 1990). If culture shapes or constructs emotions, what is it that is shaped or constructed? In a neglected but important discussion Agnes Heller (1979) argues that cultural adaptation of innate emotions involves elaboration of cognitive-situational feelings that regulates them. These affective interpretations of emotions achieve their regulatory capacity by virtue of being secondary modifications of physically based affects or emotions, such as fear, that are provoked by events and expressive of them. Thus it is necessary to describe the cause of fear, for instance, in physical (endocrinoneurological) or social structural (insufficiency of power) terms, while the object of fear what persons are afraid of must largely be defined culturally. From this perspective the cognitive dimensions of emotions are not treated at the expense of their physical and social structural elements, but together with them. The real significance of this position, found in writers such as Norbert Elias (2000) and Emile Durkheim, is that it permits exploration of an aspect of the relationship between emotions and culture ignored by the constructionist approach, namely the contribution emotions make to cultural experiences and components. In The Division of Labour in Society (1893), Durkheim includes emotions within the category of collective conscience, the latter standing for a determinative cultural formation. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) his treatment of cultural institutions refers to the sustaining importance of emotional effervescence. Ritual settings, argues Durkheim, provide a framework within which emotional experiences are formed, and the affective dimensions of the emotions and their directing energy gives life to cultural practices and institutions. In particular, attention to common cultural objects, coordination of actions and symbolic gestures, and diffusion of orientation and practice through a society are all achieved as a result of emotional focus and contagion. Unlike constructionist arguments, Durkheims discussion regards emotions as irreducible foundational forces of cognitive and cultural phenomena. There are a number of ways in which emotions support and shape culture. Randall Collins (1990: 27), for instance, has suggestively claimed that values are cognitions infused with emotion. This is an insightful corrective to the position found in sociology through the influence of Max Webers approach, for instance, namely that values and cognitions operate through exclusion of emotions. Indeed, Adam Smiths pioneering cultural sociology, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), shows how self-judgement and judgement of the conduct of others are based in emotional appraisals, and how such emotions interact with what he calls custom and fashion. More recently and from a quite different perspective Jonathan Turner (2000) demonstrates that emotions underlie not only attunement of interpersonal responses and social sanctioning, but also moral coding and the evaluations of social resources. On a more macrosociological level, it is useful to consider the composition of broad cultural temper in terms of underlying emotional patters. Suggestive statements of the relevant processes are in papers by Joseph Bensman and Arthur Vidich (1962), and Joseph de Rivera (1992). In their discussion of the differential impact, both positive and negative, on opportunities for income through movements in the business cycle, Bensman and

Vidich indicate the sources of emotionally informed outlooks of distinct economically defined groups that impact on the broader societal culture, as when descending real income gives rise to status defensiveness and resentment of others. In a similar fashion de Rivera shows how political developments impact on the cultural ambience of whole societies through what he calls emotional climates. These studies point to the economic and political sources of the aggregation of collective emotional patterns from individual-level emotions arising out of structured situations. The emotional climates that are identified in this process function as both orientating patterns of culture, which influence individual appraisals, and also collective outcomes of individual emotional experiences. The role of emotions in the construction of culture points to not only the composition of emotion but significantly its function. Emotions alert individuals to changes in and elements of their environment that are of concern to them, they provide focus to situations in which these things are integral and facilitate appropriate strategies to normalize these situations. That is, emotions both define the situations of persons and indicate what their interests are or intentions might be within them. It is a short step from this statement of the function of emotion to one concerning the emotional contribution to culture. It was mentioned above that cultural regulation of emotion occurs through elaboration of cognitive-situational feelings. It is likely that this process can be understood as emotional reaction to emotional experience, and that much cultural variation can be understood in this way. Jealousy, for example, is a widespread if not universal emotion. But in traditional or Mediterranean societies people are proud of their jealousy, whereas in modern or Western societies people may be ashamed of it. Even the apparent absence of certain emotions from particular cultures can be explained in this way, as with Simmels blas feeling, the emotional antidote to self-regarding emotions under conditions of metropolitan life. This discussion encourages reconsideration of the process of cultural appraisal or definition of the situation, which constructionists typically explain through application of feeling rules. But artefacts such as feeling rules, following Bourdieu, might better be understood as outcomes rather than determinants of practices. That insult of Untouchables leads to acquiescence rather than anger may be explained through cognitive appraisal implicit in Hindu religious belief, in which gratitude results from receiving caste deserts. But such cultural explanations fail to account for the sustained coercion by higher caste persons in maintaining Untouchable subservience, or the mass conversions of Untouchables to Islam or Christianity when opportunity permits. Alternatively, constraints of social inferiority provide sufficient structural antecedent precondition to account for Untouchable emotional experience of apathy and hopelessness, emotions that contribute to Untouchable culture. In this account social structural relations elicit emotional reactions that then contribute to cultural experience (Barbalet 1998; Kemper 1978). Not all social relations generative of emotional experience are current or past; they may also be imagined. Imagined relations are central to future oriented emotions, such as fear, anxiety, and hope, but also vicarious emotions in which persons at some level and in some manner imagine themselves to be others. This latter form is especially important for an understanding of cultural experiences led by entertainment and advertising industries that pervade, indeed dominate, the present (Illouz 2003). As the rapid communication and electronic projection of images stimulating vicarious

emotions is characteristic of modern commercial culture, so the significance of emotions for the support of cultural experience is to that degree reinforced.

REFERENCES: Barbalet, J. M. (1998) Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bensman, Joseph and Arthur Vidich (1962) Business Cycles, Class and Personality Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review, 49: 30-52 Collins, Randall (1990) Stratification, Emotional Energy, and the Transient Emotions. Pp. 27-57 in Theodore Kemper (ed), Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions. Albany: SUNY Press. Elias, Norbert (2000). The Civilizing Process. London: Blackwell. Heller, Agnes (1979). A Theory of Feeling. Assen: Van Gorcum. Illouz, Eva (2003) Oprah Winfrey and the Glamor of Misery. New York: Columbia University Press. Kemper, Theodore D. (1978) A Social Interactional Theory of Emotions. New York: Wiley. McCarthy, E. Doyle (1994) The Social Construction of Emotions: New Directions from Cultural Theory. Pp. 267-80 in William M. Wentworth and John Ryan (eds), Social Perspective on Emotion, volume 2. Greenwich: JAI Press Rivera, Joseph de (1992) Emotional Climate: Social Structure and Emotional Dynamics. Pp. 197-218 in K.T. Strongman (ed) International Review of Studies on Emotion, volume 2. New York: Wiley. Russell, James A. (1991) Culture and the Categorization of Emotions, Psychological Bulletin. 110(3): 426-50. Scheff, Thomas J. (1990). Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion and Social Structure. Chicago University Press. Turner, Jonathan (2000) On the Origins of Human Emotions. Stanford: Stanford University Press