How Did It Feel for You?

Emotion, Narrative, and the Limits

of Ethnography
Andrew Beatty

ABSTRACT In this article, I present the case for a narrative approach to emotion, identifying conceptual and pre-
sentational weaknesses in standard ethnographic approaches. First-person and confessional accounts, increasingly
offered as a corrective to the distancing and typifying effects of cultural analysis, are shown to be unreliable; shared
experience turns out to be an illusion. Instead, I suggest we look to literary examples for lessons in how to capture
the full significance of emotion in action. Here, however, we reach the limits of ethnography.

Keywords: emotion, narrative, ethnographic writing, fieldwork, literature

H ow should we write about emotion? The answer, pre-

sumably, will depend in part on our conception of
what emotions are: Basic human functions underlying cul-
tural difference or infinitely diverse ways of apprehending
the world? Portable human attributes or fixtures of the cul-
tural landscape? If the former, can I rely on personal ex-
perience for ethnographic insights; if the latter, can I ever
really connect? To incline one way or the other is to imply
a particular presentational strategy, an ethnographic genre,
perhaps even a way of doing fieldwork. It may also be the
case, conversely, that the way we write about emotion limits
our possibilities of understanding. Without attempting here
a singular definition of emotion—a polythetic concept if ever
there was one—the purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to
critique some widely used and long-standing paradigms in
the reporting of emotion and (2) to suggest the advantages
and challenges of adopting a narrative approach. A linking
theme concerns the analytical relevance of the ethnogra-
pher’s own emotions. Does my anger connect me with my
fieldwork hosts whose anger I seem to share but whose
culture I will never fully master? Or do my feelings mean
something only against my own inescapable background, be-
longing, as such, to a different form of life—indeed, to a
different life? In writing about emotions in the field—our
own and others’—where should we draw the line?
A narrative approach to the emotions demands a con-
textual richness that overspills the tight frames of standard
“realist ethnographies” (Stoller 1989; Van Maanen 1988)
with their case histories and descriptive summaries. Indeed,
to get a better sense of how emotions are entangled in
personal histories, we may be better served by literary ex-
amples. For not only do emotions, in a quite obvious way,
belong to stories; they also build on, allude to, and echo
other emotions and events; they refer to interwoven lives.
As such, their significances are not easily contained within
an illustrative and generalizing format. In two senses, then,
emotions possess a narrative aspect: they make sense within
a narrative sequence, and they “tell a story.” This claim ap-
plies as much to basic human experiences as to intricately
plotted affairs of the heart. The most intense, immediate
emotions—joy at the birth of a child, grief at a sudden
death—derive their fullest meaning from complex personal
histories, even if they also possess a paradigmatic signifi-
cance, a pattern that can be grasped instantly by unfamiliar
others (Carrithers 1992:165–176). Such emotions are not
the creation of a moment; they participate in manifold rela-
tionships formed over periods of time. Our writing, if it is
to have any credibility, must reflect this complexity.1
ANTHROPOLOGICAL WRITING ABOUT EMOTION:
POLAR POSITIONS
The question of how to write about emotion has divided
the closest of colleagues. Michelle Rosaldo saw emotions as
“embodied thoughts” whose diversity of form “reflect[s] con-
sistent differences in the organization of social life” (Rosaldo
as quoted in Levy 1983:133). “Affects,” she wrote, “what-
ever their similarities, are no more similar than the societies
in which we live” (Rosaldo 1984:145). Her husband, after
her tragic death in a fieldwork accident, came to abandon
this position and to emphasize the insights given by com-
mon, if not universal, factors in human experience. Renato
Rosaldo’s (1989) brave and influential essay “Grief and a

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 112, Issue 3, pp. 430–443, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. 2010
c by the American Anthropological
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01250.x

Headhunter’s Rage” brought into focus, almost for the first
time—Jean Briggs (1970) was the pioneer—the interrela-
tions among emotions, fieldwork, and writing, showing that
what we feel, how we think and write about it, and how it
all happened are questions that cannot easily be separated.
Against the profession’s trademark relativism and the sep-
aration it implies, Rosaldo argues for the centrality of the
anthropologist’s emotion and personal experience in mak-
ing sense of others’ worlds. I shall argue—partly using his
case—for the reverse. I suggest that the anthropologist’s
emotions in the field are mostly to do with the trials of
fieldwork: they do not (with rare exceptions) illuminate the
predicaments of our hosts. To the extent that our emotions
do enter the swim and make sense within others’ lifeworlds,
they cannot be captured in conventional ethnographic de-
scription; indeed, as I shall argue, in writing about emotion
we come up against the limits of ethnography.
To find your way in the woods, sometimes you need to
retrace your steps. In developing a skeptical position on what
can credibly be said about emotion and on whether our own
feelings tell us anything useful, I shall backtrack to some fa-
miliar positions. How well do they stand up to the evidence?
How strong are their arguments? A standard recourse in
disciplinary rethinkings, anthropological and other, is to re-
turn to the firm ground of personal experience. Following
postmodernist critiques, however, theoretical Square One
was no longer available. The reflexive revolution in anthro-
pology, epitomized a quarter of a century ago in Writing
Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), famously undermined
the authority of classic ethnographies by drawing attention
to the circumstances of their creation. Titles like Observers
Observed (Stocking 1983) and The Headman and I (Dumont
1978) captured the disciplinary double take. Clifford Geertz,
who took some of the blame as well as the credit, diagnosed
epistemological and moral hypochondria (1988:130–138).
But if the impact of the debate was initially skeptical,
once the critics had seized the stage, doubts were replaced
in some quarters by a restored faith in the authority of ex-
perience.2 Against the intricacies of symbolic interpretation
and the invisible interpreter, the voice from the field pre-
sented a rhetorical challenge that recalled Dr. Johnson’s
stone-kicking reply to the idealist: “I refute it thus!” Here,
in the theoretical whirlpool, was something like bedrock. In
the opposite camp, cultural constructionism, often inflected
by an attention to political economy, retained a powerful
position in the analysis of emotion (Lutz 1988; Lutz and
Abu-Lughod 1990; White 1992).
However, the debate between those who would focus
on cultural difference (if only to expose its political ba-
sis) and those who would transcend it ran out of steam. In
the last decade, anthropologists working on emotion have
forged ahead, tracing the role of emotion in such fields as
political violence, religious piety, ethnic affiliation, and kin
making. A great deal has been learned about the reach of
emotions into diverse spheres of life and the mutual en-
gagement of institutions and actors through emotion and
Beatty • Emotion, Narrative, and Ethnography 431
discourses of emotion. From being nowhere, “emotion”—
like “the body” before it—is suddenly everywhere (Wilce
2004). But thinking on the more basic process of how we
write about emotions felt and encountered in the field has
not kept pace. In the scramble for new territory, too much
has been taken for granted.
If emotion is now ubiquitous in the human sciences and
beyond, so too, of course, is narrative: this article is only
a small contribution to a long-established multidisciplinary
endeavor (Bruner 1991; Ochs and Capps 1996; Peacock and
Holland 1993; Tedlock 1991; Turner and Bruner 1986; Van
Maanen 1988). In bringing together these two concerns, I
claim no special novelty: I am building on the work of
many scholars. Nevertheless, the question of how emotion
is related to narrative and how that relation bears on the way
we write is less considered. It may be a truism to say that
emotions are a part of narratives—what isn’t? It is much less
obvious that emotions tell a story of their own.
THE HISTORICAL PARALLEL
In advancing the case for a narrative approach to emotion,
we can learn something from the debates in history about
whether narrative shape inheres in events or is something
imposed retrospectively on mere sequence.3 As ethnogra-
phers, we confront many of the problems tackled by histo-
rians (the perspective of narratologists like Barthes [1977]
and Genette [1979] is less clearly relevant). But our profes-
sional advantage—personal familiarity with what and whom
we write about—shows that it is possible to steer a middle
course between the opposing positions of realism and episte-
mological despair that have framed the history debates. One
can accept Louis Mink’s point that “narrative form in history,
as in fiction, is an artifice, the product of individual imagi-
nation” (Mink 2001:218), without accepting that temporal-
causal shape is entirely alien to history-as-lived. (And what
form of words, verbal or written, present tense or past
historic, is not artifice? When has reality excluded imagina-
tion?) Similarly, one can accept Hayden White’s point that
“historical situations do not have built into them intrinsic
meaning in the way that literary texts do” (White 2001:224)
without accepting all his reasons and consequences. White’s
claim is plausible not because historical situations as they
happen are meaningless but because the meanings of text
and experience are of a different order and scale.
David Carr’s influential defense of narrative history—I
quote his conclusions, not his reasoning—resonates strongly
with ethnography:
Narrative has not merely an epistemological but also an ontological
value. That is, it is not only a “cognitive instrument” as Mink
claimed—a primary way of seeking, organizing and expressing
our knowledge of a part of reality. It is constitutive of our very
being, it is our way of existing, of constituting ourselves. [Carr
2001:198]
The return of the story has been good news for anthro-
pology. Indeed, the narrative turn in medical anthropology
and “trauma studies” builds substantially on the historians’
432 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010
insights (e.g., Antze and Lambek 1996; Kleinman 1989;
Mattingly and Garro 2000). However, other than in a few
relatively specialized publications—and in psychoanalytical
accounts that address a quite different agenda (Crapanzano
1992; Mimica 2007)—ethnographers have generally under-
rated the historical emplotment of emotions.4 This is odd
because if narrative, in Carr’s (2001:198) extended sense,
applies to “our very being . . . our way of existing,” it ought
to apply especially to our emotional lives and to the emo-
tions that we share with others. The ethnographer, unlike
the historian, is on the spot and ought to profit from this sit-
uation. But with respect to emotions, his position is tricky.
The transition from life-as-lived to life-as-written poses a
difficulty that the historian does not have to face, because
ethnographers—actually, not just imaginatively—are part
of the story. How much a part is a moot point. Once we
acknowledge the deep emplacement of emotions, their en-
tanglement in stories, plots, and pasts involving significant
others, we cannot rely on our own emotions for insights into
the emotions of people living very different lives. Against its
author’s intention, “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” nicely
illustrates the point, so let me interrupt the case for nar-
rative with a discussion of the strongest counterexample.
I choose this text with some hesitation, given its sensitive
content. But two considerations—apart from its benchmark
status and the decent interval that has passed since its first
publication—permit criticism: first, Rosaldo’s own icono-
clasm, his penchant for no-holds-barred deconstruction of
the classics; second, his public use of a personal experience to
further theoretical argument. My criticisms, like his own—
and with due respect for personal feelings—accordingly con-
cern argument, presentation, and theoretical claims.
EMOTIONS IN CONTEXT—BUT WHOSE CONTEXT?
Rosaldo’s manifesto-like essay (it doubles as introduction to
his polemical book, Culture and Truth, published in 1989)
has been described as “the most celebrated work on affect
of the last generation” (Johnson and Michaelsen 2008:60).
Cited in hundreds of works, it continues to inspire debate
(for the latest example, see Ethos 2008). An established clas-
sic, then; but its first publication in 1984 came at a critical
moment in the human sciences, appearing to turn the tide
against culturalist approaches in favor of a more engaged and
personal ethnography. In making his case, Rosaldo contrasts
what he calls the “force” of emotions, accessible only to his
style of testimonial anthropology, with the more impersonal
“cultural depth” offered by interpretivism, writing: “My ef-
fort to show the force of a simple statement taken literally
goes against anthropology’s classic norms, which prefer to
explicate culture through the gradual thickening of webs of
meaning” (1989:2). For Rosaldo, the Geertzian approach
cannot capture real emotion because it typologizes, pre-
ferring the collective, anonymous displays of ritual to the
everyday, particular experiences of the individual. He cites
an example that “masks the emotional force of bereavement
by reducing funerary ritual to orderly routine” (Rosaldo
1989:13). Because the force of emotions is muted in gen-
eralizing, culturalist approaches, the symbols-and-meanings
ethnographer lacks empathy and therefore insight. More rad-
ically, Rosaldo contends that without common experience
there can be no understanding (1989:7–8). The scales fell
from his eyes when, following his wife’s tragic death in a
fieldwork accident, he abandoned his search for a cultural
explanation of headhunting. Experience had revealed the
truth in Ilongot explanations: they go headhunting to work
off the rage associated with bereavement. Anger was not
merely a cultural pretext for violence, as he had assumed; it
was the aftershock of loss (Rosaldo 1989:8–10).
Plainly, at a certain level, Rosaldo’s thesis must be true.
Experience shapes perception, the young cannot really know
what it is to be old, nor the tall the perspective of the short—
and so on through all the human types, male and female, gay
and straight, black and white, wise and foolish. To under-
stand another’s emotion we must have experienced some-
thing like it ourselves.5 But the argument is self-limiting. For
if common experience is necessary for ethnographic under-
standing, only the reader who has had a life like Rosaldo’s
will be capable of accepting his point.
The argument from experience is encapsulated in Ros-
aldo’s notion of the “positioned subject,” which seems to have
two aspects: (1) the subject’s place within a structure and (2)
the vantage afforded by the observer’s stock of generic life
experiences. Positioning is synchronic: a matter of status,
structure, and analogy. As Rosaldo explains, “Rather than
speaking of death in general, one must consider the subject’s
position within a field of social relations in order to grasp
one’s emotional experience” (1989:2); furthermore, “only
after being repositioned through a devastating loss of my own
could I better grasp that Ilongot men mean precisely what
they say when they describe the anger in bereavement as the
source of their desire to cut off human heads” (1989:3). What
matters is not how one got to a certain point—the details
of the story, all the things that make it personally significant
for the individual involved—but one’s having got there, the
structural position and the life stage one has reached. Narra-
tive serves to reveal parallels between author and informants
rather than to thicken description and add historical depth.
Rosaldo is disarmingly explicit on this point. “My use of
personal experience serves as a vehicle for making the qual-
ity and intensity of the rage in Ilongot grief more readily
accessible to readers than certain more detached modes of
composition” (Rosaldo 1989:11). But if personal experience
is useful in understanding others, its usefulness surely de-
pends on relevance, closeness of fit; and relevance, in turn,
depends on the historical particularities—in a word, the
story.
Far from home, Rosaldo puts his faith in what he knows
or rather in what he feels. It is shock that compels him to ac-
cept as simple truth Ilongot statements that they take heads
because they are angry over the deaths of their kinsmen.
And rather than persuade us (a story persuades by revealing
connections and causes), he batters us into submission. You

thought emotions were cultural constructions? They are all
about force, according to Rosaldo: “the emotional force of
death” (1989:2), “the force of anger in grief” (1989:3), “the
force of the dilemma faced by the Ilongots” (1989:4), “the
overwhelming force of rage possible in such grief” (1989:9),
“the cultural force of rage” (1989:16), and “the cultural
force of emotions” (1989:19). Behind the battery of as-
sertions, different kinds of experience, different sorts of
feeling, are being equated, particularities erased. Some ex-
amples seem more like sorrow than rage. A man’s con-
version to Christianity following the death of his child is
cited, implausibly, as “the force of the grieving man’s de-
sire to vent his rage” (1989:5). People listening to a taped
lament seem to express sorrow, regret, and frustration,
not rage; but rage is Rosaldo’s preferred term. Words are
used here to obscure rather than illuminate or differentiate
experiences.
But there is another perspective, a way into the motiva-
tions of headhunters that is less obvious but more plausible
than recourse to panhuman experience. Why do they do it?
The ideal of head taking, the quest for vengeance, the taunts
of peers, the desire for prestige, and the years of mourning
prohibitions that Rosaldo describes are among the pressures
building the anger that slaughter releases. The fact that these
pressures are culturally defined rather than rooted in per-
sonal experiences does not make them any less psychologi-
cally real; nor does it make them a culturalist’s projection. In
contrast, the fixing of headhunters’ rage in past grief (some-
times generations old) may, paradoxically, be a cultural fic-
tion, an alibi for the immediate provocations of violent rage.
Rosaldo’s personal story linking his own grief with rage does
not convincingly translate to the Ilongot because their expe-
riences are too different. What his argument reveals is the
need for a genuinely narrative approach: a building of charac-
ter, circumstance, motivation, and action. Yet such a narra-
tive would fatally expose the differences between the anthro-
pologist and the people he studies. If Rosaldo persuades us of
the weakness of a generalizing interpretivism, his remedy—a
variant of what Geertz (2000:59) calls “the return of Human
Nature”—fails to convince. What his evidence calls out for is
a more precise, circumstantial account that shows how emo-
tions are justified by experience—narrative, not cultural,
depth.6
By reading between the lines, one sees the alternative
case, not so much for the proof of experience but, con-
trariwise, for the evocative power of narrative. I want to
pursue this case here because my argument is that a con-
vincing account of emotions—a proper appraisal of their
significance—depends on an attention to narrative context.
We witness a dispute at a wedding, displays of anger and
jealousy. But only when we are familiar with the background
stories, the dispositions of people and their long interrela-
tions, can we really grasp what is going on. (It is in this
sense that emotions can be said to “have a story” as well as
belonging to stories.) To understand why the bridegroom’s
jealousy provokes his sister’s anger, and to read the effects
Beatty • Emotion, Narrative, and Ethnography 433
of these emotions in the wedding dispute, takes more than
empathy and knowledge of cultural context. It requires an
attention to character and circumstance that goes well be-
yond the ethnographic vignette.
Narrative density is, of course, what we expect from
a novel since a novelist—at least in the realist tradition—
works by accumulating details of character-in-action. The
ethnographer, bound as she is to fit cases to arguments (ar-
guments that transcend the context), cannot do this. Nor
do her fieldwork predicaments, although real enough, pro-
vide much insight into the very different predicaments of
others. Her feelings toward her fieldwork hosts have no
past, or their past is rooted in relations with other, quite
different people back home.7 If she wants to write about
emotion in the ethnographic mode, she is therefore faced
with a dilemma: stick to her own case and admit the lim-
itations of ethnographic reporting or venture dangerously
outside them. The case for an anthropology of emotion that
depends on a reflexive or confessional stance collapses. As
Rosaldo’s example unhappily shows, our emotions lose their
explanatory power away from home—they belong to dif-
ferent narratives—and the appeal to experience, the “only
connect” thesis, must fail.
Although the possibilities of mistaken empathy or pro-
jection are diminished in that their experiences more closely
resemble those of their hosts, the situation of anthropolo-
gists working “at home” is not in principle different. They
mostly operate outside their habitual circle, among farmers,
factory hands, or stockbrokers—cultural and social others—
not really at home. Or, as their writing focuses inward and
approaches autobiography or family biography, it ceases to
do the things expected of ethnography, turning into memoir
(see Narayan 2007).
Yet insights can still be had and the self made relevant.
The risk of misleading analogy demonstrated by Rosaldo
is neatly sidestepped in a recent set of articles that draw
on personal experience. In a moving discussion of the life
history of her mother, a Polish Catholic caught up in the
Holocaust, Barbara Rylko-Bauer introduces the notion of
“intimate ethnography, where the personal and the emo-
tional suffuse the work at all levels” (2005:12). The an-
thropologist’s own relatives become informants and the
mixed feelings called up by efforts to excavate life histo-
ries serve as clues to “how social forces become embod-
ied as individual experience” (Waterston and Rylko-Bauer
2006:409). Linked essays by Philippe Bourgois (2005) and
Alisse Waterston (2005) on similar themes probe the dif-
ficulties attending intimate ethnography: the complex ne-
gotiation of roles, the construction of a “truthful” account,
and so on. What legitimizes the project in each case—and
contrasts it with Rosaldo’s trickier notion of empathy based
on analogous experience—is the authors’ insider status as
children of their informants, their necessary involvement in
the reconstitution of personal history. Only when the stories
are made to address broader themes do we feel the power of
the original testimonies weakened as memories are distilled
434 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010
to familiar lessons about dehumanization and structural
violence.
ETHNOGRAPHIC APPLICATIONS: WHAT CAN BE
DONE
As these examples of “intimate ethnography” demonstrate,
to address the limitations of ethnographic writing is not,
by any means, to reject all anthropological discussion of
emotion (still less, of course, is it to damn ethnography
generally). Indeed, some of the best recent work attests
to the theoretical advantages of considering emotion in a
broader analytical frame. Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2007),
for example, writes of a “political economy of emotions”
in South Africa. Focusing on the painful transition from
apartheid, she shows how specific emotions were deliber-
ately engaged—even mandated—in the process of national
healing staged by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
At the hearings, the free flow of appropriate emotions was
encouraged as a step toward redemption and the search for
a shared experiential truth.
Emotion and memory are implicated in other recent
studies of political subjectivity. In a powerful ethnography,
Nicolas Argenti (2008) shows how the “unspeakable vio-
lence” of West Africa’s slave-trading past finds ambiguous
expression in youth masquerades that mingle terror with
hilarity, at once acknowledging and attacking the age hierar-
chies that perpetuate the old inequities. On a related theme,
Marus̆ka Svas̆ek, distinguishing between emotions remem-
bered and reexperienced, shows how collective trauma
lives on in the commemorations of Sudeten Germans who
were expelled from wartime Czechoslovakia. The “chosen
trauma” of postwar generations does not equate to the suffer-
ing of their parents but is made similar by their “identification
as co-victims” (Svasek 2005:202). Narratives of loss, terror,
and nostalgia for the homeland generate feelings of distress
that unite young with old and serve the political ends of the
imagined community in the quest for restitution.
In a special issue of Ethnos that explores the positioning of
emotion in the globalizing political economies of Southeast
Asia, Tom Boellstorff (2004) shows how malu (roughly,
shame) is triggered among Indonesian Islamists by the claims
of gays to a public voice in civil society. Malu leads to violent
rage, as Islamist youths feel their masculinity to be under
threat. The acts of puritan violence that follow mark a “sea
change” from the tolerant (if heterosexist) Suharto era to a
visceral politicized homophobia. In the same Ethnos issue,
Johan Lindquist shows how prostitutes and migrant workers
in the industrial zone of Batam overcome an inhibiting malu
by the apparently opposite means of recourse to drugs or
wearing the veil. By veiling or taking ecstasy, the pious and
the not so pious are able to manage malu and thereby “engage
with, rather than withdraw from, a new kind of world and
its contradictions” (Lindquist 2004:503).
These diverse studies escape my criticism because they
are not primarily concerned with the predicaments of indi-
viduals or the nature of emotion but, rather, with broader
social currents. It would be wrong to look here for detailed
eyewitness reports of emotional episodes. The Ethnos con-
tributions, for example, are concerned with “cultural log-
ics,” discourses, and “performative definitions”: emotions
on a bigger stage. Since their aims are theoretical, report-
ing leads away from personal experience and emotions-in-
action to discussions of political economy and “emotional
landscapes.”
EMOTIONS IN FOCUS
But what about those full-length studies that prioritize emo-
tion, such as “person-centered ethnographies”? With the
scope to depict and describe, surely they can keep a steadier
eye on the actuality, on the people inhabiting the emotional
landscapes? Surprisingly, no. In two notable and in other
respects excellent specimens of the genre, long sections
devoted to emotion contain no examples of actual occur-
rences witnessed by the authors (Hollan and Wellenkamp
1994:107–123; Parish 1994:190–230). The ethnographic
material consists solely of responses to questions such as
follows: “What is the relationship of hopelessness with de-
sire?” (Parish 1994:229); “What happens inside you when
you have pastae?” (Parish 1994:224); or “Can you remem-
ber a time when you were really angry?” (Hollan and
Wellenkamp 1994:116). Replies take the form of remi-
niscences, explanations, descriptions of “hypothetical sce-
nario[s]” (Parish 1994:206), or verbal “recreations” of events
(Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994:110). Parish’s respondents
are mostly anonymized and generic (e.g., “one high-caste
Newar said . . .” [1994:208]). In both books, the authors’
summary statements take the form of context-free, present-
tense generalizations: “Toraja believe that if one avoids get-
ting angry . . .” (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994:119); “In
the Toraja view of emotions . . .” (Hollan and Wellenkamp
1994:110); “For Newars, a key moral emotion is lajya”
(Parish 1994:199); “What Newars know, as moral beings,
is mediated by this pain and fear” (Parish 1994:215). The
lack of concrete examples can give this kind of ethnography
a secondhand, uncertain feel: “a spouse’s unfaithfulness may
evoke feelings of intense shame and anger and possibly lead
to violence . . . However, our sense is that fantasies and talk
about violence in connection with adultery are much more
common than actual occurrences” (Hollan and Wellenkamp
1994:116).
Although person-centered ethnography can, with some
justice, claim to give us the “native point of view”—or at
least the elicited native point of view—it violates the other
Malinowskian axiom of testing word against practice. Parish
seems aware of the objection and asserts that “we should not
ignore the ways emotion is embedded in action and practice
in ways that go beyond what cultural theories of emotion say”
(1994:215). Indeed, in his conclusion (Parish 1994:278), he
affirms that “culture is lived—it is embodied in experience,
action, and life. It emerges in lives”—a conception of culture
to which interview-based ethnography seems poorly suited.

Robert Levy’s Tahitians (1973), the original person-
centered ethnography, is, happily, packed with people; yet
his most influential essay on the subject contains not a single
account of an emotion episode. Characteristically of an-
thropological theorizing of emotion, it offers only a brief,
hypothetical case in which a man is abandoned by his wife
(Levy 1984:219). Equally influential (and admirable in its
own way), Catherine Lutz’s constructionist study Unnatu-
ral Emotions (1988) contains, as far as I can discover, only
one emotion episode witnessed by the author that extends
over more than a couple of lines (Lutz 1988:125–127). The
episode concerns a child’s death—not the sort of incident
that requires much narrative context or attention to the in-
flections of interpersonal history. We learn a great deal about
how Ifaluk talk about emotion or think about emotion during
interviews but not how their emotions interlock in reality,
how emotions shape and are shaped by personal histories.
Unnatural, indeed. Unless we assume that talk about emo-
tion is emotion itself—and the discourse approach comes
close to this—we are missing something here.
What these diverse approaches—person centered, ex-
periential, constructionist, and let’s add, for historical
completeness, functionalist, structuralist, and Culture and
Personality—have in common is a limited temporal context
or, rather, a conception of context that pans swiftly outward
to general factors of ideology, power, cultural framing, and
generic experience rather than deeper into individual stories:
wide angle rather than long focus. In most cases, the con-
text is immediate and reducible to generalities, the approach
broadly synchronic—as if the actors, like the ethnographer,
were fresh to the scene. What we are getting is half the
picture, less than half the story.
ETHNOGRAPHIC LIVES: THE SEARCH FOR
COMMON GROUND
The complaint that ethnography diminishes its object is a
familiar one. “Under his gaze,” writes Michael Jackson of
his fictional fieldwork persona, “the vital, elusive, and uni-
fying qualities of existence shriveled and died” (1986:122).
Perhaps emotion, that most vital and elusive of qualities,
is the most easily betrayed. Yet the answer is not simply
better writing. As Jackson demonstrates, the irreducibility
of experience poses a challenge that is epistemological and
moral as well as aesthetic. His solution is to focus on the
ingredients of experience that link ethnographer and infor-
mant, and much of his work interweaves personal reflection
with a vivid rendition of the ethnographic moment. In this
perspective, the minutiae of fieldwork take on a different
dimension, opening out toward broader human concerns
rather than sideways toward comparative theory building.
Working among African storytellers, Jackson draws on local
tellings to make his points about the performative recasting
of experience in words, the open-endedness and potential-
ities of narrative. He argues—and I agree with him—that
“praxis is always a vital and indeterminate relationship with
givenness, a going beyond, a surpassing of one’s situation,
Beatty • Emotion, Narrative, and Ethnography 435
status, or role” (Jackson 1998:33). I would only add that the
complexity of practice emerges more clearly in narratives
of action than in locally made stories serving quite different
ends. In a later book, In Sierra Leone (2004), Jackson com-
bines personal memoir with the biography of a politician and
friend. The deep familiarity, the glancing reflections among
parallel lives, give an unusual resonance to the text that calls
to mind the meandering, hypnotic prose of W. G. Sebald,
whose novels Jackson took with him to the field. It’s no de-
traction of Jackson’s fine book to say that his subject’s story
is several steps away from the living moment, shaped, as it
is, by the passage of time and the conventional framing of a
big man’s public career.
Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman (2003) is another bi-
ography in progress, a retelling of the informant’s stories
against the changing feelings and perspectives of intersect-
ing lives. Again, the long familiarity between ethnographer
and informant—in this case a Mexican peddler—leads to
an understanding of how narrative shapes a life. It does not
lead to—does not claim—any special insight into the ways
in which emotion is linked to action or character. The action
is all across the table of Behar’s kitchen; character is such
as emerges in words and stories; emotions are remembered
rather than recaptured in their original complexity. Field-
work memoirs do not, as a rule, attempt to portray complex
chains of living emotion, unless the emotion be that of the
ethnographer.
Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham’s entrancing dou-
ble narrative, Parallel Worlds (1993), presents a kind of bil-
dungsroman detailing the growth of an anthropologist’s and
a writer’s mind. Immersion, enquiry, professional guilt,
understanding, and withdrawal: these are the processes il-
luminated in their dialectical tale. In one striking passage
(1993:303–304), Graham intuits a correspondence that calls
to mind the book’s title: the maker of fiction gives voice to
creatures of his imagination just as the Beng diviner bodies
forth invisible spirits. But this is an insight into the creative
process and the possibility of intellectual connection rather
than a stroke of empathy. In the memoir’s double vision
of counterparts, husbands and wives, anthropologists and
writers, emotion is vividly present throughout, but it is the
fieldworkers’ emotions and dilemmas that most compel the
reader.
These studies are significant achievements. We should
not blame authors for something they are not attempting.
But the contrast between what can be done by the opposed
methods of ethnography and literary narrative is perhaps best
captured by another example. Who could deny that Scheper-
Hughes’s (2001) ethnography of Irish madness powerfully
illuminates the peculiar bad faith of the Irish farming fam-
ily, the constricted emotions, oppressive pieties, and half-
understood economic forces that once shaped and deformed
rural families? But to find out what it feels like to live in such
a family, to apprehend the living emotion, we must turn
to the fiction writer and memoirist John McGahern (2005,
2006), whose prickly rural predicaments, suitably enough,
436 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010
resist summary. To say this is to accept that different goals
and perspectives lead to distinctive achievements. Ethnog-
raphy and literary narrative have complementary strengths
and limitations. So what can one learn from the other?
A NARRATIVE APPROACH TO EMOTION:
LESSONS OF THE MASTERS
Writers have explored these problems for centuries and
ought to have something to teach us. They are not ethnog-
raphers; they don’t have to explain; but like ethnographers
they need to convince, and one of the ways they do this is
through the evocation and portrayal of emotion. So much
could be said here, but perhaps the most obvious thing to
note is that, in fiction, the balance of narrative and emotional
payoff is quite different from that of even the most personal
ethnography.
In Les Misérables (Hugo 1933[1862]), at the climactic
moment when Jean Valjean unmasks himself in court and
takes the place of a condemned man accused in his name,
we are told nothing of his emotions. Instead, simply this:
He was very pale, and trembled slightly. His hair, already grey
when he came to Arras, was now perfectly white. It had become
so during the hour that he had been there. [Hugo 1933:267]
Valjean’s agonized examination of conscience; his desper-
ate, reluctant, 40-page journey to Arras; his terror of being
revealed; the moral imperative of owning up; his despair
at the prospect of returning to the galleys; and not least
the reader’s growing anxiety all make this miraculous, ter-
rible transformation—within the conventions of Romantic
fiction—entirely credible. Described impersonally from the
outside, the effect is all the greater. In the crucible of the
courtroom, we are not told what Valjean is feeling: we
know it. The story has brought us there. Yet—it hardly
needs stressing—the circumstances are entirely outside our
experience.
Or consider Gabriel Conroy at the end of James Joyce’s
great story, “The Dead,” as he contemplates the sleeping
figure of his suddenly estranged wife:
He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what
had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish
speech, from the wine and the dancing, the merry-making when
saying good night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the
river in the snow. [1944:254]
In this paragraph, Joyce explains his method. The intense
pathos of the scene, its painful irony, derives from the accu-
mulation of happy but trivial incidents preceding the stun-
ning revelation by Gabriel’s wife of an earlier lost love. The
psychological plausibility of Gabriel’s baffled desire and his
feeling of annihilation depends on the slow build up of inci-
dent and character. Again, the story has amply justified the
emotions.
Without the artifice of a contrived plot, the author
of nonfiction may still rely on the cumulative power of
narrative to evoke emotion—and on emotion, in turn, to
color and shape narrative. Consider an example rather closer
to the ethnographer’s entrapment between experience and
expression. In Primo Levi’s memoir of his imprisonment
and liberation from Auschwitz, the narrator emerges from
the liberated camp with feelings of relief, sadness, dismay,
hope, exhilaration, and exhaustion (Levi 2000:218–223). If
we have managed to read this far—the pain of the narrative
mitigated by the brilliance of the prose—we know what he
means; we know that these theoretically distinct sentiments
are all powerfully present at the same time. Indeed, the
cumulative force of the account makes them seem inevitable.
Levi is fond of strings of emotion words, usually placed
at points of transition, and one comes to recognize them as
a kind of signature: they always have about them an aptness,
a conclusive flourish. On his long way back to Italy, this is
how Levi and a fellow traveler part company:
We left each other without many words: but at the moment of
farewell, in a fleeting but distinct manner, I felt a solitary wave of
friendliness towards my Greek, streaked with tenuous gratitude,
contempt, respect, animosity, curiosity and regret that I should
not see him again. [Levi 2000:268]
Having followed the narrator, having seen what it takes to
survive and even thrive in the chaotic aftermath of liberation,
we can take this listing of six emotions as both exact and true.
Levi has so vividly portrayed his relation to “the Greek” that
the evidence of the reader’s own mixed feelings confirms
the parting judgment. Each named emotion scores a hit and
produces a subtle moral shift, encoding a series of complex
evaluations. In the world of the camps, where language has
been debased and mere words have become hollow and
imprecise, emotions still retain an interpretative fit, a hold
on reality.
But if words lose their grip, so, pushed to the limit,
can emotions. When, at the long-awaited approach of the
Russians, a guard calls for the camp to be evacuated, Levi
writes:
The news excited no direct emotion in me. Already for many
months I had no longer felt any pain, joy or fear, except in
that detached and distant manner characteristic of the Lager,
which might be described as conditional: if I still had my former
sensitivity, I thought, this would be an extremely moving moment.
[Levi 2000:182]
Again, the deadening, oppressive detail makes the condi-
tionality of emotion here at once a terrible discovery and
something entirely comprehensible. Without ever leaving
the resources of ordinary language, including ordinary emo-
tion words, Levi has shown us something about the human
condition that we did not know or perhaps had only dimly
suspected. And, amazingly, he has done so from the depths
of circumstances utterly remote from the experience of most
readers.
As an ethnographer, one of many things that impress
me about Levi’s writing is the work that he makes emotions
do in a narrative: they define and shape experiences, sum
up situations, characterize persons, and conclude sections
of narrative, showing us where we are, existentially, in a

story. And of course, they are powerful markers of authorial
presence, even when they are only, as in the last example,
“conditional.” For Levi, then, emotions are not added onto
experience, hovering over the real thing: they are the sub-
stance and possibility of experience. As such, they are as
hard edged, palpable, and concrete as the physical world;
perhaps, in the grey limbo of the camps, even more so.
Emotions are signs of life but also instruments of analysis,
lenses through which we perceive the world.
Can we learn from this conjunction of emotion and cir-
cumstance? Or is the contextual use of emotion to evoke
and evaluate off-limits to ethnography? I suggest that it
is not possible to render the emotional dimension of ex-
perience convincingly without giving emotion its proper
narrative due—something conventional ethnographies have
rarely done. Instead, they are apt to misrepresent emotions
by highlighting only one or other aspect—of language, feel-
ing, tactics, or cultural meaning—and therefore risk turning
people into caricatures, bearers of difference, social con-
structions. This is not a mere effect of writing; it implies a
misrecognition of emotion in the field. As Anthony Cohen
has remarked—and his comments apply as much to emo-
tion as to the notion of “selfhood” that he is defending—“by
failing to extend to the ‘others’ we study a recognition of
the personal complexity which we perceive in ourselves, we
are generalizing them into a synthetic fiction which is both
discredited and discreditable” (Ingold 1996:29).
EMOTION IN ETHNOGRAPHY: PURGING OF THE
REAL
How did this simplification happen? It began with the pruning
of what Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) calls “the imponder-
abilia of everyday life” in quest of functions and models. (The
word was Malinowski’s coinage; but the OED definition of
“imponderable” indicates the problem: “a factor that is diffi-
cult or impossible to estimate or assess.”) Despite our ten-
dency to contrast the products of field and library, it is a fact
that the most highly prized ethnographies have been the least
“imponderable”—and, in that sense, the least ethnographic.
Naven (Bateson 1936) and Political Systems of Highland Burma
(Leach 1954), for example, are interesting solely for their
theoretical daring, not for their ethnographic exuberance.
Even such classics as E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940),
offered to generations of students as a model of ethnogra-
phy, are valued mainly for their expository dazzle—but at
the expense of ethnographic detail, of light and shade, of
contrary evidence. It is as if Evans-Pritchard, like a sculptor,
arrived at his elegant form by a technique of taking away,
a process that is the very opposite of the slow, haphazard
accumulation of detail that goes into the production of field
notes. Only the famous introduction gives us a glimpse of
the rough cut.
Part of what gets taken away, of course, is the emotional
quality of social life: the imponderabilia. In Naven, Gregory
Bateson had attempted to schematize the patterning of Iatmul
emotions. But although he gave us the concept of “ethos,” he
Beatty • Emotion, Narrative, and Ethnography 437
never tried to evoke it. His method, dogmatically structural,
would not allow it. Real people and actual emotions would
only complicate things. And this has been the pattern ever
since. For most of the history of anthropology, what one
observed in the field was to be seen through, like a veil, to an
underlying reality—whether of form, function, structure,
or text. You went to the field, sweated and suffered, and
thought of higher things. “Being there” was really “being
somewhere else.” Participant-observation, or at least the
writing up, entailed a curious renunciation of the life around
you, a kind of methodological asceticism.
Recent attempts to put people and their emotions back
into ethnography have not been entirely successful. The vi-
gnettes and capsule dialogues that feature in most modern
ethnographies (including my own) as often as not fall a little
flat. Once again, it is the method rather than the skill of the
author that constrains credibility. Wheeled on to illustrate an
argument, counter someone else’s generalization, or, worst
of all, add color, the people can seem two dimensional, “flat”
rather than “round” (in E. M. Forster’s [1988:73] terminol-
ogy), emphatically making the point for their author or just
too odd for the unprepared reader.8 We neither know nor
care who they are, so we cannot be moved by their stories.
Having complained about too little reality, we now find
ourselves wanting less of it and skip straight to the analysis.
Invidious to cite examples (let Beatty 1992 serve the pur-
pose); but contrast, for their evocative power and precision,
John Berger’s Pig Earth (1979), Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique
Land (1992), Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1989), and
Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes’s novelistic In Sorcery’s Shadow
(1987).
Now, the recourse to vignettes might be said to signal
an enrichment of the genre, an advance on the streamlined
classics. But in its own way, it is more misleading. The
illustrative, rather than analytical, style gives emotions a
paradigmatic force and objectivity they do not possess. A
market transaction or a wedding speech can be sampled to
offer insights into economy or gender. But emotions are
more elusive. Unlike prices and wedding etiquette, they are
personal and biographical as well as shared; they are of the
moment but reference the past; they are “in here” as well
as “out there.” Mostly they fall outside the ethnographic
frame.
WHY EMOTIONS ELUDE ETHNOGRAPHY
The problem is that emotions have a particularity that is
uncongenial to ethnography. In writing about the field, we
choose examples for their broader significance within some
theoretical perspective. The people in our case histories are
in unwitting dialogue with the people in other ethnographies;
they are never merely themselves. However individuated,
they are types, figures in a larger story that is not their
own. Otherwise, why write about them? James Clifford
(1986:104) has commented on this “insistent tug toward the
general,” and anyone writing today cannot but be aware of
the problem.
438 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010
With emotions we reach an irreducible core: the tug is
resisted, the link snaps. Embedded as they are in biography,
circumstantial but historical, emotions resist ethnographic
formulation; their particularity defies abstraction. Not that
we haven’t tried. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1968) atom of kin-
ship, with its positive and negative signs denoting contrast-
ing attitudes among kin types, may be the ultimate in the
emotional reductionism: call it Abstract Expressionism. But
Lévi-Strauss built his atoms from equally schematic accounts
of hostile brothers and indulgent uncles in the classic ethno-
graphies. These stereotypes have long passed into anthropo-
logical folklore, but accounts of generic relationships remain
a staple of ethnography, linking, for example, contemporary
person-centered studies with the older, less avowedly hu-
manistic approaches of functionalism and structuralism. We
learn to recognize such behavioral patterns in the field, but
they provide only a rough orientation, and they are not
enough. Even supposing relations between a father and son
in a certain society are typically cool, the reaction of one to
the death of the other will be unpredictable, nonstandard in
whatever makes that particular relation humanly interesting.
The warmth concealed in the reserve, the gestures of rec-
ompense, the relief that accompanies sorrow: these tell the
fuller story. And it is this diversity of human types, circum-
stances, and histories that gives emotions their distinctive
hue, their interpretative precision, their social and subjec-
tive significance. Jean Briggs, long ago, showed the way in
her portrait of an Eskimo family (1970). Of her complex
relation to her adoptive father, she writes:
But though I was convinced that the behaviour that, in Inuttiaq,
I defined as “manipulative” and “autocratic” was both real and
Eskimo in its general shape, I am still unsure whether in some
elusive manner Inuttiaq infused the Eskimo patterns with his own
assertive spirit, whether in some subtle ways he went too far in
his dominance or exerted on me more pressure than others did to
be submissive. [1970:67]
And in a long chapter devoted to Inuttiaq, as well as in
countless telling details, she provides us with enough to
make a judgment for ourselves.
A theatrical analogy. To respond to a Hamlet solilo-
quy, you need a knowledge of English—a familiarity with
the conventions of Elizabethan theater, with the world
of castles and courts and so on. But the meaning of the
speech lies not in its exemplary nature, as an illustration of
courtly intrigue, stagecraft, or the Oedipus complex, but
in the revelation of character in action, the motivations,
and ruminations of Hamlet at that moment in the plot. All
the rest is background. In considering emotion, we have
got background and foreground reversed—trained, as we
are, to read significance in general forms, in the paradig-
matic instead of in particulars. But the remedy, the an-
tidote to theoretical abstraction or functionalist thinness,
cannot be ever-thicker description, which merely takes
us deeper into hidden social factors, cultural frames, and
symbolism—the “cultural depth” that Rosaldo questions—
but tells us nothing about the specific content of emotion.
Nor can the antidote be Rosaldo’s brute emotivism, the ap-
peal to one’s own sentimental education. Both approaches
rest on a failure to grasp the personal-historical complex-
ity of emotions, their grounding in interwoven stories and
characters.
Briggs is highly unusual in bringing off the difficult feat
of marrying a clear-eyed analytical perspective on emotion
with the contextual and narrative detail usually found only in
realist fiction. And anyone who returns to her ethnography
cannot but marvel at the careful plotting of motivations and
moods; the minute attention to shades of implication; the
scrupulous distinguishing of observed, attributed, named,
and hypothetical emotions; and the narrative linking of emo-
tional episodes (how one incident recalls and builds on oth-
ers) and of these with character and cultural expectation.
But Briggs’s frigid field—“twenty-one people in an expanse
of thirty-five thousand or more square miles, their near-
est neighbours several days’ travel distant” (1970:16)—is
equally exceptional. It resembles less the crowded, porous
field sites of most ethnographies than the spot-lit scenery of
the imagination, its eight households, and fluctuating pop-
ulation of “twenty to thirty-five” approximating the cast of
the average novel.
A parallel case—as wonderfully achieved, as different as
sand from snow—is Lila Abu-Lughod’s Bedouin ethnogra-
phy (1986, 1993). Once again, a shortlist of names affords a
depth of characterization and cumulative incident that makes
reported emotions both credible and communicable to the
reader. In her first book, Veiled Sentiments (1986), Abu-
Lughod hit on a means of connecting shared cultural forms
with individual histories and the ordinarily inaccessible realm
of feeling by focusing on the use of oral poetry in everyday
discourse. “Ghinnawa,” she writes, “can be considered the
poetry of personal life: individuals recite such poetry in spe-
cific social contexts, for the most part private, articulating in
it sentiments about their personal situations and closest re-
lationships” (Abu-Lughod 1986:31). And in Writing Women’s
Worlds (1993), Abu-Lughod uses a sequence of stories that
subvert generalization (“writing against culture” [1993:25])
to achieve an emotional conviction and realism not normally
available to ethnography.
What Briggs, Abu-Lughod, and Stoller (1989) show is
that a narrative approach allows us to grasp the humane sig-
nificances that define the experience of emotion. An aware-
ness of emotion in narrative context brings to light the con-
tradictions and conflicts that people experience in their social
life, their not fitting, their resistance or unwilling capitula-
tion to social pressures, their abrasions with reality, their
struggles for meaning. For the same reason, narrative works
against a relativism that would encompass emotion within
culture—depersonalizing it—as if nothing escapes the cul-
tural embrace (Abu-Lughod 1993). A narrative approach
leaves opaque what resists social analysis; it acknowledges
the irreducible; it does not force an answer.
If this sounds like the remedy we are seeking, let me be
clear: in these very respects (and as the exceptions show),

narrative departs from and is opposed to most styles of
ethnography as commonly practiced.
THE NARRATOR AND THE ETHNOGRAPHER: TWO
OF A KIND?
These reflections are prompted by the experience of writing,
for a general readership, a fieldwork account several years
after publishing an ethnography covering the same people
and events (Beatty 1992, n.d.). One book, written with a
theoretical aim, was based on field notes; the other, written
to tell a story and to relive the personal encounter, is based
on diaries and tapes. One offers an explanation; the other
an evocation. Although they correspond in externals, they
could have been written by different people—as, in a sense,
they were. I don’t disavow my hard-won ethnography nor
could I have attempted the second book without it. But I
wonder about the balance sheet: whether a loss of theoretical
impulse and ethnographic focus isn’t at the same time a gain
in realism—a gain, to be more specific, in emotional realism.
The writer of a narrative, whether fictional or not,
confronts certain technical, strictly literary, problems: how
much space to give the narrator and her changing understand-
ing; how to reveal character through plot; how to render
the emotional feel of a situation. The author abroad has,
additionally, to worry about the greater burden of explana-
tion required, the need to keep a proper sense of alienness
without alienating the reader, and the desire to present the
culture through the people and the action (a variation on the
character-and-plot equation). Taken together, these techni-
cal problems are key to the credible construction of emotions
in narrative.
For the ethnographer, in contrast, questions of charac-
ter, pace, and emotional tone are secondary or irrelevant.
At any rate, in writing about the Indonesian island of Nias
the first time around I was not conscious of these issues;
I was only aware that in pursuing general problems I had
failed to convey what mattered to people as individuals. The
ethnography had gotten in the way.
This is not a repetition of the old complaint that ethno-
graphies don’t tell the story of the field: many now do. It’s a
more radical criticism that ethnographic writing, by design,
gets emotion wrong. The methods—analytical, linguistic,
experimental, or illustrative—systematically filter out what
for actors is of principal significance: namely, history, char-
acter, implication, strategy, and plot. Let me make the point
with an example from a later fieldwork in a different part
of Indonesia. (Since I have come out against capsule exam-
ples, I am in the unusual position of hoping mine will fail to
convince.)
In 1997, in a rice-growing village in East Java, about 200
people—a mix of nominal Muslims, orthodox pious, and
syncretists devoted to a Hinduized mysticism—had gathered
in the mosque to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday. Behind the
rows of kneeling faithful, at the back among the VIPs, I sat on
a sofa next to the headman. Gentle exhortations to piety and
sermons sounding the tolerant Javanese note had given way
Beatty • Emotion, Narrative, and Ethnography 439
to bumbling announcements of village news when a preacher
took the stage. He was a soldier, and he had a new, forthright
message, promising hell to backsliders and compromisers.
He denounced local leaders for their laxity, youths for aping
Westerners, and even schoolgirls for wearing trousers. The
harangue provoked unwonted cheers from the pious, frowns
among the rest: here was a division unseen since the political-
religious massacres of the 1960s. At the back, the headman,
dark with emotion (fury, shame, frustration?), was scribbling
notes. Should he confront his opponent (and be devoured,
as I thought, pleading against intervention) or submit quietly
in the Javanese way and fix things later behind the scenes?
When the preacher ordered us to stand and the congregation
rose, the VIPs remained deep in their sofas; but at a signal
from a new haji (Mekka pilgrim), an agitator for reform,
they too stood. The headman, protesting and the last to
move, got weakly to his feet, muttering that he was dizzy.
And then, in the aftermath, he collapsed, subsiding into a
long, unexplained illness that lasted through two attempts
to oust him as leader and saw the unraveling of the cultural
compromise that he personified.
To explain—even to identify—the headman’s puzzling
emotions is, necessarily, to tell the story. But behind the
scenario sketched above lies the much longer story of his
battle with those who would sweep away mysticism, spirit
cults, and the easy relations between the sexes; the contest
with his cousin (the haji) who had brought political Islam to
the village; and his own checkered career as an easygoing and
not terribly effective leader. A summary gives an impression;
a case-study analysis (exemplifying rival cultural paradigms,
syncretism vs. puritanism, changing styles of leadership, or
Javanese ethnopsychology) would give us the stage furniture;
but it would take a proper narrative to do the story and the
emotions justice (for an attempt, see Beatty 2009).
A similar conclusion was forced on me as I began a
narrative account of my earlier fieldwork in Nias and set
about trying to restore what, in the published ethnography
(Beatty 1992), I had systematically excluded: the emotional
life that connected the characters with one another and me
with them. As I began After the Ancestors (Beatty n.d.), I had
no remedy in mind, but what I fastened on was a sense
of predicament: the predicaments of individual characters.
In a place of stark poverty and profligate feasting, paupers,
and overreachers, what concerned people most was not the
technicalities of kinship or swidden cultivation—these are
mostly settled matters—but the great questions of life and
death, injustice and suffering, morality and salvation in a
world no longer tribal but not yet modern, a world “after
the ancestors.”
These moral questions crystallized in particular dramas:
the loss of an heir, a murder, rivalry for leadership, an op-
portunity to swindle, a rejected marriage proposal, a funeral
hijacked by missionaries. Unlike structure, habitus, mem-
ory, agency, or the native point of view, these predicaments
are observable, dramatic, evolving, and highly revealing.
And they are the stuff of emotion. When the new account
440 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010
began to take shape, it was precisely the emotional qual-
ity of the predicaments that came through. In animating
the characters and reviewing the events, it was my own
half-forgotten feelings of anger, guilt, and amusement that
guided me in how to construct certain scenes and that illu-
minated their personal meaning. Yet the story belongs to the
people: the author’s feelings are largely irrelevant. You sit
nervously through your host’s family quarrel, but unless you
are involved, your own feelings are immaterial. You wait
for the dying chief to expire, but your feelings are not those
of his kinsmen; nor do you need to feel sad in the same way
to recognize their sadness. Although your feelings provide
some small insight, they are not the story. Only when field-
work itself is the focus do the narrator’s emotions become
of pressing relevance.
But there is another reason for sounding this skeptical
note, and it has less to do with how we report than how
we feel. In the field, one of the last things we come to
understand is other people’s emotions, and it takes a good
deal of experience to begin to relate to our hosts in an
emotionally sophisticated way. This is not just because it
takes time to learn the idiom of emotion but also because
our knowledge of characters and interwoven histories is
very slowly constructed. More than this, we ourselves have
undergone a transformation.
Fieldwork is less like two years of a life than a life in
two years. And if, as the cliché goes, the early stages reprise
childhood, then we also grow up in the field: we become
competent adults, and our feelings about doing fieldwork—
about being there—mature. By the end, we hardly credit
what once bothered us; we see things in the round; we have
come through. To write about the past, to recreate the trials
of fieldwork, is therefore not to reexperience those field-
work emotions, except in a trivial sense. Our feelings about
what happened are informed by everything that happened
later in the field, by everything we now know, and by the
different person that we have become. The evocation of feel-
ings is an exercise in imaginative recovery: a fiction but one
based in fact. Depending on how diligently and candidly we
kept our diaries, the facts may be in some sense recoverable.
Depending on our imagination and memory, we may be able
to project ourselves back into that frame. But the narrator,
the “I,” is the instrument of fiction, neither me-now nor
me-then but a creation of the text, a bridge to the reader,
not a real person. He is there to lend credibility, to show
where the story came from, to show the limits of what could
be observed.
To say this much is to suggest that, however we choose
to write about the field, our remembered feelings don’t
matter for the written account in the way they mattered at
the time. They had practical consequences for the alliances
and enmities we made and for their part in forming us as
fieldworkers: they were undoubtedly formative. But they
were often irrelevant to what we wanted to know. And they
are colored by our later, more mature judgments. Indeed,
we can’t write truthfully about the field until we can leave
those feelings behind.
CONCLUSION
Ethnographers have trouble with emotions: with recognizing
them in strange places ( judging what they are, where they
begin and end) but especially with how to write about them.
There is no priority in this difficulty: the writing problem
contributes to the recognition problem. As my examples
have shown, when anthropologists have explicitly focused
on emotion, they have tended to avoid detailed description
and particularly time depth: the interwoven past relations
that give feelings their precise circumstantial fit. (Vague
anxieties reflect a vague apprehension of past relations.)
Ethnography (in all the schools considered) moves swiftly
outward to general factors, robbing emotions of the personal
significance that is—as most authors would agree—their
essence.
The simplest remedy for this failing, recourse to the
ethnographer’s own experience, remains deeply problem-
atic. More technical approaches through discourse, proto-
types, case histories, and potted biographies can only be a
preparation, serving to return us to the greater complex-
ity of the natural setting. As the few exceptions indicate,
only a narrative approach—because it locates emotion in
practice; in the indivisible flow of action, character, and
history—can reveal the dimensions of emotion hidden by
other methods. There is nothing very new in this claim.
Novelists have known it for centuries. But as ethnographers
we have still—most of us—to learn the lesson.
Andrew Beatty Department of Anthropology, School of Social
Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, U.K.;
Andrew.Beatty@brunel.ac.uk
NOTES
Acknowledgments. My thanks to Mercedes Garcia de Oteyza
for her suggestions. I am indebted to four AA reviewers for their
painstaking comments and to AA editor-in-chief Tom Boellstorff for
his detailed criticisms. Their suggestions have helped greatly in the
shaping of this article.
1. Goodwin and Goodwin (2001) argue for an understanding of
emotions within the tight frames of “situated interaction,” but
their examples—a hopscotch game and dialogue in the family
of a man who can say only four words—are exceptionally
constrained. Their article draws on a conception of emotion
as an internal process that is “made visible” (2001:253) in
interaction. For a criticism of this idea, see Beatty 2005.
2. Renato Rosaldo’s (1989) work best illustrates this pendulum
swing; see also Wikan 1992.
3. For key scholarly statements, see Roberts 2001. Thinking on
these issues goes back a long way. Morson reminds us that
“in War and Peace Tolstoy constantly contrasts the neatness

of narrative accounts with the messiness of lived events”
(2002:213).
4. The one-to-one clinical encounter and the ethnographic-
psychoanalytic interview are remote from the emplotment of
emotion in action. As such, they systematically misrepresent
naturally occurring emotion. Because they sample one story
to tell another, always finding significance elsewhere, they are
poor models for a narrative approach. By “historical emplot-
ment of emotions,” I mean the way in which emotions refer
back to interwoven personal histories. I do not mean broader
changes in structures of feeling or emotional discourses, which
require a very different kind of historical treatment.
5. Goldie (2000:33) distinguishes two senses of “knowing what
someone is feeling”: (1) recognizing the “paradigmatic narra-
tive structure” of an emotion—its typical action context and
expression (this is close to Carrithers’s [1992] argument); and
(2) knowing what it is like to have that feeling. Rosaldo conflates
the two.
6. Rosaldo’s interest in narrative is directed less to particular
stories and sequences than to “other people’s narrative analyses”
(1989:147) and alternative modes of story construction—for
example, in Ilongot hunting stories.
7. “Transference” is, again, a problem having to do with the prac-
tice of fieldwork, part of our baggage; the insights it provides,
doubly unreliable. It does not help us understand the jealous
sister at the wedding, even if it gives us that illusion. Some phe-
nomenologically and psychoanalytically inclined work (e.g.,
Devereux 1967; Jackson 1998) analyzes this predicament but
does not offer an escape from my general criticism.
8. “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of sur-
prising in a convincing way. . . . It has the incalculability of life
about it—life within the pages of a book” (Forster 1988:81).
REFERENCES CITED
Abu-Lughod, Lila
1986 Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Sentiment in a Bedouin So-
ciety. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1993 Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Antze, Paul, and Michael Lambek, eds.
1996 Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory.
London: Routledge.
Argenti, Nicolas
2008 The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated
Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields. Chicago: Chicago Uni-
versity Press.
Barthes, Roland
1977 Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives. In Im-
age, Music, Text. Stephen Heath, trans. Pp. 79–124. London:
Fontana.
Bateson, Gregory
1936 Naven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beatty, Andrew
1992 Society and Exchange in Nias. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
2005 Emotions in the Field: What Are We Talking About? Journal
of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11:17–37.
Beatty • Emotion, Narrative, and Ethnography 441
2009 A Shadow Falls: In the Heart of Java. London: Faber and
Faber.
N.d. After the Ancestors. Unpublished MS, Department of An-
thropology, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University.
Behar, Ruth
2003 Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s
Story. Boston: Beacon.
Berger, John
1979 Pig Earth. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-
operative.
Boellstorff, Tom
2004 The Emergence of Political Homophobia in Indonesia: Mas-
culinity and National Belonging. Ethnos 69(4):465–486.
Bourgois, Philippe
2005 Bringing the Past into the Present: Family Narratives of
Holocaust, Exile, and Diaspora. Anthropological Quarterly
78(1):89–123.
Briggs, Jean L.
1970 Never in Anger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, Jerome
1991 The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry
18(1):1–21.
Carr, David
2001 Getting the Story Straight: Narrative and Historical Knowl-
edge. In The History and Narrative Reader. Geoffrey Roberts,
ed. Pp. 197–208. London: Routledge.
Carrithers, Michael
1992 Why Humans Have Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Clifford, James
1986 On Ethnographic Allegory. In Writing Culture: The Po-
etics and Politics of Ethnography. James Clifford and George
Marcus, eds. Pp. 98–121. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds.
1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crapanzano, Vincent
1992 Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Devereux, George
1967 From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The
Hague: Mouton.
Dumont, Jean-Paul
1978 The Headman and I. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Ethos
2008 Special issue, “Whatever Happened to Empathy?” C. Jason
Throop and Douglas Hollan, eds. Ethos 36(4).
Evans-Pritchard, E. E.
1940 The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Forster, E. M.
1988[1927] Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Geertz, Clifford
1988 Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
2000 Available Light. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
442 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010
Genette, Gérard
1979 Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press.
Ghosh, Amitav
1992 In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage.
Goldie, Peter
2000 The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Goodwin, Marjorie H., and Charles Goodwin
2001 Emotion within Situated Activity. In Linguistic Anthropol-
ogy: A Reader. Alessandro Duranti, ed. Pp. 239–257. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Gottlieb, Alma, and Philip Graham
1993 Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter
Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hollan, Douglas W., and Jane C. Wellenkamp
1994 Contentment and Suffering: Culture and Experience in
Toraja. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hugo, Victor
1933[1862] Les Misérables. Charles Wilbour, trans. London:
Dent.
Ingold, Tim, ed.
1996 Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge.
Jackson, Michael
1986 Barawa and the Way Birds Fly in the Sky. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
1998 Paths toward a Clearing. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
2004 In Sierra Leone. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Johnson, David E., and Scott Michaelsen
2008 Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture.
Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press.
Joyce, James
1944[1914] The Dead. In Dubliners. James Joyce, author.
Pp. 199–256. London: Jonathan Cape.
Kleinman, Arthur
1989 The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human
Condition. New York: Basic Books.
Leach, E. R.
1954 Political Systems of Highland Burma. London: Athlone.
Levi, Carlo
1989[1947] Christ Stopped at Eboli. New York: Noonday.
Levi, Primo
2000 If This Is a Man and The Truce. Stuart Woolf, trans.
London: Everyman.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
1968 Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology.
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1. Pp. 31–54. London: Allen
Lane.
Levy, Robert I.
1973 Tahitians: Mind, and Experience in the Society Islands.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1983 Introduction: Self and Emotion. Ethos 11(3):128–134.
1984 Emotion, Knowing, and Culture. In Culture Theory.
Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds. Pp. 214–
237. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lindquist, Johan
2004 Veils and Ecstasy: Negotiating Shame in the Indonesian
Borderlands. Ethnos 69(4):487–508.
Lutz, Catherine A.
1988 Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Microne-
sian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Lutz, Catherine A., and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds.
1990 Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw
1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Mattingly, Cheryl, and Linda Garro
2000 Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Heal-
ing. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McGahern, John
2005 Memoir. London: Faber and Faber.
2006 Creatures of the Earth: Selected Stories. London: Faber and
Faber.
Mimica, Jadran, ed.
2007 Explorations in Psychoanalytic Ethnography. Oxford:
Berghahn.
Mink, Louis O.
2001 Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument. In The History
and Narrative Reader. Geoffrey Roberts, ed. Pp. 211–220.
London: Routledge.
Morson, Gary
2002 Conclusion: Reading Dostoevskii. In The Cambridge Com-
panion to Dostoevskii. W. J. Leatherbarrow, ed. Pp. 212–234.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Narayan, Kirin
2007 My Family and Other Saints. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps
1996 Narrating the Self. Annual Review of Anthropology 25:19–
43.
Parish, Steven M.
1994 Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City: An Exploration
of Mind, Emotion, and Self. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Peacock, James L., and Dorothy C. Holland
1993 The Narrative Self: Life Stories in Process. Ethos 21(4):367–
383.
Roberts, Geoffrey, ed.
2001 The History and Narrative Reader. London: Routledge.
Rosaldo, Michelle
1984 Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling. In Culture
Theory. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine, eds. Pp.
137–157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosaldo, Renato
1989 Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural Force of
Emotions. In Culture and Truth. Pp. 1–21. Boston: Beacon.
Rylko-Bauer, Barbara
2005 Lessons about Humanity and Survival from My Mother and
from the Holocaust. Anthropological Quarterly 78(1):11–41.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy
2001 Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural
Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2007 Violence and the Politics of Remorse: Lessons from South
Africa. In Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. J. Biehl,
B. Good and A. Kleinman, eds. Pp. 179–233. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Stocking, George W., Jr.
1983 Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork.
History of Anthropology, vol. 1. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Stoller, Paul
1989 The Taste of Ethnographic Things. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Stoller, Paul, and Cheryl Olkes
1987 In Sorcery’s Shadow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Svas̆ek, Marus̆ka
2005 The Politics of Chosen Trauma. In Mixed Emotions. Kay
Milton and Marus̆ka Svas̆ek, eds. Pp. 195–214. Oxford: Berg.
Tedlock, Barbara
1991 From Participant Observation to the Observation of Par-
ticipant: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. Journal of
Anthropological Research 41(1):69–94.
Turner, Victor, and Edward Bruner
1986 The Anthropology of Experience. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Van Maanen, John
1988 Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Waterston, Alisse
2005 The Story of My Story: An Anthropology of Vio-
lence, Dispossession, and Diaspora. Anthropological Quar-
terly 78(1):43–61.
Waterston, Alisse, and Barbara Rylko-Bauer
2006 Out of the Shadows of History and Memory: Personal
Family Narratives in Ethnographies of Rediscovery. American
Ethnologist 33(3):397–412.
Beatty • Emotion, Narrative, and Ethnography 443
White, Geoffrey M.
1992 Ethnopsychology. In New Directions in Psychological An-
thropology. Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey M. White, and
Catherine A. Lutz, eds. Pp. 21–46. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
White, Hayden
2001 The Historical Text as Literary Artifact. In The History
and Narrative Reader. Geoffrey Roberts, ed. Pp. 221–236.
London: Routledge.
Wikan, Unni
1992 Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance. American
Ethnologist 19(3):460–482.
Wilce, J. M.
2004 Passionate Scholarship: Recent Anthropologies of Emotion.
Reviews in Anthropology 33:1–17.
FOR FURTHER READING
(These selections were made by the American Anthropologist editorial
interns as examples of research related in some way to this article. They do
not necessarily reflect the views of the author.)
Pasqualino, Caterina
2007 Filming Emotion: The Place of Video in Anthropology.
Visual Anthropology Review 23(1):84–91.
Sharman, Russell Leigh
2007 Style Matters: Ethnography as Method and Genre. Anthro-
pology and Humanism 32(2):117–129.
Simon, Gregory M.
2008 Shame, Knowing, and Anthropology: On Robert I. Levy
and the Study of Emotion. Ethos 33(4):493–498.
Simonelli, Jeanne
2007 The Active Voice: Narrative in Applied and Activist
Anthropology. Anthropology and Humanism 32(2):156–
170.
Wierzbicka, Anna
2003 Emotion and Culture: Arguing with Martha Nussbaum.
Ethos 31(4):577–600.