Current Emotion Research in Linguistic Anthropology

Abstract

Linguistic anthropologists have studied emotion in societies around the world for several decades. This article defines the discipline, introduces its general relevance to emotion theory, then presents five of the most important contributions linguistic anthropology has made to the study of emotion.

Keywords

linguistic anthropology linguistic relativity phenomenology reflexivity

This article presents the view of emotion from linguistic anthropology. After introducing the foundations of that field and their relevance to emotion, it focuses on work emerging over past decades. It then moves on to five thematic magnets that have attracted linguistic anthropologists’ attention. Understanding these is crucial to seeing the contributions of the field to the study of emotion:

comparative studies of languages as categorizing devices influencing our experience of the outer and inner worlds and the way those perceptual worlds are organized;

the increasing recognition of inherently reflexive dimensions of language and emotion;

recent studies of emotional identifications with linguistic forms and varieties and how those identifications emerge in socialization processes;

insights from conversation analysis on the collaborative production of talk and affect; and

work on emotion in relation to globalization and forms of power.

Introducing Linguistic Anthropology and Its Role in the Broader Discipline

Linguistic anthropologists collect, analyze, and interpret linguistic data—especially discourse rather than isolated linguistic elements—in order to address broad social science questions. Along with sociocultural anthropologists, they are shedding light on emotion, its social life and centrality to everyday interaction (see Goffman, 1967), and its enmeshment with local structures of power and the global political economy.

Linguistic anthropology remains terra incognita to many, including emotion scholars, although it shares many of sociocultural anthropology’s commitments—for example, to ethnography, broadly understood. Whether or not it is discourse-centered, ethnography has usually involved living with those whose lives and activities one is studying. Ethnographic engagement as encounter with otherness fosters a sense of human variation. The point of ethnographic research is to find what holds true for this community, these people, at this time; that is, many anthropologists embrace cultural particularism. Thus, ethnographic research may well focus on a particular emotion, performed and discussed in a particular way, in one fieldwork site.

Devotion is an example, although having one English word to apply to a family of devotional feelings may mislead us. The apparently singular affect differs according to its object—the Prophet of Islam, for example (Eisenlohr, 2010). Eisenlohr documents heated discussion among Muslims in Mauritius concerning the legitimacy of the recital of poems of devotion to the Prophet and the power of electronic mediation (by cassette) to stir legitimate devotion. Note the focus here on one emotion—devotional love—and indeed one particular form. And the geographic context—not one locale (the island of Mauritius), but its ongoing relationship with South Asia as the ancestral homeland for Muslim Mauritians—is crucial. Eisenlohr’s ethnographic story of emotion and communication takes place at the busy circulatory intersection of the local and the global, refusing to fit the old ethnographic mold. The particulars of production and circulation of emotion and discourse exemplify the stories linguistic anthropologists tell.

What counts as ethnographic research grows as more and more anthropologists experiment with expanding the notion of a field site, or with forms of ethnographic engagement that do not involve face-to-face contact with those whom one studies. Hill (2009) represents what is possible when the awkwardness of face-to-face interaction with research subjects requires a different approach; Hill’s monograph on the emotion-laden topic of “hate speech” and other manifestations of The Everyday Language of White Racism in the United States reflects her analyses of print and new media.

Performativity: Speech as Social Action, Language as Key to Ritual Efficacy

Hill’s (2009) argument hinges on an understanding of language as a tool for social action, including acts of hate. Such an understanding is a defining feature of linguistic anthropology.

Sociologists and anthropologists have long concerned themselves with ritual as key to reproducing the social order. Ritual gatherings (“religious” or “civil,” e.g., political) stir up what Durkheim (1915/1965) called “effervescence.” That social affect, together with the ritual’s signifying features, enable such gatherings to capture social solidarity and project it into the future. Linguistic anthropologists are increasingly occupied with tracing the power of ritual poetics—the magic conjured in and through intratextual emotional crescendos (cf. Urban, 2001, p. 101), that is, through the unfolding of complex concoctions of metaphor and elaborate parallelism. They argue that it is at least in large part participation in producing and circulating ritual signs (and large arrays of signs) that fosters a here-and-now experience of transcendence and transformation, laden with feelings of fear, reverence, and devotion. “Ritual text paints a picture of what it accomplishes”—that is, bringing participants together, saving their community. At the very least, to the degree we accept the picture ritual paints, it changes our experience, “emotionally as well as otherwise” (Silverstein, 2003, p. 38).

It is in such events that language becomes most visible as a cultural resource and a tool for carrying out social action (Duranti, 1997, p. 1) and emotion comes “out of the head” (G. White, personal communication, March 10, 2013), emerging as a sociocultural phenomenon. This vision of language as a tool for action (one small arena of which is denoting or referring) derives from Austin’s (1962) work on “performativity,” the power of language-in-use to perform or create states of affairs that it may seem only to denote. Such a vision of performativity guides anthropologists (and historians; Reddy 2001) working on emotion. For Eisenlohr (2010), for example, the reason Mauritian Muslims listen to recorded na’t, “devotional songs,” is not that they reflect the already-present emotionality of the poet-reciter, but that they produce the desired emotion of love in listeners.

“Performativity” for our purposes means “efficacy.” It has no necessary relationship with staged representation, performance-quality, etcetera. Yet “performance” in that sense—defined as communication in which “performers” are held accountable not just for what they say, but how (well) they say it (Bauman, 1975)—has also long interested anthropologists. Local performance genres, such as Karelian itkuvirzi—in which the performed emotionality of expert lamenters was traditionally interpreted as a sign of their shaman-like power, rather than as cathartic—illustrate the variability in local meanings of emotion and communicative forms (Wilce, 2009, p. 42). Around the world, local reflections on communication often focus on the power and appropriateness of performance, not on what Western societies regard as the inherently insincere nature of anything “performed.” Both a focus on performance as powerful in itself and the concern with the sincerity of communication are semiotic ideologies, that is, cultural concepts of the workings of signs linked closely with the social order, as are these statements: “Using traditional speech forms make ritual performances effective in preserving our community,” or “Individuals are responsible for creating their own emotional health through direct verbal self-expression.” (Note that the influence of ideologies of sincerity and concomitant notions of the self is not absolute even in “the West,” though limitations of space prevent further exploration of that topic here.) I return to these themes in the final section of this article, which addresses the place of emotion in the political economy.

Linguistic Relativity

Before addressing the first major contribution of linguistic anthropology to the study of emotion, it is best to address misunderstandings surrounding the notion of “linguistic relativity.” Arguments for the nontrivial effects of language on cognition or for a more general mediating role language and other forms of communication play in human action are assertions of the “world-making” role of language. The actual arguments of, for example, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) do not turn on isolated words (e.g., myths about Inuit people having “100 words for ‘snow’”), but on larger sets of linguistic forms and practices (e.g., Lucy, 1997). “Folk Whorfianism”—manifest in notions that, because some ethnolinguistic group “lacks a word” for some “thing” such as “depression,” the group is by implication primitive (Drennan, Levett, & Swartz, 1991)—is an ever-present danger.

Despite this danger, linguistic anthropologists’ contribution to theories of subjectivity in general and emotion in particular often build upon research related to linguistic relativity, which has continued without a major hiatus since the early 20th century. Recent work reflects and extends earlier arguments by figures such as V. N. Volosinov, who rejected the common Western model of the interior and exterior—the notion that emotion lies inside the individual, fully formed and waiting expression in signs. Instead, wrote Volosinov, “Expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction, [and] … expression-utterance is determined by the actual conditions of the given utterance— above all, by its immediate social situation” (1973 [1929], p. 85). Among the examples we have of expression organizing, say, an infant’s experience, are those that fall under the rubric of “social referencing” theory and its extension by researchers concerned with language socialization (Duranti, Ochs, & Schieffelin, 2012, p. 30).

What does this kind of anthropology make of the idea of basic emotions? Does it not recognize our species’ unifying evolutionary heritage? Indeed. A crucial shift took place in the evolution of the genus Homo when instinctive calls and cries that had been relied upon for millions of years as directly indexical of inner states fell under conscious control, opening up the possibility of faking emotion signs, including vocalizations (Tolbert, 2001). And that, in turn, opened the door for layer upon layer of reflexivity (discussed later in this article). The idea that humans share a very limited repertoire of basic (evolved) emotions must be true at some level. Yet most cultural and linguistic anthropologists agree that the lessons learned from the evolution of communicative systems support understandings of language as inseparable from culture, and as likely to shape as be shaped by mind. Whether or not a certain set of basic emotions truly exists, transcendent of culture and language, is less important than asking how such emotions (or any emotions) arise in actual social life—in naturally occurring talk-in-interaction. And what arises there is more complex than basic (Peräkylä, 2012, p. 279): Disgust may be a basic emotion, but linguistic anthropologists “approach the display of disgust not as an expression of the inner state of the individual…, but as a multimodal practice that … encompasses not only face but posture, prosody, and lexis.” The point is that “pure forms of basic emotion are not very often found in naturally occurring interaction. Instead, what we encounter are blended and complex expressions” (2012, p. 279).

Note that, despite our language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2000)—cultural models of language and its relations to phenomena such as emotion—individual words (emotion “labels” like “fear” or “afraid”) are by no means universally dominant ways of expressing emotion. It is relatively more accurate to say that utterances (made of one or many words) convey feelings, and those utterances (in Finnish, for example) may consist of only a verb like pelottaa, “one is afraid,” or a string of profanities.

Studying emotion in its natural home (in utterances that form turns in conversational interaction) as Peräkylä (2012) and others have done underscores the maxim that language (whatever else it may be) is a tool for social action and in that sense mediates that action—a form of the argument for linguistic relativity. Support for the linguistic mediation of thought and perception—a form of linguistic relativity that differs from, and is older than, arguments about linguistic mediation per se—comes from surprising places. Some recent neuroscience studies appear to confirm the nontrivial mediation of language in brain activity related to color perception. For instance, Tan et al. (2008) found that “perceptual discrimination of colors” activates both those areas of the brain known to be involved in color identification (identification without necessarily naming or using language in any way) and other brain areas “relevant to language processes” (2008, p. 4007). That is, “Language appears to affect neural activity patterns activated in the course of color perception” (2008, p. 4007). Gendron, Lindquist, Barsalou, and Barrett assert that “there is accumulating evidence that words shape perception in a variety of domains,” “that emotion words act as a context during emotion perception,” and that “the conceptual knowledge associated with emotion words influences the initial encoding of emotion percepts” (2012, p. 314).

The next section analyzes the contributions of anthropology (and particularly linguistic anthropology) to emotion studies, starting with a very particular form of the linguistic relativity argument we have been reviewing.

Chief Contributions of Anthropology to the Study of Emotion

Categorial Relativity

One of the oldest and most important contributions of linguistic anthropologists is their exploration of how the world’s diverse speech communities divide up the subjective world according to their categorizing devices (languages). Thinking like an anthropologist means “bracketing off” experiences and categories we take for granted (Duranti, 1997, p. 48), including “emotion.” Anthropologists do not assume that languages simply differ in how they divide the semantic space “underneath” a local umbrella term translatable as “emotion,” or that all of the world’s peoples speak often and openly about a particular domain of subjectivity corresponding to “emotion.” Rather, they ask whether or not the subcategory of subjectivity whose English label—“emotion”—we happen to favor now does, or ever did, represent a single, unified, cross-cultural universal. (Note here Wierzbicka’s [1996] attempts to transcend this Anglo- or Euro-centrism through “natural semantic metalanguage.”) This means situating the term “emotion” in a particular cultural-historical context (Wilce, 2009). “Emotion” and its referent may be no more universal than is the model of the person-as-individual (Geertz, 1973; note that the anthropological literature concerning such models is underplayed here only for lack of space). Indeed, the dominance of the word “emotion” as a symbol authenticating the discipline of psychology is only some 150 years old (Dixon, 2003; Wilce, 2009, pp. 140–142).

Beatty’s work exemplifies anthropological skepticism about a single “emotional realm continuous across different contexts” even within a single culture (2005, p. 27). Beatty notes that, in interacting with children, Javanese adults may invoke words like isin “shame”— yet not primarily for the purpose of naming “an emotion” or prompting a child to “feel that emotion.” Rather,

for the small child, isin, “shame,” indicates a prescribed pattern of behavior before strangers or elders…. The adult uses the word because the child is not acting ashamed; but this prompting of shame, gratitude, or fear only indicates what the child has to do. (2005, p. 30)

Not all anthropologists question the existence or universal salience of a category aptly called “emotion(s)” that usefully captures features of its constituent subcategories, but those who do so encourage new forms of cross-disciplinary work designed to test our fundamental assumptions.

Diachronic approaches to relativity: Engaging historical contexts

Not only is a secular concept of “emotion” an apparently recent product of Scottish moral philosophy as it evolved into something we can recognize as psychology (Dixon, 2003), but our cultural assumptions about its locus, relation to “cognition,” and in particular its moral force, have all undergone continuous change. The “moral force” of emotion to which I refer is its key role (a) in Protestant European discourses on the nature of the Christian person, her prayer, and her transparency or sincerity before God and humankind (Keane, 2007), and (b) in secular and postsecular discourse on authenticity. Trilling (1972) documents the centuries-long European obsession with sincerity and its recent displacement by an ethic of authenticity, which demands that we be true to ourselves, for ourselves.

Nothing could be further from the principles guiding local forms of “the navigation of feeling” (Reddy, 2001) in, for example, the highlands of Luzon, home to the Ilongot. According to Rosaldo (1982), the Ilongot understand persons as unstable entities (cf. Geertz, 1973). This makes the act of promising, and notions of sincerity vis-à-vis promises, nonsensical. One wonders whether the rise of societies in which interpersonal relations—and thus (inter)subjectivities—are governed by contract might be the source of visions of the stable self in such societies (Janina Fenigsen, personal communication, May 11, 2013).

The notion of authenticity as being true to oneself for the sake of oneself has risen so far in (post)modern European contexts as to have become a feature, if not the defining feature, of the experience of the sacred, at least among Finnish participants in the so-called revival of Karelian lamenting. Neolaments sung by Finns borrowing from their eastern ethnic neighbors transform an old Karelian practice aimed at helping the dead find their way to the Other World into a therapeutic practice. Transparent self-disclosure in small groups of lamenters becomes for them a sacred achievement (Wilce, 2011, p. 584), as are authentic feeling-connections among New Age practitioners (Heelas, 2008, p. 175).

Diverse terms and perspectives

Before setting aside the problem of categorization and particularly the categories of ethnolinguistic Others, it is useful to review some of the many labels linguistic anthropologists have invoked to characterize relevant forms of subjectivity—experience, affect and (affective) stance, emotion, and feeling.

“Experience” is both a key term in contemporary Western culture (Desjarlais, 1994) and a hypernym subsuming within itself subcategories such as “emotion.” Recent linguistic anthropological literature has tended to treat emotion and experience together, as in Ochs’ work on the relationship between language, feeling, and experience. “Experience, even the drama of pain and suffering,” argues Ochs (2012, p. 156), “lies outside, inside, and alongside enacted language as its indexical and phenomenological resource.” Therefore, argues Ochs, anthropologists should “look deeply into the manifold ways in which the temporal unfolding of language in and across situations—not just words but phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse—is implicated in moment-to-moment thinking, feeling, and being in the world” (2012, p. 144). Ochs asserts that, rather than existing fully formed before and outside of talk, emotion streams simultaneously with the stream of talk, conceived as a collaborative production. Ochs goes beyond Volosinov in situating details of linguistic structure in relation to the experience of what we might call “the speaking body.”

Since Ochs and Schieffelin’s (1989) groundbreaking work on “the pragmatics of affect,” some linguistic anthropologists (e.g., Besnier, 1990, but more recently McElhinny, 2010, and McEwan-Fujita, 2010) have shown a preference for “affect” over “emotion.” The capacity for “affect” to include “emotion, feelings, moods, dispositions, and attitudes associated with persons and/or situations” (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989, p. 7) is an advantage for them. “Affect” keeps feelings, dispositions, etcetera, in view together as some kind of whole. As we have seen, Beatty (2005) expresses skepticism toward that perspective (but is no more sanguine about “emotion” than “affect”).

“Linguistic stance”—said to comprise affective versus epistemic stance—is a metaphor denoting “the lexical and grammatical expression of attitudes, feelings, judgments, or commitment concerning the propositional content of a message” (Biber & Finegan, 1989, p. 93). “Affective” and “epistemic stance” involve, respectively, a speaker’s expression of feelings toward, and a commitment to the truth of, his or her proposition. Linguistic anthropologists have recently analyzed stance in both its original (embodied) and metaphorical senses. Examples include Goodwin’s study of girls’ games of hopscotch (2006) and Matoesian’s (2005) analysis of a hotly divided discussion in which a woman who is a crucial participant in the discussion appears literally to be “Struck by Speech.” Her response includes grammatical, lexical, and prosodic markers of (linguistic-affective) stance and embodied signs (“body posture, facial expression, and gestures”; 2005, p. 168). Note that linguists consistently prefer “affective” over “emotional” in collocation with “stance.”

There appears to be a trend in anthropology titles toward “affect,” but anthropologists working on our topic have historically defined it as the “anthropology of emotion” (Desjarlais, 1992, 1994; Wilce, 2009; see also historian Reddy, 2001; and the diverse authors represented in Peräkylä & Sorjonen, 2012). Other competitors for dominance in anthropological work include “feelings” (which like “affect” denotes a broader array of states than “emotion”) and “sentiment.” Any of these terms–emotion, feeling, sentiment–may be preferable to “affect” insofar as they are more “experience-near.”

Reflexivity and the Reversibility of the Language-and-Emotion Relationship

The second major contribution linguistic anthropology offers to the understanding of emotion is its particular explorations of two clearly complementary perspectives on “reflexivity.” One focuses on reflexive signs, while the other emphasizes inner transformations involving reflection and thus a new level of consciousness. As we shall see, the two are inseparable.

Not only do human beings as social actors constantly engage in reflection, but the function of many signs—including linguistic signs—is also reflexive (Wilce, 2009). Most humanly produced signs—from tears, to languages, to arguments (e.g., that the speech style of some class of persons “is naturally more emotional” than some standard of comparison)—fall under the influence of reflexive (or meta-) signs. Moreover, in a very real sense, signs (again, like tears, languages, and arguments) become signs through social interaction—being responded to as signs, generating further action (R. N. Hadder, personal communication, March 22, 2013).

All social facts, including those pertaining to language and emotion, involve a fundamental reflexivity—layer upon layer of potential reflections on the “facts” of practice (e.g., “THEY say it THIS way…”). Any such “fact” is thus inherently unstable; reflections on such “facts” shape them now and in the potential moment of their reproduction.

A second, quite complementary, perspective comes from phenomenology. Linguistic anthropologists have a long engagement with phenomenology. Recently, Duranti has invoked Husserl’s (1931/2002) contrast between the natürliche and the theoretische Einstellung—the “natural” versus the “theoretical” attitude or standpoint (Duranti, 2009, pp. 212–213; as we shall see, both the “natural” and the “theoretical” attitudes are cultural). The perceptions we have as part of the natural standpoint undergo denaturalization—“phenomenological modification”—through reflection. It is often speech, however, that prompts such modifications. Duranti (2009, p. 216) argues that unlike “What’s that?” which calls for classifying, a question like “That machine scare you? Hm?” uttered by an adult to a child can prompt a phenomenological modification. It implies the child-addressee’s “ability to both reflect and report on her emotional state.” It thus “provides a model for self-reflection” (Duranti, 2009) and metacommunication about the “tellability” (Ochs & Capps, 2001) of feeling states. The question might suggest that the machine SHOULD cause fear, but in any case makes feelings both present and topical in a way that is (in)appropriate depending on culture or (in extreme cases) having an agoraphobic parent (Capps & Ochs, 1995).

The question “That machine scare you?” presents one (referential) meaning while creating in its addressee another meaning that is a reflection of emotional sort. The language–emotion relationship is thus bidirectional. Not only can emotions be the referents of linguistic forms, but linguistic forms can also prompt feeling—that is, feelings can make linguistic forms their object.

Language ideologies—in this context particularly cultural ideas about ways of speaking and feeling, and about the people associated with those ways of speaking and feeling—are very revealing examples of this. They are inherently reflexive, and may even involve explicit reflection on speech. At least superficially, this example—“You should say, ‘I feel sad when you do that’”—involves the commonsense relationship between language and emotion in which the former makes the latter its referential object. A second example—“People who speak like that are disgusting, and rightly excluded from the best jobs”)—inverts that relationship, associating a strong emotion with a way of speaking as the object of that emotion. Language ideologies, which in the previous case function as metacommunicative/emotional sensibilities (Wilce, 2009), can act as censoring devices. People addressed by such statements may change their (speech) behavior. The contribution of such reflexive communication to forms of “emotion management” studied by psychologists (e.g., Matthews, Zeidner, & Roberts, 2011) deserves more study (but see, e.g., Hughes, 2010).

Emotion is a work in progress. We build emotion together (and here “together” means in the microworld of real-time interaction and the macroworld as well) when we use language to refer to emotional states, keeping in mind, however, that this is only part of the relevant function of language (i.e., language is not only a set of symbols by which we name and thus, putatively, express feelings). Note again that focusing exclusively on the role of language in “naming” feelings—implying the centrality of nouns as emotion “labels”—distorts the workings of emotive utterances in some languages. But the most important addition to this commonsense notion of how language relates to emotion introduced in this article is the pervasive phenomenon in which language is felt, and/or becomes the object of feeling.

This happens in two ways. First, shared social sentiments about ways of speaking that function in many ways like language ideologies (“X way of speaking is disgusting”) are extremely common. Second, but not unrelatedly, our languages FEEL a certain way on our tongue and lips, in our throats and in our mouths. Even more clearly in the realm of emotion are those experiences we have with familiar and unfamiliar tongues—the pleasure one may have in speaking one’s own language or the discomfort and anxiety one might feel vis-à-vis a language that is new. Drawing on phenomenological understandings of time in the lived world of human interaction, Ochs (2012) calls for investigations of

the temporal experience of ordinary meaning-making, in which feelings may accrue and diminish, thoughts may be initiated and withdrawn, … and the sound of one’s own and others’ intonations, voice qualities, and rhythms … feed back into the living experience of enacted language. (2012, pp. 154–155)

The feelings we have toward specific linguistic forms fall under the category of identification with its psychoanalytic resonances modified as the term is used in linguistic anthropology.

Learning to Identify With Language, Community, and Culture: Language-and-Affect Socialization

We know language is often the object of feelings. The third linguistic anthropological contribution extends that argument, focusing on the social learning of such feelings. How does one learn to have the particular emotional-sensory experiences that go beyond the sensory experience of speaking a mother tongue to the hot flush of shame that accompanies, say, a rebuke for speaking a certain way? What cultural lessons must be taught, in what social situations, for us to experience pride or shame in regards to ways of speaking–not only “languages” but regional dialects or professional registers (e.g., “legalese”–“mine”, “yours”, or “theirs”)? Speakers of oppressed languages—such as Native Americans who grew up during the long period when children were forcibly sent off to boarding school and brutally punished for speaking their own languages— may have residual shame along with a recently elicited pride regarding their languages. Shame and pride may mix as polar contrasts somehow co-present as forms of identification with and through particular linguistic forms and varieties. Such emotions about speech patterns attach also to people considered to own those ways of speaking.

This emphasis on two-way relationships between language and emotion (language as vehicle but also object of emotion) can prompt greater critical attention to the essentialization of identities and further exploration of shifting emotional identifications with speech forms and speech communities. What form could an empirical linguistic anthropological analysis of processes of identification possibly take? Such apparently unconscious processes would appear to be inaccessible to students of discourse—surely a frustrating state of affairs, given the obvious relevance of identification to emotion and thus the promise that a linguistic anthropology of identification holds out.

The answer lies in the fact that linguistic anthropologists concern themselves with acts of identification with language, significant and signifying acts, some of which are linguistic (Billig, 1999). Returning briefly to our discussion of culture-specific affects like devotion, the Tamil language of South India has been a remarkable magnet of devotion from the colonial period until now. In the world of tamilparru Tamil devotion, the Tamil language is not “just any historically, humanly produced semiotic system,” but a goddess, Tamil Mother (Ramaswamy, 1997). What is this form of devotion (parru) that can attach to the Tamil language (tamilparru)? Parru means “adherence, attachment, affection, support, love, and devotion” (Ramaswamy, 1997, p. 5). It is obvious not only from Ramaswamy’s glosses but from other evidence she provides that parru denotes an emotional identification. The life of the tamilan (devotee of Tamil) “is the life of Tamil and, correspondingly, Tamil’s life is his life” (Ramaswamy, 1997, p. 5). The tamilan may even take an oath—an empirically observable act— to respond to any harm that Tamil undergoes as though he had personally been harmed (Ramaswamy, 1997, p. 253). Everyday acts of identification involving language on which we focus are seldom as explicit as an oath, but they are socially and culturally significant, and—for better or worse—never completely lost in the “black box” of the inner world or unconscious mind (Billig, 1999).

Language socialization activities “are a particularly strategic focus for ethnography of language ideology,” since it is in such activities that “various kinds of presupposition are voiced” (G. White, personal communication, March 10, 2013). Language socialization encompasses the simultaneous and intertwined processes of acquiring linguistic and social competence. Thus, it includes acquiring skills of affective performance in language and other semiotic modalities. But caregivers also attach feelings to children’s linguistic behavior; for example, shame and shaming play an important role in the language socialization of children (Lo & Fung, 2012) and their acquisition of emotion management skills. Note, however, that emotion management means different things in different cultural systems, varying with beliefs about what sort of emotion is a natural feature of babies and what sorts of emotion need to be taught. Is it politeness or assertiveness that children lack and must acquire? Interpretations of both children’s nature and natural behavior, and goals set for their acquisition of communicative competence, are always cultural.

The production of cultural as opposed to natural beings is sometimes spoken of as the process of acquiring “identities.” This may be so; however, such identities are byproducts of the emotional process of identification with one’s community and its semiotic repertoire—its storehouse of various linguistic varieties and other forms of communication. This is poignantly true in the context of language contraction (Hoffman, 2008), a situation in which speakers use their heritage language in ever fewer settings. Linguistic anthropologists share others’ concern about a global situation in which—due to the contraction of language use—approximately half of the world’s 6,000-plus extant languages will disappear in the current century (as predicted 31 years ago by Krauss, 1992). Ethno-national and tribal minorities around the world face this threat. Research focused on feelings of young and old people alike in relation to their heritage language is gaining traction and is prepared to make both applied and theoretical contributions.

As noted, shame and pride vis-à-vis a heritage language can easily coexist in an individual as tense dimensions of identification. These feelings may be unevenly distributed in a community facing the loss of its traditional language. In at least some contexts involving organized efforts at language revitalization, novice speakers of a heritage language experience negative affect while interacting with some expert speakers and positive affect with others (McEwan-Fujita, 2010). The latter group— McEwan-Fujita calls them “sociolinguistic mentors”— should be the focus of more research. The applied implications of being able to impart positive feelings to learners of contracting languages are clear.

The Collaborative, Interactive Production of Emotion or Emotion Talk

Previous sections of this article have stressed the emergent nature of emotion talk in interaction, and the perspective that speech (including emotion speech) is action. Such perspectives have been fostered by conversation analysis (CA), with which some linguistic anthropologists have fruitfully engaged. They prioritize studying video recordings of naturally occurring interaction, paying close attention to visible behavior that accompanies speech. Emotion occurs in conjunction with, or as part of, embodied acts carried out “within processes of interaction” (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2001, p. 253). Among those embodied acts are uses of the lungs, lips, and voice, for example, in producing relatively loud or soft speech. How might one measure the “outraged indignation” of children in the playground? Marjorie H. Goodwin (2006) has observed and recorded many naturally occurring events of interaction involving girls playing hopscotch. Girls produce measurable emotion displays when they see someone commit an infraction. Such participant-player-witnesses may produce vigorous accusations “prefaced” with a shout in which their pitch “leaps” markedly—for example, from 400 to 600 Hz— in the scope of that single syllable. An accusatory pointing gesture may accompany speech. Such activities exemplify what, according to Goodwin, is the natural home of emotion displays involving not just vocal mechanisms, but whole bodies.

The ethnomethodological or conversation-analytic perspective finds echoes in the work of psychological and linguistic anthropologist Geoffrey White, who describes having

been struck by the significant role played by socially organized activities in facilitating (and creating) culturally meaningful forms of emotion. These are more than “settings” for the expression of preexisting emotions. They are culturally constituted activities within which understandings of self as well as social identities and relations are enacted and defined. (2005, p. 243)

These assertions underscore the widespread agreement among not only linguistic anthropologists but also ethnographers in general that the ideal way to study emotion is to look carefully at its emergence, management, and performative efficacy in naturally occurring social activities.

Linguistic Anthropological Visions of Emotion, Power, and Globalization

As previously noted, anthropology has begun to transcend its original vision of fieldwork confined to small face-to-face communities. Many now attempt to describe the global circulation—and “glocalization” (Brenner, 1998)—of semiotic forms and reflections on them. Linguistic practices and ideologies of language-and-emotion circulate broadly. The world’s people increasingly “do emotion” and invoke models of emotion that have arisen in Europe over the last centuries. What this article suggests as the final anthropological contribution to understanding emotion is its contextualization of changing linguistic and emotive practices vis-à-vis global cultural transformations.

A veritable flood of recent studies of colonialism, postcoloniality, Christianity, and missionization has revealed histories of radical transformation in local cultures of emotion. These changes encompass both the forms emotion now takes in experience and expression, and the metacommunicative models that more and more people draw on as they encourage, suppress, or rank various feelings and expressive modalities (see Keane, 2007; and, for an effective review of affect and language in colonial encounters and the nature and discursive shape of affective labor in neoliberalism, see McElhinny, 2010).

Among the most important of the metaemotional, metasemiotic models at work over the last centuries are “sincerity” and “authenticity,” historical accounts of which we have from Trilling (1972) and others. If sincerity emerged in what we might call modernity, authenticity has some connection with what some demarcate as postmodernity. The ideal of sincerity entails truth telling as an external obligation, while the ideal of authenticity entails being true to self for the sake of self. Taylor (2007) claims that ours is an “Age of Authenticity.” In the increasing number of niches in this world defined by neoliberalism—the contemporary form of capitalist globalization in which the responsibility of states to care for their citizens devolves to individuals, leaving them to their own devices in seeking spiritual healing and self-actualization—talk often turns to authenticity. Participants in what we might call small “circles of healing” experience something of the pressure to “confess” (not to a priest in an organized religion, but to therapists and fellow seekers), which Foucault (1990) aimed to capture with the phrase “incitement to discourse.”

Linguistic anthropologists have begun to critically examine the forms of discourse and metadiscourse emerging in what Rose (1996) refers to as the “psy-” disciplines. Carr (2011) documents the pressure exerted on poor women of color with legal difficulties pertaining to substance abuse, who participate in a rehabilitation program called Fresh Beginnings. The program’s staff are likely unaware of the political nature of their work as they encourage the “confession” of emotions and their back-stories. Their clients, by contrast, desperate to keep custody of their children, cannot forget that custody decisions may entirely hinge upon their obedience to the normative injunctions summed up in the acronym “HOW” (honesty, openness, willingness). “Careful [and discourse-centered] ethnography,” writes Carr (2011, p. 19), “explains that [a client] would say and do most anything to keep the state from taking her children, including convincing her therapists not to make the call that would have set this process in motion.” Here we encounter the paradox in which authenticity, which can ostensibly only emerge from one’s “real self,” is coercively solicited. Cultural changes sweeping over China have led to an incitement to discourse, that is, to emotional “confession,” that would not be unfamiliar to those on both sides of the power divide in the Fresh Beginnings program. “As Chinese society ‘psychologizes’ and as the therapeutic culture begins to appropriate demoralization, direct affective expression among psychiatric patients is likely to become more common” (Lee, 1999, p. 361).

What contemporary linguistic-ethnographic writing often reveals is neither purely “global” nor “local,” but rather “glocal” (Brenner, 1998)—that is, contested hybrids of exogenous and endogenous influence in communities around the world. But the very notions of “societies,” “groups,” and “communities” have become trickier to define. Cultural heterogeneity is now found in what had been a single demographic unit like Tibetan Buddhists, now scattered across international boundaries. Two Tibetan monasteries in India embrace sharply divergent models of affect and its expression, as Lempert (2007) has shown. The monks at a monastery in Dharamsala closely aligned with the Dalai Lama—“the Institute for Buddhist Dialectics, whose name bespeaks its modernist mission” (2007, p. 513)—embrace a modernist ethic of authenticity (congruence between inner feeling and outer expression; but see Wilce & Fenigsen, 2013). By contrast, “disciplinary monks” at Sera Monastery carry on the tradition of public (albeit “in-house”) demonstrations of “histrionic” wrath, manifest in signs like “harsh voice quality” and “expletives” (Lempert, 2007, p. 519). Monks there embrace a premodern distinction between inner and outer captured in this aphoristic comment to Lempert regarding histrionic wrath: “Face, darker than a rocky mountain. Mind, whiter than a snow mountain” (as quoted by Lempert, 2007, p. 520). The voice of the disciplinarian is not the “clear-speaking, truth-telling subject of modernity” (2007, p. 511). A historic “quake” has placed Sera Monastery on the other side of a fault line from Dharamsala, where no “histrionic” expressions are cultivated.

Kuipers (1998) describes how Dutch colonial authority constrained the interrelations and prestige rankings of genres of expressive performance for the Weyewa on the Indonesian island of Sumba. Before the Dutch established hegemony, Weyewa leaders were proud to cast themselves as “angry men” (kabani-mbani), and the oral form in which they established their authority was an oratory of towering anger, delivered in couplets. Angry oratory had no place in the modern state that the Dutch formed and bequeathed to the Indonesians and has mostly disappeared. By contrast, Dutch colonial officials had no reason to fear Weyewa laments, which were rather apolitical vis-à-vis angry oratory. In today’s Sumba, public schools relegate all traditional rituals to marginalized areas of the curriculum. Within those margins, however, lament is favored. “Framed as examples of Sumbanese ‘culture’ (kebudayaan Sumba), what are most often displayed—and win the most trophies—are ‘laments,’ performed by women as an accompaniment to dancers and gong and drum orchestras” (Kuipers, 1998, p. 148).

Conclusion

Whatever degree of hardwiring of human emotions (and of language) there might be, much is to be gained in analyzing their social-interactional and local-cultural contexts…. Emotion talk—like all talk—is a form of action that does things to the world, including the subjective and intersubjective worlds of experience, a form of action that is prototypically collaborative rather than expressive of an essentialized individual self. (Wilce, 2009, p. 13)

Emotion—embedded in interaction and public performance, consisting of shared rather than private experience—is subjected to traditional and modernizing cultural forces and authorities, while also subjecting expressive forms including linguistic varieties to its own force, manifest, for example, in strong pulls-and-pushes of identification, one of the several forms of reflexivity this article has explained as key to the social and cultural life of language and emotion. The inner, private lives of others and their feelings remain largely beyond the reach of a linguistic anthropologist’s tools. Awareness of this limitation combines with the finding that every human society has ideologies of language; all of them pertain to more than language, and some pertain to emotion; and finally, ideologies of language and emotion vary dramatically cross-culturally. Such findings have long encouraged anthropologists to regard with a great deal of skepticism those definitions of emotion that locate it within autonomous individuals or their autonomous minds. The recent emergence of phenomenological accounts of language and experience in linguistic anthropology (Duranti, 2009; Ochs, 2012) might signal a slight disciplinary shift. Nonetheless, the discipline’s focus on what is accessible to our methods, and what is observable, is understood internally not only as an appropriate self-limitation, but indeed as the structure within which we have learned to offer ever more nuanced accounts of emotive performance, emotion in interaction, or emotional crescendos produced by political and religious oratory, and critical analyses of burgeoning incitements to emotional discourse.

Footnotes

Author note:

Some material contained herein is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0822512, “Re-sounding Voices: ‘Healing with Lament’ in the Contemporary Finnish Lament Revival.” Many thanks to those who have commented on an earlier version of this article—R. Neill Hadder, Greg Matoesian, Geoff White, Oscar Escudero, Martina Volfova, Christine Kirby, and Janina Fenigsen.

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