Winter reading

[snousle]

I'm getting into The Saturated Self, a consciously postmodernist take on the meaning of "self" in the digital age. It's a subject I'm keenly interested in, and it's very engaging, but...

Right off the bat, the author states that human emotions are socially constructed rather than universal among cultures. Maternal love in particular is asserted to be absent in various times and places in history.

I kinda thought this debate was over, and that the basic repertoire of human emotions was, indeed, believed to be invariant across cultures by the great majority of people who study such things. But what do I know? I'm not sure what to think about this guy.

Comments

[pangolin.livejournal.com]

Well, if you study biology or psychology, or biological psychology, you will know that the basics of emotions are pretty much hard-wired. Obviously the triggering mechanisms for them sometime involve interpretation, such as being able to understand an insult or a joke, but even the propensity for language is relatively hard wired.

Question: When your cat is irritated because you are teasing it too much, is that socially constructed?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

He discusses cultures where a variety of behaviors are attributed to emotional states that don't have correlates in our culture. Taken at face value, it's a compelling argument.

But then, since there is no objective knowledge and everything is subject to refutation, why worry? :-(

I just hope that in writing all this, he's pursuing some useful purpose beyond wankery.

[mellowtigger]

It may be that both views are correct. I'm unfamiliar with the title, does he make distinctions between different kinds of emotions?

In "The Feeling of What Happens", Antonio Damasio writes (p.53):

"Emotions are part of the bioregulatory devices with which we come equipped to survive. That is why Darwin was able to catalog the emotional expressions of so many species and find consistency in those expressions, and that is why, in different parts of the world and across different cultures, emotions are so easily recognized. Surely enough, there are variable expressions and there are variations in the precise configuration of stimuli that can induce an emotion across cultures and among individuals. But the thing to marvel at, as you fly high above the planet, is the similarity, not the difference. It is that similarity, incidentally, that makes cross-cultural relations possible and that allows for art and literature, music and film, to cross frontiers."

Also (page 57):

"But a word of caution is needed here. I really mean what I say when I talk about ranges of stimuli that constitute inducers for certain classes of emotion. I am allowing for a considerable variation in the type of stimuli that can induce an emotion - both across individuals and across cultures - and I am calling attention to the fact that regardless of the degree of biological presetting of the emotional machinery, development and culture have much to say regarding the final product. In all probability, development and culture superpose the following influences on the preset devices: first, they shape what constitutes an adequate inducer of a given emotion; second, they shape some aspect5s of the expression of emotion; and third, they shape the cognition and behavior which follows the deployment of an emotion."

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If he's using "emotion" in the same way that, for instance, social scientists use "gender", then he has a point. Obviously, few thing are more hard-wired than genitalia. But cultures aren't consistent in how many genders they recognise, much less how they draw boundaries between them. Similarly, emotional responses may be hard-wired, but that doesn't mean they're categorised identically from culture to culture. A well-known example is the lack of the concept of "sadness" in traditional Tahitian culture. Tahitians will still feel the same sensations as people elsewhere when, for instance, a loved one dies, but they won't ascribe them to the same causes. What did our ancestors say before they recognised "depression" as a malady? They just said they were "tired" or "melancholy".