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?

[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".