meaning and feeling in the anthropology of emotions

Abstract

Emotion terms are used in everyday discourse to indicate experiences that involve both meaning and feeling, both mind and body. Most attempts to theorize emotions, however, tend to reduce them to one side or the other of these dichotomies; anthropology is divided between views of the emotions as primarily biological and as primarily sociocultural in nature. In this article I consider these approaches and propose three ways around the meaning/feeling dichotomy: through a rereading of the intellectual past of the modern West; through analytic methods that seek to reconstruct affective resonances; and through a realization that feeling‐tones, as well as meanings, are conveyed in the writing and reading of ethnography. In this article I draw on comparative material from the Central Himalayan region of Kumaon in northern India. [emotion, meaning, feeling, anthropological theory, South Asia, Himalaya]

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