The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect
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AN41CH11-Tarlow ARI 16 August 2012 15:14 The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect Sarah Tarlow School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, United Kingdom; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012. 41:169–85 Keywords The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at fear, grief, constructivism, body, empathy, compassion anthro.annualreviews.org Access provided by CAPES on 04/19/17. For personal use only. This article’s doi: Abstract 10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145944 The literature on the archaeology of emotion and affect is mostly quite Copyright c 2012 by Annual Reviews. recent and is not extensive. This review considers the main lines of Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:169-185. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org All rights reserved approach taken so far and explores how different understandings of 0084-6570/12/1021-0169$20.00 what constitutes an emotion underlie the work of archaeologists in this area. A distinction is made between past emotion as a subject of study and examination of the emotional subjectivity of the archaeologist as a method. The potential contribution of archaeology to emotion studies in the future includes bringing a sense of contextual historicity to the discussion and developing our knowledge of how material things and places are involved in shaping and expressing emotion. Inspired by some historians of emotion, a focus on shared emotional meanings, values, and codes seems a more productive direction than the exploration of idiosyncratic personal emotional experience. 169 AN41CH11-Tarlow ARI 16 August 2012 15:14 INTRODUCTION: ON THE the main lines of approach in archaeology, and NAMING OF PARTS concludes with some predictions—or perhaps suggestions—for future work. The emotional turn is a profound and chal- Nearly all the disagreements, controversy, lenging development in recent intellectual his- and ambiguity in studying emotion could be tory, not least because it is manifest across both cleared up if there were significant consensus scientific and humanities disciplines—although on what an emotion is. Most people can agree the nature of the emotional question and what that happiness and anger are emotions, but what might be considered a satisfactory answer vary about hope? Depression? Ennui? The distinc- considerably according to disciplinary styles. tion between an emotion, a state of mind, a Archaeology is interestingly positioned in this mood, a personality type, or even a pathology regard, partaking as it does of many other dis- is difficult to draw. Even in the case of an un- ciplines for which emotion has been a major contentious emotion such as happiness, do we focus of study in recent decades. Perhaps sur- mean the intense moments of visceral euphoria, prisingly, however, only a handful of developed or can we use it to characterize a long-term state archaeological studies of emotion have been such as a marriage, a career, or a community? published, in addition to a few theoretical dis- Differences in how we use and intend emotion cussions. This review refers to developments language lie at the root of many failed commu- in emotion studies in cognate areas, examines nications between emotion scholars, although such ambiguity arguably also functions to open up a wider range of possible questions and to DEFINITION OF TERMS resist fixing conclusions. Basic or key emotions: emotions that are biological in origin, shared across culture, and recognizable by universally shared fa- EMOTION AMONG cial expressions. Lists of between 6 and 11 basic emotions have THE SCHOLARS been published by psychologists of emotion, predominantly Paul Approaches to emotion study are numerous and Ekman and Robert Plutchik. See Ortony & Turner 1990 for a differ from each other in subtle ways. However, review many approaches can be broadly arranged along Constructivism: in emotion studies, the belief that emotions a spectrum, the poles of which I call psycholog- are culturally constructed and constituted and that even the bodily ical and constructivist, although these terms do perturbations associated with emotion are experienced in cultur- not map directly onto the self-identification of ally determined ways the scholars involved. At the psychological end Access provided by CAPES on 04/19/17. For personal use only. Disenchantment: a fundamental process of the modern world, of the spectrum are those approaches that un- according to Max Weber, by which magic and mystery were sup- derstand emotion as a bodily agitation. Emo- Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:169-185. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org planted by rational and intellectual knowledge of the world. At tion is located in the brain and in the actions the same time, knowledge came to be located inside individual of hormones and is thus broadly shared by all minds rather than in a numinous natural world anatomically modern humans as a biological Emotionology: the particular emotional codes and values function. According to this way of thinking, characteristic of a historically located society (after Stearns & therefore, some emotions are far from being Stearns 1985) the exclusive property of humans. Dogs, ele- Ladder of inference: the varying levels of difficulty with which phants, rats, and even fish and bees have emo- archaeologists can know about aspects of past life, posited by tions. At the constructivist pole, emotions are Hawkes (1954), with aspects such as technology and subsistence not considered to be universal among humans. on the lower levels and belief and feeling at the top. Subsequent Not only does the emotional content of a situ- archaeological theorists have rejected this model on the grounds ation change according to cultural context, but that material remains are the product of all these things the actual emotional experience is learned and social. Such approaches are often closely linked 170 Tarlow AN41CH11-Tarlow ARI 16 August 2012 15:14 to linguistic studies of emotion language and smiling faces (e.g., Ekman 1980a,b). Whether point to the deployment of emotional terms in Wierzbicka’s (2010, pp. 269–70) proposal of us- ways that are not translatable across and be- ing a culturally neutral minilanguage of “con- tween cultures. Broadly, these two approaches ceptual primes” is any less impoverishing is not align more closely with either a biological and clearly established. universal view or a cultural and contextual one. There is no doubt, however, that psy- However, it is difficult to place the work of any chological assumptions about the supposed individual at the far ends of the spectrum. The universality of emotion have had a far greater majority of writers on emotion recognize to impact on popular ideas than have anthropolog- some degree that emotions are both biological ical ones, and they even inform public policy. and cultural. The difference tends to be in what At the time of writing, at least 161 US airports they see as more interesting and in need of ex- use the SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Ob- ploration, and the potential problem is in con- servation Techniques) program of human and tinuing to think about emotion in polarized and technical observation of faces and behaviors to binary terms despite acknowledging the limita- identify microvariations in facial expression tions of doing so. that reveal (supposedly universal) emotions Psychological approaches are interested in and, thus, presumably detect individuals who the neurological and chemical bases of emo- threaten air security (Gov. Account. Off. tion, understood as a physical agitation. They 2010; see discussion in Menasco et al. 2008). see emotions as fundamental parts of biolog- Public policy is more readily influenced by an ically determined human experience and thus approach to emotion that assumes universality mostly shared cross-culturally. The psycholog- of emotion. So too is popular culture. Emo- ical school of emotion studies does allow a role tionally universal pasts underpin the success for culture, but this view often relates more of costume dramas, historical fiction, and even to “how emotions are manifest, their conse- television documentaries, which use emotions quences and value in the world” (Panksepp of love, grief, anger, and fear as bridges 2004, p. 16). The feeling part comes from the between modern audiences and past people brain. This is the paradigm of emotions that and where the message of essential continuity lies behind Ekman’s well-known identification is prioritized. Emotional pasts are powerfully of basic emotions with corresponding facial attractive but risk presenting modern and expressions, which are, he claims, recognized Euro-American sensibilities as universal, which cross-culturally (Izard 1971, 1977, 1991, 1992; has negative political implications. Ekman & Friesen 1972; Ekman 1980a,b, 1984, Access provided by CAPES on 04/19/17. For personal use only. 1993, 1994). Some further division into primitive or basic CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACHES Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:169-185. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org and social is possible in such an approach, but it A more anthropological approach to emotion is not uncontentious. Wierzbicka (2010, p. 269) studies gives greater weight to the role of notes that the history, and by extension the ar- culture in shaping not only the way that emo- chaeology, of emotion has great power to cri- tions are expressed, but also the very nature tique a biologically based science of emotion be- of emotional experience. The social/cultural cause its findings would be