Understanding Emotions, 3rd Edition

3

Cultural Understandings of Emotions

CONTENTS

The Construction of Emotions in the West

A Cultural Approach to Emotion

Self-Construal: Independent and Interdependent Selves

Values

Epistemology

Approaches to Studying Cultural Influences on Emotion

Cross-Cultural Comparisons

Ethnographies

Historical Approaches

Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches to Emotion

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

FIGURE 3.0 Two bronze figurines from the Han dynasty in China, made more than 2,000 years ago, probably representing people from alien northern tribes.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must carry it with us or we find it not.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, xii, Art)

For nine months the American anthropologist Catherine Lutz lived on a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, Ifaluk, studying the emotional lives of the 430 people who lived there (Lutz, 1988). One day, sitting with another woman, Lutz watched a five-year-old girl dancing and making silly faces, showing happiness, ker as it was known in the island's language. Lutz responded warmly to the little girl, whom she thought was rather cute. “Don't smile at her,” said her companion, “she'll think that you're not song,” meaning justifiably angry (p. 167). The woman was indicating that the girl was approaching the age at which she should have social intelligence, the concern for others that is ...