Ethnographic Perspectives on the Emotion Lexicon

Abstract

Extensive ethnographic research has been conducted on the emotion lexicon in the last 10 years. The anthropologists who have done this work have generally used traditional participant observation methods to discover the form and function of the vocabulary of emotion as it is used in natural, everyday contexts. Some of this research has attempted to outline the full range of terms that could fall under the rubric of “types of emotions” (Briggs, 1970; Gerber, 1975; Lutz, 1982), while others have focused on elucidating the meanings of a smaller set of culturally central emotion terms (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Myers, 1979; Rosaldo, 1980). Common to most of this research is a concern with the role the emotion lexicon plays in both cultural meaning systems and in the ordering of social life or interpersonal behavior. This research has shown that emotion terms are important operators in sociocultural systems and, by extension, in the organization and interpretation of what might be only then inadequately described as personal or private experience. From the perspective of much ethnographic research, people’s emotional lives and understandings are in an important sense their social lives.