Emotion und Kultur: Einige Grundfragen

Abstract

The anthropological literature on emotions is still governed by a dichotomous view of emotions as either primarily biological and thus universal or as primarily socio-cultural and thus particular in nature. Most attempts to theorize emotions tend to reduce them to one side or the other of this old nature-culture opposition, only some very few recent approaches intend to overcome these forms of reductionism. In this article the author reviews critically some of the most basic assumptions on emotions within the anthropological literature and tries to formulate an alternative view of emotion as complex, multi-layered bio-cultural process, which can be studied effectivly only through interdisciplinary cooperation.