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In the Midst of Life: Affect and Ideation in the World of the Tolai

University of California Press

Jenkin's election had taken Mr. Beavis long strides towards death. From being a man much younger than his years, he had suddenly come to look his age. An old man; and tired into the bargain, eroded from within.

"I'm worried," Pauline had confided to Anthony. "He's making himself ill. And for something so childish really. I can't make him see that it doesn't matter. Or rather I can't make him feel it. Because he sees it all right, but goes on worrying all the same."

I cite this passage from Aldous Huxley's novel Eyeless in Gaza (1969:468) not for any startling insight it offers, but rather because it embodies a number of assumptions that many would consider unexceptionable, if not trite: what we think and what we feel, we are being told, are far from being the same thing; thought is often overborne by feelings which can profoundly affect our physical well-being as well as our conduct. And indeed most of us are able to recognize without difficulty the importance that emotion plays not only in the lives of those characters we encounter in a novel or observe on stage and screen but in our own, too. So much of everyday social intercourse involves the expression of affect: we must be alert to the feelings of others just as we are careful what we disclose of our own. In negotiating these encounters we also come to recognize, if only subliminally, that how and what we feel is transmitted not just verbally but by nonverbal

cues as well, cues that may indeed carry the more vital information: in a given "message" tone of voice, a raising of the eyebrows or some other involuntary movement of the body may count as much as, or even more than, verbal content. Nor of course is it only in the context of such personal interaction that the important role of affect is to be seen: it is indeed difficult to think of any human activity or social event that is not ordinarily accompanied by some degree of emotional expression.

In such circumstances the layman might be led to suppose that anthropologists, whose preoccupation after all has been to explore the human experience in all its diversity, would have been quick to see this and give affect a prominent place in their inquiries. The facts, however, are quite otherwise. For despite the references to emotional states in many ethnographic accounts, or even the occasional instance of British and American anthropologists chiding their French colleagues for their neglect of the emotions in their structuralist analyses (e.g., Firth 1966; Geertz 1973; Spiro 1979), it remains the case that affect has never been a focus of anthropological research,1 even, surprisingly, within that branch of the discipline usually referred to today as psychological anthropology.2 The present study was conceived as an attempt to redress this situation; its central concern is to explore the role of the emotions in the social life of the Tolai people of the Gazelle Peninsula, New Britain. But before turning to this task it will be helpful to consider some of the reasons for the neglect. This will lead us directly to a number of methodological issues that need to be discussed at this stage.

A variety of reasons have been offered for the marked failure on the part of students of human society to attend to the part played by the emotions in social life. For some, the reason/emotion opposition already noted—a dichotomy that has deep historical roots in the cultural tradition of those Western societies from which hitherto most social and behavioral scientists have come—is itself seen as generating a powerful bias against research into affect. But the matter is undoubtedly more complex than this and, leaving to one side questions that properly belong to the sociology of knowledge, it also has to be acknowledged that the phenomena themselves present formidable obstacles to systematic inquiry. The point has neatly been made by Knapp (1958:55) when he remarks that "like a mountain peak, emotional experience has an apparent immediacy and concreteness, yet a way of receding into a conceptual haze."

The apparent immediacy and concreteness of many affective states, Knapp observes, arises in part from the participation in them of ob-

vious bodily processes. These processes have been the subject of much study by neurophysiologists who have given us some of our most detailed knowledge about the inner workings of the emotions. We can learn much from this work, for example, about what neural processes make possible or about the physiological mechanisms that underlie the expression of particular emotions. However, any assumption that one can adequately describe, still less explain, emotional experience in terms of experimentally generated physiological data soon runs into difficulty simply because even when a display of affect has a clear physiological basis, it is still not possible to infer from knowledge of the neural processes alone just what emotion has been experienced, if any. As Pribran (1963:228) has expressed it, the blush of a young woman or the flushing of her face may indicate embarrassment, or love, or that she has been in the sun all day and the burn is beginning to show, aided by the preprandial ingestion of alcohol.

Where the nature of what is to be studied is so uncertain, obvious difficulties stand in the way of applying methods of research that satisfy the usual standards of scientific rigour. Small wonder, then, that in such circumstances psychologists of a behaviorist persuasion, anxious to be rid of the "hocus pocus of mentalism," should sometimes have expressed the desire to see terms such as emotion disappear from the vocabulary of their discipline (see, e.g., Boring 1946). But even those psychologists who reject this stance, and have seriously attempted to come to grips with emotions, have been obliged to point out how the task of experimental investigation is enormously complicated by certain attributes of the affect system itself as well as by other factors (see, e.g., Tomkins 1963:1, 193, 324; Plutchik 1980:xvii; 1982:531). For many anthropologists, however, it is the subjective element which is seen as a major stumbling block to inquiry. Fairly representative of anthropological doubts in the matter are the comments of Abner Cohen. "Our subjective life," he observes, "is notoriously chaotic, whimsical, vague, shifty and very largely unconscious" (Cohen 1974a:x). The message is clear: the emotions represent an area of shifting sands from which the anthropologist is well-advised to steer clear; instead he should stick to observable and verifiable criteria; what matters sociologically is what people actually do, not what they subjectively think or feel. I do not need to dwell at this stage on the broader assumptions about what constitutes terra firma in anthropological research which underlie the kind of approach that cohen advocates. More pertinent to present concerns is that for all its seeming straightforwardness and its curt dismissal

of the "airy fairy," Cohen's position itself does not manage to avoid ambiguity. Elsewhere in the same discussion, for example, there are references to symbols that agitate strong feelings and emotions, but if his own criteria are applied one is left to wonder how these feelings and emotions are to be identified. The...