Emotions are vital to all of us. From love and hate to grief, fear and envy, emotions are increasingly understood as driving forces in social life. The Emotions: A Cultural Reader applies a cross-cultural perspective on emotions, which accentuates an awareness of emotions in social and cultural context. This also points to problems of comparison and translation of local terms and emotional experiences, and to what extent there are culturally distinct emotions. Are emotions cultural or universal? Emotions theory early identified the importance of the person, as collectively constructed, but also the individual, the self and subjectivity in emotional experiences. Recent social science work on emotions has incorporated ideas from neuroscience, such as the finding that emotions are central in rational choice making and social adjustment, as well as the fact that emotions influence thought. Emotions weave into cognition and biology. Importantly, this cross-disciplinary approach closes the traditional Western gap in which emotions are separated from rationality and thought: the heart versus mind debate.

Emotions are a loaded topic. From love and hate to grief, fear and envy, emotions are increasingly understood as driving forces in social life. The Emotions: A Cultural Reader applies a cross-cultural perspective on emotions. It examines the fact that emotions are socially and culturally constructed, while highlighting problems of comparison and translation of local terms and emotional experiences. Are emotions cultural or universal? To what extent are there culturally distinct emotions? The Emotions closes the traditional Western gap where emotions are separated from rationality and thought: the heart versus mind debate. By presenting both classic essays and new cutting-edge chapters from anthropology, sociology and psychology with important contributions from philosophy and neuroscience, the volume connects a rich range of cross-cultural studies to form a thriving interdisciplinary debate on emotions.

"This is a very well-conceived, multiangled volume, one sure to generate lively discussion and experiment - and that maintains the distinctiveness of each authorial voice while also bringing them into generative conversation with each other." Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz DESCRIPTION Looking at encounters that can puncture or jolt us, this volume uses art as a lens through which to register and understand exceptional experiences. The volume also includes the fieldworker's experience of unexpected events that can lead to key understandings, as well as revelatory moments that happen during artistic creation and while looking at art. By exploring exceptional experiences through art, the volume asks probing questions for anthropology. In recognizing that art is all-encompassing - including, as it does, narrative, performance, dance and images - Exceptional Experiences situates itself within a number of conversations on methodological and conceptual issues in anthropology and beyond.

This chapter examines performance and aesthetics as a conceptual pair. As the two concepts tend to be treated separately, and aesthetics has attracted the least attention in anthropology, the development of aesthetics is considered from its origin in European philosophical thought. This leads to a discussion of the role of aesthetics in anthropology including objects such as visual art, images, and design. To this belongs the idea of alternative aesthetics as well as peak experiences of art and performance and an understanding of how such rare, but revelatory, expressive events come about. The chapter concludes by observing that to the study of performance and aesthetics has now been added political aesthetics, everyday aesthetics, and social aesthetics. Future study of aesthetics is predicted to keep steering away from the notion of aesthetics as beauty, and instead focus on affective and sensorial aspects in a cross-cultural perspective. 

Against a backdrop of gift-giving and reciprocity as keys in building and confirming social relationships in the field, this fictional narrative reveals a string of gift-giving events that did not work out. This outcome is rarely reported on in anthropology, but here one gift was returned immediately, another promised but never produced. There is also the anti-climactic nature of a parting gift when it is time for the fieldworker to exit the field. The setting is Dublin’s literary world, and the fieldwork includes a number of appreciated gifts, though not always in the form of an equal exchange of objects. The occurrence of unwanted and ungiven gifts that recur through the narrative are thorny reminders of the fragility of friendship in the field. The characters in the narrative are composite except for cameo appearances of named writers. 

Writing is key in anthropology, as one of its main modes of communication. Teaching, research, publications, and outreach all build on, or consist of, writing. This entry traces how anthropological writing styles have evolved over time according to changing politics in the discipline. It starts out in the late nineteenth century, showing how early writings in the discipline aimed to be objective. While writing anthropology in a literary mode goes a long way back, it was not until the 1970s that writing began to be collectively acknowledged as a craft to be cultivated in the discipline. This led to a boom of experimental ethnographic writing from the 1980s, as part of the ‘writing culture’ debate. The idea behind experimental narratives was that they might convey social life more accurately than conventional academic writing. Today, literary production and culture continue to be a source of inspiration for anthropologists, as well as a topic of study. Anthropological writing ranges from creative nonfiction to memoirs, journalism, and travel writing. Writing in such non-academic genres can be a way to make anthropological approaches and findings more widely known, and can inspire academic writing to become more accessible. Recent developments in anthropological writings include collaborative text production with interlocutors and artists. However, the tendency for experimentation is also held in check, as publishing in academic publication formats and featuring in citation indices is crucial for anthropologists’ careers. Still, as our writing moves increasingly online, there is a growth of flexible formats for publishing, including online books, essays on current affairs, and conversations in journals.