beatty - emotion ethnography

How Did It Feel for You? Emotion, Narrative, and the Limits

of Ethnography

Andrew Beatty

ABSTRACT In this article, I present the case for a narrative approach to emotion, identifying conceptual and pre-

sentational weaknesses in standard ethnographic approaches. First-person and confessional accounts, increasingly

offered as a corrective to the distancing and typifying effects of cultural analysis, are shown to be unreliable; shared

experience turns out to be an illusion. Instead, I suggest we look to literary examples for lessons in how to capture

the full significance of emotion in action. Here, however, we reach the limits of ethnography.

Keywords: emotion, narrative, ethnographic writing, fieldwork, literature

How should we write about emotion? The answer, pre-sumably, will depend in part on our conception of

what emotions are: Basic human functions underlying cul-tural difference or infinitely diverse ways of apprehendingthe world? Portable human attributes or fixtures of the cul-tural landscape? If the former, can I rely on personal ex-perience for ethnographic insights; if the latter, can I everreally connect? To incline one way or the other is to implya particular presentational strategy, an ethnographic genre,perhaps even a way of doing fieldwork. It may also be thecase, conversely, that the way we write about emotion limitsour possibilities of understanding. Without attempting herea singular definition of emotion—a polythetic concept if everthere was one—the purpose of this article is twofold: (1) tocritique some widely used and long-standing paradigms inthe reporting of emotion and (2) to suggest the advantagesand challenges of adopting a narrative approach. A linkingtheme concerns the analytical relevance of the ethnogra-pher’s own emotions. Does my anger connect me with myfieldwork hosts whose anger I seem to share but whoseculture I will never fully master? Or do my feelings meansomething only against my own inescapable background, be-longing, as such, to a different form of life—indeed, to adifferent life? In writing about emotions in the field—ourown and others’—where should we draw the line?

A narrative approach to the emotions demands a con-textual richness that overspills the tight frames of standard“realist ethnographies” (Stoller 1989; Van Maanen 1988)with their case histories and descriptive summaries. Indeed,to get a better sense of how emotions are entangled inpersonal histories, we may be better served by literary ex-

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 112, Issue 3, pp. 430–443, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. c©2010 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01250.x

amples. For not only do emotions, in a quite obvious way,belong to stories; they also build on, allude to, and echoother emotions and events; they refer to interwoven lives.As such, their significances are not easily contained withinan illustrative and generalizing format. In two senses, then,emotions possess a narrative aspect: they make sense withina narrative sequence, and they “tell a story.” This claim ap-plies as much to basic human experiences as to intricatelyplotted affairs of the heart. The most intense, immediateemotions—joy at the birth of a child, grief at a suddendeath—derive their fullest meaning from complex personalhistories, even if they also possess a paradigmatic signifi-cance, a pattern that can be grasped instantly by unfamiliarothers (Carrithers 1992:165–176). Such emotions are notthe creation of a moment; they participate in manifold rela-tionships formed over periods of time. Our writing, if it isto have any credibility, must reflect this complexity.1

ANTHROPOLOGICAL WRITING ABOUT EMOTION:POLAR POSITIONSThe question of how to write about emotion has dividedthe closest of colleagues. Michelle Rosaldo saw emotions as“embodied thoughts” whose diversity of form “reflect[s] con-sistent differences in the organization of social life” (Rosaldoas quoted in Levy 1983:133). “Affects,” she wrote, “what-ever their similarities, are no more similar than the societiesin which we live” (Rosaldo 1984:145). Her husband, afterher tragic death in a fieldwork accident, came to abandonthis position and to emphasize the insights given by com-mon, if not universal, factors in human experience. RenatoRosaldo’s (1989) brave and influential essay “Grief and a

Beatty • Emotion, Narrative, and Ethnography 431

Headhunter’s Rage” brought into focus, almost for the firsttime—Jean Briggs (1970) was the pioneer—the interrela-tions among emotions, fieldwork, and writing, showing thatwhat we feel, how we think and write about it, and how itall happened are questions that cannot easily be separated.Against the profession’s trademark relativism and the sep-aration it implies, Rosaldo argues for the centrality of theanthropologist’s emotion and personal experience in mak-ing sense of others’ worlds. I shall argue—partly using hiscase—for the reverse. I suggest that the anthropologist’semotions in the field are mostly to do with the trials offieldwork: they do not (with rare exceptions) illuminate thepredicaments of our hosts. To the extent that our emotionsdo enter the swim and make sense within others’ lifeworlds,they cannot be captured in conventional ethnographic de-scription; indeed, as I shall argue, in writing about emotionwe come up against the limits of ethnography.

To find your way in the woods, sometimes you need toretrace your steps. In developing a skeptical position on whatcan credibly be said about emotion and on whether our ownfeelings tell us anything useful, I shall backtrack to some fa-miliar positions. How well do they stand up to the evidence?How strong are their arguments? A standard recourse indisciplinary rethinkings, anthropological and other, is to re-turn to the firm ground of personal experience. Followingpostmodernist critiques, however, theoretical Square Onewas no longer available. The reflexive revolution in anthro-pology, epitomized a quarter of a century ago in WritingCulture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), famously underminedthe authority of classic ethnographies by drawing attentionto the circumstances of their creation. Titles like ObserversObserved (Stocking 1983) and The Headman and I (Dumont1978) captured the disciplinary double take. Clifford Geertz,who took some of the blame as well as the credit, diagnosedepistemological and moral hypochondria (1988:130–138).

But if the impact of the debate was initially skeptical,once the critics had seized the stage, doubts were replacedin some quarters by a restored faith in the authority of ex-perience.2 Against the intricacies of symbolic interpretationand the invisible interpreter, the voice from the field pre-sented a rhetorical challenge that recalled Dr. Johnson’sstone-kicking reply to the idealist: “I refute it thus!” Here,in the theoretical whirlpool, was something like bedrock. Inthe opposite camp, cultural constructionism, often inflectedby an attention to political economy, retained a powerfulposition in the analysis of emotion (Lutz 1988; Lutz andAbu-Lughod 1990; White 1992).

However, the debate between those who would focuson cultural difference (if only to expose its political ba-sis) and those who would transcend it ran out of steam. Inthe last decade, anthropologists working on emotion haveforged ahead, tracing the role of emotion in such fields aspolitical violence, religious piety, ethnic affiliation, and kinmaking. A great deal has been learned about the reach ofemotions into diverse spheres of life and the mutual en-gagement of institutions and actors through emotion and

discourses of emotion. From being nowhere, “emotion”—like “the body” before it—is suddenly everywhere (Wilce2004). But thinking on the more basic process of how wewrite about emotions felt and encountered in the field hasnot kept pace. In the scramble for new territory, too muchhas been taken for granted.

If emotion is now ubiquitous in the human sciences andbeyond, so too, of course, is narrative: this article is onlya small contribution to a long-established multidisciplinaryendeavor (Bruner 1991; Ochs and Capps 1996; Peacock andHolland 1993; Tedlock 1991; Turner and Bruner 1986; VanMaanen 1988). In bringing together these two concerns, Iclaim no special novelty: I am building on the work ofmany scholars. Nevertheless, the question of how emotionis related to narrative and how that relation bears on the waywe write is less considered. It may be a truism to say thatemotions are a part of narratives—what isn’t? It is much lessobvious that emotions tell a story of their own.

THE HISTORICAL PARALLELIn advancing the case for a narrative approach to emotion,we can learn something from the debates in history aboutwhether narrative shape inheres in events or is somethingimposed retrospectively on mere sequence.3 As ethnogra-phers, we confront many of the problems tackled by histo-rians (the perspective of narratologists like Barthes [1977]and Genette [1979] is less clearly relevant). But our profes-sional advantage—personal familiarity with what and whomwe write about—shows that it is possible to steer a middlecourse between the opposing positions of realism and episte-mological despair that have framed the history debates. Onecan accept Louis Mink’s point that “narrative form in history,as in fiction, is an artifice, the product of individual imagi-nation” (Mink 2001:218), without accepting that temporal-causal shape is entirely alien to history-as-lived. (And whatform of words, verbal or written, present tense or pasthistoric, is not artifice? When has reality excluded imagina-tion?) Similarly, one can accept Hayden White’s point that“historical situations do not have built into them intrinsicmeaning in the way that literary texts do” (White 2001:224)without accepting all his reasons and consequences. White’sclaim is plausible not because historical situations as theyhappen are meaningless but because the meanings of textand experience are of a different order and scale.

David Carr’s influential defense of narrative history—Iquote his conclusions, not his reasoning—resonates stronglywith ethnography:

Narrative has not merely an epistemological but also an ontologicalvalue. That is, it is not only a “cognitive instrument” as Minkclaimed—a primary way of seeking, organizing and expressingour knowledge of a part of reality. It is constitutive of our verybeing, it is our way of existing, of constituting ourselves. [Carr2001:198]

The return of the story has been good news for anthro-pology. Indeed, the narrative turn in medical anthropologyand “trauma studies” builds substantially on the historians’

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insights (e.g., Antze and Lambek 1996; Kleinman 1989;Mattingly and Garro 2000). However, other than in a fewrelatively specialized publications—and in psychoanalyticalaccounts that address a quite different agenda (Crapanzano1992; Mimica 2007)—ethnographers have generally under-rated the historical emplotment of emotions.4 This is oddbecause if narrative, in Carr’s (2001:198) extended sense,applies to “our very being . . . our way of existing,” it oughtto apply especially to our emotional lives and to the emo-tions that we share with others. The ethnographer, unlikethe historian, is on the spot and ought to profit from this sit-uation. But with respect to emotions, his position is tricky.The transition from life-as-lived to life-as-written poses adifficulty that the historian does not have to face, becauseethnographers—actually, not just imaginatively—are partof the story. How much a part is a moot point. Once weacknowledge the deep emplacement of emotions, their en-tanglement in stories, plots, and pasts involving significantothers, we cannot rely on our own emotions for insights intothe emotions of people living very different lives. Against itsauthor’s intention, “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” nicelyillustrates the point, so let me interrupt the case for nar-rative with a discussion of the strongest counterexample.I choose this text with some hesitation, given its sensitivecontent. But two considerations—apart from its benchmarkstatus and the decent interval that has passed since its firstpublication—permit criticism: first, Rosaldo’s own icono-clasm, his penchant for no-holds-barred deconstruction ofthe classics; second, his public use of a personal experience tofurther theoretical argument. My criticisms, like his own—and with due respect for personal feelings—accordingly con-cern argument, presentation, and theoretical claims.

EMOTIONS IN CONTEXT—BUT WHOSE CONTEXT?Rosaldo’s manifesto-like essay (it doubles as introduction tohis polemical book, Culture and Truth, published in 1989)has been described as “the most celebrated work on affectof the last generation” (Johnson and Michaelsen 2008:60).Cited in hundreds of works, it continues to inspire debate(for the latest example, see Ethos 2008). An established clas-sic, then; but its first publication in 1984 came at a criticalmoment in the human sciences, appearing to turn the tideagainst culturalist approaches in favor of a more engaged andpersonal ethnography. In making his case, Rosaldo contrastswhat he calls the “force” of emotions, accessible only to hisstyle of testimonial anthropology, with the more impersonal“cultural depth” offered by interpretivism, writing: “My ef-fort to show the force of a simple statement taken literallygoes against anthropology’s classic norms, which prefer toexplicate culture through the gradual thickening of webs ofmeaning” (1989:2). For Rosaldo, the Geertzian approachcannot capture real emotion because it typologizes, pre-ferring the collective, anonymous displays of ritual to theeveryday, particular experiences of the individual. He citesan example that “masks the emotional force of bereavementby reducing funerary ritual to orderly routine” (Rosaldo

1989:13). Because the force of emotions is muted in gen-eralizing, culturalist approaches, the symbols-and-meaningsethnographer lacks empathy and therefore insight. More rad-ically, Rosaldo contends that without common experiencethere can be no understanding (1989:7–8). The scales fellfrom his eyes when, following his wife’s tragic death in afieldwork accident, he abandoned his search for a culturalexplanation of headhunting. Experience had revealed thetruth in Ilongot explanations: they go headhunting to workoff the rage associated with bereavement. Anger was notmerely a cultural pretext for violence, as he had assumed; itwas the aftershock of loss (Rosaldo 1989:8–10).

Plainly, at a certain level, Rosaldo’s thesis must be true.Experience shapes perception, the young cannot really knowwhat it is to be old, nor the tall the perspective of the short—and so on through all the human types, male and female, gayand straight, black and white, wise and foolish. To under-stand another’s emotion we must have experienced some-thing like it ourselves.5 But the argument is self-limiting. Forif common experience is necessary for ethnographic under-standing, only the reader who has had a life like Rosaldo’swill be capable of accepting his point.

The argument from experience is encapsulated in Ros-aldo’s notion of the “positioned subject,” which seems to havetwo aspects: (1) the subject’s place within a structure and (2)the vantage afforded by the observer’s stock of generic lifeexperiences. Positioning is synchronic: a matter of status,structure, and analogy. As Rosaldo explains, “Rather thanspeaking of death in general, one must consider the subject’sposition within a field of social relations in order to graspone’s emotional experience” (1989:2); furthermore, “onlyafter being repositioned through a devastating loss of my owncould I better grasp that Ilongot men mean precisely whatthey say when they describe the anger in bereavement as thesource of their desire to cut off human heads” (1989:3). Whatmatters is not how one got to a certain point—the detailsof the story, all the things that make it personally significantfor the individual involved—but one’s having got there, thestructural position and the life stage one has reached. Narra-tive serves to reveal parallels between author and informantsrather than to thicken description and add historical depth.Rosaldo is disarmingly explicit on this point. “My use ofpersonal experience serves as a vehicle for making the qual-ity and intensity of the rage in Ilongot grief more readilyaccessible to readers than certain more detached modes ofcomposition” (Rosaldo 1989:11). But if personal experienceis useful in understanding others, its usefulness surely de-pends on relevance, closeness of fit; and relevance, in turn,depends on the historical particularities—in a word, thestory.

Far from home, Rosaldo puts his faith in what he knowsor rather in what he feels. It is shock that compels him to ac-cept as simple truth Ilongot statements that they take headsbecause they are angry over the deaths of their kinsmen.And rather than persuade us (a story persuades by revealingconnections and causes), he batters us into submission. You


thought emotions were cultural constructions? They are allabout force, according to Rosaldo: “the emotional force ofdeath” (1989:2), “the force of anger in grief” (1989:3), “theforce of the dilemma faced by the Ilongots” (1989:4), “theoverwhelming force of rage possible in such grief” (1989:9),“the cultural force of rage” (1989:16), and “the culturalforce of emotions” (1989:19). Behind the battery of as-sertions, different kinds of experience, different sorts offeeling, are being equated, particularities erased. Some ex-amples seem more like sorrow than rage. A man’s con-version to Christianity following the death of his child iscited, implausibly, as “the force of the grieving man’s de-sire to vent his rage” (1989:5). People listening to a tapedlament seem to express sorrow, regret, and frustration,not rage; but rage is Rosaldo’s preferred term. Words areused here to obscure rather than illuminate or differentiateexperiences.

But there is another perspective, a way into the motiva-tions of headhunters that is less obvious but more plausiblethan recourse to panhuman experience. Why do they do it?The ideal of head taking, the quest for vengeance, the tauntsof peers, the desire for prestige, and the years of mourningprohibitions that Rosaldo describes are among the pressuresbuilding the anger that slaughter releases. The fact that thesepressures are culturally defined rather than rooted in per-sonal experiences does not make them any less psychologi-cally real; nor does it make them a culturalist’s projection. Incontrast, the fixing of headhunters’ rage in past grief (some-times generations old) may, paradoxically, be a cultural fic-tion, an alibi for the immediate provocations of violent rage.Rosaldo’s personal story linking his own grief with rage doesnot convincingly translate to the Ilongot because their expe-riences are too different. What his argument reveals is theneed for a genuinely narrative approach: a building of charac-ter, circumstance, motivation, and action. Yet such a narra-tive would fatally expose the differences between the anthro-pologist and the people he studies. If Rosaldo persuades us ofthe weakness of a generalizing interpretivism, his remedy—avariant of what Geertz (2000:59) calls “the return of HumanNature”—fails to convince. What his evidence calls out for isa more precise, circumstantial account that shows how emo-tions are justified by experience—narrative, not cultural,depth.6

By reading between the lines, one sees the alternativecase, not so much for the proof of experience but, con-trariwise, for the evocative power of narrative. I want topursue this case here because my argument is that a con-vincing account of emotions—a proper appraisal of theirsignificance—depends on an attention to narrative context.We witness a dispute at a wedding, displays of anger andjealousy. But only when we are familiar with the backgroundstories, the dispositions of people and their long interrela-tions, can we really grasp what is going on. (It is in thissense that emotions can be said to “have a story” as well asbelonging to stories.) To understand why the bridegroom’sjealousy provokes his sister’s anger, and to read the effects

of these emotions in the wedding dispute, takes more thanempathy and knowledge of cultural context. It requires anattention to character and circumstance that goes well be-yond the ethnographic vignette.

Narrative density is, of course, what we expect froma novel since a novelist—at least in the realist tradition—works by accumulating details of character-in-action. Theethnographer, bound as she is to fit cases to arguments (ar-guments that transcend the context), cannot do this. Nordo her fieldwork predicaments, although real enough, pro-vide much insight into the very different predicaments ofothers. Her feelings toward her fieldwork hosts have nopast, or their past is rooted in relations with other, quitedifferent people back home.7 If she wants to write aboutemotion in the ethnographic mode, she is therefore facedwith a dilemma: stick to her own case and admit the lim-itations of ethnographic reporting or venture dangerouslyoutside them. The case for an anthropology of emotion thatdepends on a reflexive or confessional stance collapses. AsRosaldo’s example unhappily shows, our emotions lose theirexplanatory power away from home—they belong to dif-ferent narratives—and the appeal to experience, the “onlyconnect” thesis, must fail.

Although the possibilities of mistaken empathy or pro-jection are diminished in that their experiences more closelyresemble those of their hosts, the situation of anthropolo-gists working “at home” is not in principle different. Theymostly operate outside their habitual circle, among farmers,factory hands, or stockbrokers—cultural and social others—not really at home. Or, as their writing focuses inward andapproaches autobiography or family biography, it ceases todo the things expected of ethnography, turning into memoir(see Narayan 2007).

Yet insights can still be had and the self made relevant.The risk of misleading analogy demonstrated by Rosaldois neatly sidestepped in a recent set of articles that drawon personal experience. In a moving discussion of the lifehistory of her mother, a Polish Catholic caught up in theHolocaust, Barbara Rylko-Bauer introduces the notion of“intimate ethnography, where the personal and the emo-tional suffuse the work at all levels” (2005:12). The an-thropologist’s own relatives become informants and themixed feelings called up by efforts to excavate life histo-ries serve as clues to “how social forces become embod-ied as individual experience” (Waterston and Rylko-Bauer2006:409). Linked essays by Philippe Bourgois (2005) andAlisse Waterston (2005) on similar themes probe the dif-ficulties attending intimate ethnography: the complex ne-gotiation of roles, the construction of a “truthful” account,and so on. What legitimizes the project in each case—andcontrasts it with Rosaldo’s trickier notion of empathy basedon analogous experience—is the authors’ insider status aschildren of their informants, their necessary involvement inthe reconstitution of personal history. Only when the storiesare made to address broader themes do we feel the power ofthe original testimonies weakened as memories are distilled


to familiar lessons about dehumanization and structuralviolence.

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPLICATIONS: WHAT CAN BEDONEAs these examples of “intimate ethnography” demonstrate,to address the limitations of ethnographic writing is not,by any means, to reject all anthropological discussion ofemotion (still less, of course, is it to damn ethnographygenerally). Indeed, some of the best recent work atteststo the theoretical advantages of considering emotion in abroader analytical frame. Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2007),for example, writes of a “political economy of emotions”in South Africa. Focusing on the painful transition fromapartheid, she shows how specific emotions were deliber-ately engaged—even mandated—in the process of nationalhealing staged by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.At the hearings, the free flow of appropriate emotions wasencouraged as a step toward redemption and the search fora shared experiential truth.

Emotion and memory are implicated in other recentstudies of political subjectivity. In a powerful ethnography,Nicolas Argenti (2008) shows how the “unspeakable vio-lence” of West Africa’s slave-trading past finds ambiguousexpression in youth masquerades that mingle terror withhilarity, at once acknowledging and attacking the age hierar-chies that perpetuate the old inequities. On a related theme,Maruska Svasek, distinguishing between emotions remem-bered and reexperienced, shows how collective traumalives on in the commemorations of Sudeten Germans whowere expelled from wartime Czechoslovakia. The “chosentrauma” of postwar generations does not equate to the suffer-ing of their parents but is made similar by their “identificationas co-victims” (Svasek 2005:202). Narratives of loss, terror,and nostalgia for the homeland generate feelings of distressthat unite young with old and serve the political ends of theimagined community in the quest for restitution.

In a special issue of Ethnos that explores the positioning ofemotion in the globalizing political economies of SoutheastAsia, Tom Boellstorff (2004) shows how malu (roughly,shame) is triggered among Indonesian Islamists by the claimsof gays to a public voice in civil society. Malu leads to violentrage, as Islamist youths feel their masculinity to be underthreat. The acts of puritan violence that follow mark a “seachange” from the tolerant (if heterosexist) Suharto era to avisceral politicized homophobia. In the same Ethnos issue,Johan Lindquist shows how prostitutes and migrant workersin the industrial zone of Batam overcome an inhibiting maluby the apparently opposite means of recourse to drugs orwearing the veil. By veiling or taking ecstasy, the pious andthe not so pious are able to manage malu and thereby “engagewith, rather than withdraw from, a new kind of world andits contradictions” (Lindquist 2004:503).

These diverse studies escape my criticism because theyare not primarily concerned with the predicaments of indi-viduals or the nature of emotion but, rather, with broader

social currents. It would be wrong to look here for detailedeyewitness reports of emotional episodes. The Ethnos con-tributions, for example, are concerned with “cultural log-ics,” discourses, and “performative definitions”: emotionson a bigger stage. Since their aims are theoretical, report-ing leads away from personal experience and emotions-in-action to discussions of political economy and “emotionallandscapes.”

EMOTIONS IN FOCUSBut what about those full-length studies that prioritize emo-tion, such as “person-centered ethnographies”? With thescope to depict and describe, surely they can keep a steadiereye on the actuality, on the people inhabiting the emotionallandscapes? Surprisingly, no. In two notable and in otherrespects excellent specimens of the genre, long sectionsdevoted to emotion contain no examples of actual occur-rences witnessed by the authors (Hollan and Wellenkamp1994:107–123; Parish 1994:190–230). The ethnographicmaterial consists solely of responses to questions such asfollows: “What is the relationship of hopelessness with de-sire?” (Parish 1994:229); “What happens inside you whenyou have pastae?” (Parish 1994:224); or “Can you remem-ber a time when you were really angry?” (Hollan andWellenkamp 1994:116). Replies take the form of remi-niscences, explanations, descriptions of “hypothetical sce-nario[s]” (Parish 1994:206), or verbal “recreations” of events(Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994:110). Parish’s respondentsare mostly anonymized and generic (e.g., “one high-casteNewar said . . .” [1994:208]). In both books, the authors’summary statements take the form of context-free, present-tense generalizations: “Toraja believe that if one avoids get-ting angry . . .” (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994:119); “Inthe Toraja view of emotions . . .” (Hollan and Wellenkamp1994:110); “For Newars, a key moral emotion is lajya”(Parish 1994:199); “What Newars know, as moral beings,is mediated by this pain and fear” (Parish 1994:215). Thelack of concrete examples can give this kind of ethnographya secondhand, uncertain feel: “a spouse’s unfaithfulness mayevoke feelings of intense shame and anger and possibly leadto violence . . . However, our sense is that fantasies and talkabout violence in connection with adultery are much morecommon than actual occurrences” (Hollan and Wellenkamp1994:116).

Although person-centered ethnography can, with somejustice, claim to give us the “native point of view”—or atleast the elicited native point of view—it violates the otherMalinowskian axiom of testing word against practice. Parishseems aware of the objection and asserts that “we should notignore the ways emotion is embedded in action and practicein ways that go beyond what cultural theories of emotion say”(1994:215). Indeed, in his conclusion (Parish 1994:278), heaffirms that “culture is lived—it is embodied in experience,action, and life. It emerges in lives”—a conception of cultureto which interview-based ethnography seems poorly suited.


Robert Levy’s Tahitians (1973), the original person-centered ethnography, is, happily, packed with people; yethis most influential essay on the subject contains not a singleaccount of an emotion episode. Characteristically of an-thropological theorizing of emotion, it offers only a brief,hypothetical case in which a man is abandoned by his wife(Levy 1984:219). Equally influential (and admirable in itsown way), Catherine Lutz’s constructionist study Unnatu-ral Emotions (1988) contains, as far as I can discover, onlyone emotion episode witnessed by the author that extendsover more than a couple of lines (Lutz 1988:125–127). Theepisode concerns a child’s death—not the sort of incidentthat requires much narrative context or attention to the in-flections of interpersonal history. We learn a great deal abouthow Ifaluk talk about emotion or think about emotion duringinterviews but not how their emotions interlock in reality,how emotions shape and are shaped by personal histories.Unnatural, indeed. Unless we assume that talk about emo-tion is emotion itself—and the discourse approach comesclose to this—we are missing something here.

What these diverse approaches—person centered, ex-periential, constructionist, and let’s add, for historicalcompleteness, functionalist, structuralist, and Culture andPersonality—have in common is a limited temporal contextor, rather, a conception of context that pans swiftly outwardto general factors of ideology, power, cultural framing, andgeneric experience rather than deeper into individual stories:wide angle rather than long focus. In most cases, the con-text is immediate and reducible to generalities, the approachbroadly synchronic—as if the actors, like the ethnographer,were fresh to the scene. What we are getting is half thepicture, less than half the story.

ETHNOGRAPHIC LIVES: THE SEARCH FORCOMMON GROUNDThe complaint that ethnography diminishes its object is afamiliar one. “Under his gaze,” writes Michael Jackson ofhis fictional fieldwork persona, “the vital, elusive, and uni-fying qualities of existence shriveled and died” (1986:122).Perhaps emotion, that most vital and elusive of qualities,is the most easily betrayed. Yet the answer is not simplybetter writing. As Jackson demonstrates, the irreducibilityof experience poses a challenge that is epistemological andmoral as well as aesthetic. His solution is to focus on theingredients of experience that link ethnographer and infor-mant, and much of his work interweaves personal reflectionwith a vivid rendition of the ethnographic moment. In thisperspective, the minutiae of fieldwork take on a differentdimension, opening out toward broader human concernsrather than sideways toward comparative theory building.Working among African storytellers, Jackson draws on localtellings to make his points about the performative recastingof experience in words, the open-endedness and potential-ities of narrative. He argues—and I agree with him—that“praxis is always a vital and indeterminate relationship withgivenness, a going beyond, a surpassing of one’s situation,

status, or role” (Jackson 1998:33). I would only add that thecomplexity of practice emerges more clearly in narrativesof action than in locally made stories serving quite differentends. In a later book, In Sierra Leone (2004), Jackson com-bines personal memoir with the biography of a politician andfriend. The deep familiarity, the glancing reflections amongparallel lives, give an unusual resonance to the text that callsto mind the meandering, hypnotic prose of W. G. Sebald,whose novels Jackson took with him to the field. It’s no de-traction of Jackson’s fine book to say that his subject’s storyis several steps away from the living moment, shaped, as itis, by the passage of time and the conventional framing of abig man’s public career.

Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman (2003) is another bi-ography in progress, a retelling of the informant’s storiesagainst the changing feelings and perspectives of intersect-ing lives. Again, the long familiarity between ethnographerand informant—in this case a Mexican peddler—leads toan understanding of how narrative shapes a life. It does notlead to—does not claim—any special insight into the waysin which emotion is linked to action or character. The actionis all across the table of Behar’s kitchen; character is suchas emerges in words and stories; emotions are rememberedrather than recaptured in their original complexity. Field-work memoirs do not, as a rule, attempt to portray complexchains of living emotion, unless the emotion be that of theethnographer.

Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham’s entrancing dou-ble narrative, Parallel Worlds (1993), presents a kind of bil-dungsroman detailing the growth of an anthropologist’s anda writer’s mind. Immersion, enquiry, professional guilt,understanding, and withdrawal: these are the processes il-luminated in their dialectical tale. In one striking passage(1993:303–304), Graham intuits a correspondence that callsto mind the book’s title: the maker of fiction gives voice tocreatures of his imagination just as the Beng diviner bodiesforth invisible spirits. But this is an insight into the creativeprocess and the possibility of intellectual connection ratherthan a stroke of empathy. In the memoir’s double visionof counterparts, husbands and wives, anthropologists andwriters, emotion is vividly present throughout, but it is thefieldworkers’ emotions and dilemmas that most compel thereader.

These studies are significant achievements. We shouldnot blame authors for something they are not attempting.But the contrast between what can be done by the opposedmethods of ethnography and literary narrative is perhaps bestcaptured by another example. Who could deny that Scheper-Hughes’s (2001) ethnography of Irish madness powerfullyilluminates the peculiar bad faith of the Irish farming fam-ily, the constricted emotions, oppressive pieties, and half-understood economic forces that once shaped and deformedrural families? But to find out what it feels like to live in sucha family, to apprehend the living emotion, we must turnto the fiction writer and memoirist John McGahern (2005,2006), whose prickly rural predicaments, suitably enough,


resist summary. To say this is to accept that different goalsand perspectives lead to distinctive achievements. Ethnog-raphy and literary narrative have complementary strengthsand limitations. So what can one learn from the other?

A NARRATIVE APPROACH TO EMOTION:LESSONS OF THE MASTERSWriters have explored these problems for centuries andought to have something to teach us. They are not ethnog-raphers; they don’t have to explain; but like ethnographersthey need to convince, and one of the ways they do this isthrough the evocation and portrayal of emotion. So muchcould be said here, but perhaps the most obvious thing tonote is that, in fiction, the balance of narrative and emotionalpayoff is quite different from that of even the most personalethnography.

In Les Miserables (Hugo 1933[1862]), at the climacticmoment when Jean Valjean unmasks himself in court andtakes the place of a condemned man accused in his name,we are told nothing of his emotions. Instead, simply this:

He was very pale, and trembled slightly. His hair, already greywhen he came to Arras, was now perfectly white. It had becomeso during the hour that he had been there. [Hugo 1933:267]

Valjean’s agonized examination of conscience; his desper-ate, reluctant, 40-page journey to Arras; his terror of beingrevealed; the moral imperative of owning up; his despairat the prospect of returning to the galleys; and not leastthe reader’s growing anxiety all make this miraculous, ter-rible transformation—within the conventions of Romanticfiction—entirely credible. Described impersonally from theoutside, the effect is all the greater. In the crucible of thecourtroom, we are not told what Valjean is feeling: weknow it. The story has brought us there. Yet—it hardlyneeds stressing—the circumstances are entirely outside ourexperience.

Or consider Gabriel Conroy at the end of James Joyce’sgreat story, “The Dead,” as he contemplates the sleepingfigure of his suddenly estranged wife:

He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From whathad it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolishspeech, from the wine and the dancing, the merry-making whensaying good night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along theriver in the snow. [1944:254]

In this paragraph, Joyce explains his method. The intensepathos of the scene, its painful irony, derives from the accu-mulation of happy but trivial incidents preceding the stun-ning revelation by Gabriel’s wife of an earlier lost love. Thepsychological plausibility of Gabriel’s baffled desire and hisfeeling of annihilation depends on the slow build up of inci-dent and character. Again, the story has amply justified theemotions.

Without the artifice of a contrived plot, the authorof nonfiction may still rely on the cumulative power ofnarrative to evoke emotion—and on emotion, in turn, tocolor and shape narrative. Consider an example rather closer

to the ethnographer’s entrapment between experience andexpression. In Primo Levi’s memoir of his imprisonmentand liberation from Auschwitz, the narrator emerges fromthe liberated camp with feelings of relief, sadness, dismay,hope, exhilaration, and exhaustion (Levi 2000:218–223). Ifwe have managed to read this far—the pain of the narrativemitigated by the brilliance of the prose—we know what hemeans; we know that these theoretically distinct sentimentsare all powerfully present at the same time. Indeed, thecumulative force of the account makes them seem inevitable.

Levi is fond of strings of emotion words, usually placedat points of transition, and one comes to recognize them asa kind of signature: they always have about them an aptness,a conclusive flourish. On his long way back to Italy, this ishow Levi and a fellow traveler part company:

We left each other without many words: but at the moment offarewell, in a fleeting but distinct manner, I felt a solitary wave offriendliness towards my Greek, streaked with tenuous gratitude,contempt, respect, animosity, curiosity and regret that I shouldnot see him again. [Levi 2000:268]

Having followed the narrator, having seen what it takes tosurvive and even thrive in the chaotic aftermath of liberation,we can take this listing of six emotions as both exact and true.Levi has so vividly portrayed his relation to “the Greek” thatthe evidence of the reader’s own mixed feelings confirmsthe parting judgment. Each named emotion scores a hit andproduces a subtle moral shift, encoding a series of complexevaluations. In the world of the camps, where language hasbeen debased and mere words have become hollow andimprecise, emotions still retain an interpretative fit, a holdon reality.

But if words lose their grip, so, pushed to the limit,can emotions. When, at the long-awaited approach of theRussians, a guard calls for the camp to be evacuated, Leviwrites:

The news excited no direct emotion in me. Already for manymonths I had no longer felt any pain, joy or fear, except inthat detached and distant manner characteristic of the Lager,which might be described as conditional: if I still had my formersensitivity, I thought, this would be an extremely moving moment.[Levi 2000:182]

Again, the deadening, oppressive detail makes the condi-tionality of emotion here at once a terrible discovery andsomething entirely comprehensible. Without ever leavingthe resources of ordinary language, including ordinary emo-tion words, Levi has shown us something about the humancondition that we did not know or perhaps had only dimlysuspected. And, amazingly, he has done so from the depthsof circumstances utterly remote from the experience of mostreaders.

As an ethnographer, one of many things that impressme about Levi’s writing is the work that he makes emotionsdo in a narrative: they define and shape experiences, sumup situations, characterize persons, and conclude sectionsof narrative, showing us where we are, existentially, in a


story. And of course, they are powerful markers of authorialpresence, even when they are only, as in the last example,“conditional.” For Levi, then, emotions are not added ontoexperience, hovering over the real thing: they are the sub-stance and possibility of experience. As such, they are ashard edged, palpable, and concrete as the physical world;perhaps, in the grey limbo of the camps, even more so.Emotions are signs of life but also instruments of analysis,lenses through which we perceive the world.

Can we learn from this conjunction of emotion and cir-cumstance? Or is the contextual use of emotion to evokeand evaluate off-limits to ethnography? I suggest that itis not possible to render the emotional dimension of ex-perience convincingly without giving emotion its propernarrative due—something conventional ethnographies haverarely done. Instead, they are apt to misrepresent emotionsby highlighting only one or other aspect—of language, feel-ing, tactics, or cultural meaning—and therefore risk turningpeople into caricatures, bearers of difference, social con-structions. This is not a mere effect of writing; it implies amisrecognition of emotion in the field. As Anthony Cohenhas remarked—and his comments apply as much to emo-tion as to the notion of “selfhood” that he is defending—“byfailing to extend to the ‘others’ we study a recognition ofthe personal complexity which we perceive in ourselves, weare generalizing them into a synthetic fiction which is bothdiscredited and discreditable” (Ingold 1996:29).

EMOTION IN ETHNOGRAPHY: PURGING OF THEREALHow did this simplification happen? It began with the pruningof what Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) calls “the imponder-abilia of everyday life” in quest of functions and models. (Theword was Malinowski’s coinage; but the OED definition of“imponderable” indicates the problem: “a factor that is diffi-cult or impossible to estimate or assess.”) Despite our ten-dency to contrast the products of field and library, it is a factthat the most highly prized ethnographies have been the least“imponderable”—and, in that sense, the least ethnographic.Naven (Bateson 1936) and Political Systems of Highland Burma(Leach 1954), for example, are interesting solely for theirtheoretical daring, not for their ethnographic exuberance.Even such classics as E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940),offered to generations of students as a model of ethnogra-phy, are valued mainly for their expository dazzle—but atthe expense of ethnographic detail, of light and shade, ofcontrary evidence. It is as if Evans-Pritchard, like a sculptor,arrived at his elegant form by a technique of taking away,a process that is the very opposite of the slow, haphazardaccumulation of detail that goes into the production of fieldnotes. Only the famous introduction gives us a glimpse ofthe rough cut.

Part of what gets taken away, of course, is the emotionalquality of social life: the imponderabilia. In Naven, GregoryBateson had attempted to schematize the patterning of Iatmulemotions. But although he gave us the concept of “ethos,” he

never tried to evoke it. His method, dogmatically structural,would not allow it. Real people and actual emotions wouldonly complicate things. And this has been the pattern eversince. For most of the history of anthropology, what oneobserved in the field was to be seen through, like a veil, to anunderlying reality—whether of form, function, structure,or text. You went to the field, sweated and suffered, andthought of higher things. “Being there” was really “beingsomewhere else.” Participant-observation, or at least thewriting up, entailed a curious renunciation of the life aroundyou, a kind of methodological asceticism.

Recent attempts to put people and their emotions backinto ethnography have not been entirely successful. The vi-gnettes and capsule dialogues that feature in most modernethnographies (including my own) as often as not fall a littleflat. Once again, it is the method rather than the skill of theauthor that constrains credibility. Wheeled on to illustrate anargument, counter someone else’s generalization, or, worstof all, add color, the people can seem two dimensional, “flat”rather than “round” (in E. M. Forster’s [1988:73] terminol-ogy), emphatically making the point for their author or justtoo odd for the unprepared reader.8 We neither know norcare who they are, so we cannot be moved by their stories.Having complained about too little reality, we now findourselves wanting less of it and skip straight to the analysis.Invidious to cite examples (let Beatty 1992 serve the pur-pose); but contrast, for their evocative power and precision,John Berger’s Pig Earth (1979), Amitav Ghosh’s In an AntiqueLand (1992), Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1989), andPaul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes’s novelistic In Sorcery’s Shadow(1987).

Now, the recourse to vignettes might be said to signalan enrichment of the genre, an advance on the streamlinedclassics. But in its own way, it is more misleading. Theillustrative, rather than analytical, style gives emotions aparadigmatic force and objectivity they do not possess. Amarket transaction or a wedding speech can be sampled tooffer insights into economy or gender. But emotions aremore elusive. Unlike prices and wedding etiquette, they arepersonal and biographical as well as shared; they are of themoment but reference the past; they are “in here” as wellas “out there.” Mostly they fall outside the ethnographicframe.

WHY EMOTIONS ELUDE ETHNOGRAPHYThe problem is that emotions have a particularity that isuncongenial to ethnography. In writing about the field, wechoose examples for their broader significance within sometheoretical perspective. The people in our case histories arein unwitting dialogue with the people in other ethnographies;they are never merely themselves. However individuated,they are types, figures in a larger story that is not theirown. Otherwise, why write about them? James Clifford(1986:104) has commented on this “insistent tug toward thegeneral,” and anyone writing today cannot but be aware ofthe problem.


With emotions we reach an irreducible core: the tug isresisted, the link snaps. Embedded as they are in biography,circumstantial but historical, emotions resist ethnographicformulation; their particularity defies abstraction. Not thatwe haven’t tried. Claude Levi-Strauss’s (1968) atom of kin-ship, with its positive and negative signs denoting contrast-ing attitudes among kin types, may be the ultimate in theemotional reductionism: call it Abstract Expressionism. ButLevi-Strauss built his atoms from equally schematic accountsof hostile brothers and indulgent uncles in the classic ethno-graphies. These stereotypes have long passed into anthropo-logical folklore, but accounts of generic relationships remaina staple of ethnography, linking, for example, contemporaryperson-centered studies with the older, less avowedly hu-manistic approaches of functionalism and structuralism. Welearn to recognize such behavioral patterns in the field, butthey provide only a rough orientation, and they are notenough. Even supposing relations between a father and sonin a certain society are typically cool, the reaction of one tothe death of the other will be unpredictable, nonstandard inwhatever makes that particular relation humanly interesting.The warmth concealed in the reserve, the gestures of rec-ompense, the relief that accompanies sorrow: these tell thefuller story. And it is this diversity of human types, circum-stances, and histories that gives emotions their distinctivehue, their interpretative precision, their social and subjec-tive significance. Jean Briggs, long ago, showed the way inher portrait of an Eskimo family (1970). Of her complexrelation to her adoptive father, she writes:

But though I was convinced that the behaviour that, in Inuttiaq,I defined as “manipulative” and “autocratic” was both real andEskimo in its general shape, I am still unsure whether in someelusive manner Inuttiaq infused the Eskimo patterns with his ownassertive spirit, whether in some subtle ways he went too far inhis dominance or exerted on me more pressure than others did tobe submissive. [1970:67]

And in a long chapter devoted to Inuttiaq, as well as incountless telling details, she provides us with enough tomake a judgment for ourselves.

A theatrical analogy. To respond to a Hamlet solilo-quy, you need a knowledge of English—a familiarity withthe conventions of Elizabethan theater, with the worldof castles and courts and so on. But the meaning of thespeech lies not in its exemplary nature, as an illustration ofcourtly intrigue, stagecraft, or the Oedipus complex, butin the revelation of character in action, the motivations,and ruminations of Hamlet at that moment in the plot. Allthe rest is background. In considering emotion, we havegot background and foreground reversed—trained, as weare, to read significance in general forms, in the paradig-matic instead of in particulars. But the remedy, the an-tidote to theoretical abstraction or functionalist thinness,cannot be ever-thicker description, which merely takesus deeper into hidden social factors, cultural frames, andsymbolism—the “cultural depth” that Rosaldo questions—but tells us nothing about the specific content of emotion.

Nor can the antidote be Rosaldo’s brute emotivism, the ap-peal to one’s own sentimental education. Both approachesrest on a failure to grasp the personal-historical complex-ity of emotions, their grounding in interwoven stories andcharacters.

Briggs is highly unusual in bringing off the difficult featof marrying a clear-eyed analytical perspective on emotionwith the contextual and narrative detail usually found only inrealist fiction. And anyone who returns to her ethnographycannot but marvel at the careful plotting of motivations andmoods; the minute attention to shades of implication; thescrupulous distinguishing of observed, attributed, named,and hypothetical emotions; and the narrative linking of emo-tional episodes (how one incident recalls and builds on oth-ers) and of these with character and cultural expectation.But Briggs’s frigid field—“twenty-one people in an expanseof thirty-five thousand or more square miles, their near-est neighbours several days’ travel distant” (1970:16)—isequally exceptional. It resembles less the crowded, porousfield sites of most ethnographies than the spot-lit scenery ofthe imagination, its eight households, and fluctuating pop-ulation of “twenty to thirty-five” approximating the cast ofthe average novel.

A parallel case—as wonderfully achieved, as different assand from snow—is Lila Abu-Lughod’s Bedouin ethnogra-phy (1986, 1993). Once again, a shortlist of names affords adepth of characterization and cumulative incident that makesreported emotions both credible and communicable to thereader. In her first book, Veiled Sentiments (1986), Abu-Lughod hit on a means of connecting shared cultural formswith individual histories and the ordinarily inaccessible realmof feeling by focusing on the use of oral poetry in everydaydiscourse. “Ghinnawa,” she writes, “can be considered thepoetry of personal life: individuals recite such poetry in spe-cific social contexts, for the most part private, articulating init sentiments about their personal situations and closest re-lationships” (Abu-Lughod 1986:31). And in Writing Women’sWorlds (1993), Abu-Lughod uses a sequence of stories thatsubvert generalization (“writing against culture” [1993:25])to achieve an emotional conviction and realism not normallyavailable to ethnography.

What Briggs, Abu-Lughod, and Stoller (1989) show isthat a narrative approach allows us to grasp the humane sig-nificances that define the experience of emotion. An aware-ness of emotion in narrative context brings to light the con-tradictions and conflicts that people experience in their sociallife, their not fitting, their resistance or unwilling capitula-tion to social pressures, their abrasions with reality, theirstruggles for meaning. For the same reason, narrative worksagainst a relativism that would encompass emotion withinculture—depersonalizing it—as if nothing escapes the cul-tural embrace (Abu-Lughod 1993). A narrative approachleaves opaque what resists social analysis; it acknowledgesthe irreducible; it does not force an answer.

If this sounds like the remedy we are seeking, let me beclear: in these very respects (and as the exceptions show),


narrative departs from and is opposed to most styles ofethnography as commonly practiced.

THE NARRATOR AND THE ETHNOGRAPHER: TWOOF A KIND?These reflections are prompted by the experience of writing,for a general readership, a fieldwork account several yearsafter publishing an ethnography covering the same peopleand events (Beatty 1992, n.d.). One book, written with atheoretical aim, was based on field notes; the other, writtento tell a story and to relive the personal encounter, is basedon diaries and tapes. One offers an explanation; the otheran evocation. Although they correspond in externals, theycould have been written by different people—as, in a sense,they were. I don’t disavow my hard-won ethnography norcould I have attempted the second book without it. But Iwonder about the balance sheet: whether a loss of theoreticalimpulse and ethnographic focus isn’t at the same time a gainin realism—a gain, to be more specific, in emotional realism.

The writer of a narrative, whether fictional or not,confronts certain technical, strictly literary, problems: howmuch space to give the narrator and her changing understand-ing; how to reveal character through plot; how to renderthe emotional feel of a situation. The author abroad has,additionally, to worry about the greater burden of explana-tion required, the need to keep a proper sense of aliennesswithout alienating the reader, and the desire to present theculture through the people and the action (a variation on thecharacter-and-plot equation). Taken together, these techni-cal problems are key to the credible construction of emotionsin narrative.

For the ethnographer, in contrast, questions of charac-ter, pace, and emotional tone are secondary or irrelevant.At any rate, in writing about the Indonesian island of Niasthe first time around I was not conscious of these issues;I was only aware that in pursuing general problems I hadfailed to convey what mattered to people as individuals. Theethnography had gotten in the way.

This is not a repetition of the old complaint that ethno-graphies don’t tell the story of the field: many now do. It’s amore radical criticism that ethnographic writing, by design,gets emotion wrong. The methods—analytical, linguistic,experimental, or illustrative—systematically filter out whatfor actors is of principal significance: namely, history, char-acter, implication, strategy, and plot. Let me make the pointwith an example from a later fieldwork in a different partof Indonesia. (Since I have come out against capsule exam-ples, I am in the unusual position of hoping mine will fail toconvince.)

In 1997, in a rice-growing village in East Java, about 200people—a mix of nominal Muslims, orthodox pious, andsyncretists devoted to a Hinduized mysticism—had gatheredin the mosque to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday. Behind therows of kneeling faithful, at the back among the VIPs, I sat ona sofa next to the headman. Gentle exhortations to piety andsermons sounding the tolerant Javanese note had given way

to bumbling announcements of village news when a preachertook the stage. He was a soldier, and he had a new, forthrightmessage, promising hell to backsliders and compromisers.He denounced local leaders for their laxity, youths for apingWesterners, and even schoolgirls for wearing trousers. Theharangue provoked unwonted cheers from the pious, frownsamong the rest: here was a division unseen since the political-religious massacres of the 1960s. At the back, the headman,dark with emotion (fury, shame, frustration?), was scribblingnotes. Should he confront his opponent (and be devoured,as I thought, pleading against intervention) or submit quietlyin the Javanese way and fix things later behind the scenes?When the preacher ordered us to stand and the congregationrose, the VIPs remained deep in their sofas; but at a signalfrom a new haji (Mekka pilgrim), an agitator for reform,they too stood. The headman, protesting and the last tomove, got weakly to his feet, muttering that he was dizzy.And then, in the aftermath, he collapsed, subsiding into along, unexplained illness that lasted through two attemptsto oust him as leader and saw the unraveling of the culturalcompromise that he personified.

To explain—even to identify—the headman’s puzzlingemotions is, necessarily, to tell the story. But behind thescenario sketched above lies the much longer story of hisbattle with those who would sweep away mysticism, spiritcults, and the easy relations between the sexes; the contestwith his cousin (the haji) who had brought political Islam tothe village; and his own checkered career as an easygoing andnot terribly effective leader. A summary gives an impression;a case-study analysis (exemplifying rival cultural paradigms,syncretism vs. puritanism, changing styles of leadership, orJavanese ethnopsychology) would give us the stage furniture;but it would take a proper narrative to do the story and theemotions justice (for an attempt, see Beatty 2009).

A similar conclusion was forced on me as I began anarrative account of my earlier fieldwork in Nias and setabout trying to restore what, in the published ethnography(Beatty 1992), I had systematically excluded: the emotionallife that connected the characters with one another and mewith them. As I began After the Ancestors (Beatty n.d.), I hadno remedy in mind, but what I fastened on was a senseof predicament: the predicaments of individual characters.In a place of stark poverty and profligate feasting, paupers,and overreachers, what concerned people most was not thetechnicalities of kinship or swidden cultivation—these aremostly settled matters—but the great questions of life anddeath, injustice and suffering, morality and salvation in aworld no longer tribal but not yet modern, a world “afterthe ancestors.”

These moral questions crystallized in particular dramas:the loss of an heir, a murder, rivalry for leadership, an op-portunity to swindle, a rejected marriage proposal, a funeralhijacked by missionaries. Unlike structure, habitus, mem-ory, agency, or the native point of view, these predicamentsare observable, dramatic, evolving, and highly revealing.And they are the stuff of emotion. When the new account


began to take shape, it was precisely the emotional qual-ity of the predicaments that came through. In animatingthe characters and reviewing the events, it was my ownhalf-forgotten feelings of anger, guilt, and amusement thatguided me in how to construct certain scenes and that illu-minated their personal meaning. Yet the story belongs to thepeople: the author’s feelings are largely irrelevant. You sitnervously through your host’s family quarrel, but unless youare involved, your own feelings are immaterial. You waitfor the dying chief to expire, but your feelings are not thoseof his kinsmen; nor do you need to feel sad in the same wayto recognize their sadness. Although your feelings providesome small insight, they are not the story. Only when field-work itself is the focus do the narrator’s emotions becomeof pressing relevance.

But there is another reason for sounding this skepticalnote, and it has less to do with how we report than howwe feel. In the field, one of the last things we come tounderstand is other people’s emotions, and it takes a gooddeal of experience to begin to relate to our hosts in anemotionally sophisticated way. This is not just because ittakes time to learn the idiom of emotion but also becauseour knowledge of characters and interwoven histories isvery slowly constructed. More than this, we ourselves haveundergone a transformation.

Fieldwork is less like two years of a life than a life intwo years. And if, as the cliche goes, the early stages reprisechildhood, then we also grow up in the field: we becomecompetent adults, and our feelings about doing fieldwork—about being there—mature. By the end, we hardly creditwhat once bothered us; we see things in the round; we havecome through. To write about the past, to recreate the trialsof fieldwork, is therefore not to reexperience those field-work emotions, except in a trivial sense. Our feelings aboutwhat happened are informed by everything that happenedlater in the field, by everything we now know, and by thedifferent person that we have become. The evocation of feel-ings is an exercise in imaginative recovery: a fiction but onebased in fact. Depending on how diligently and candidly wekept our diaries, the facts may be in some sense recoverable.Depending on our imagination and memory, we may be ableto project ourselves back into that frame. But the narrator,the “I,” is the instrument of fiction, neither me-now norme-then but a creation of the text, a bridge to the reader,not a real person. He is there to lend credibility, to showwhere the story came from, to show the limits of what couldbe observed.

To say this much is to suggest that, however we chooseto write about the field, our remembered feelings don’tmatter for the written account in the way they mattered atthe time. They had practical consequences for the alliancesand enmities we made and for their part in forming us asfieldworkers: they were undoubtedly formative. But theywere often irrelevant to what we wanted to know. And theyare colored by our later, more mature judgments. Indeed,

we can’t write truthfully about the field until we can leavethose feelings behind.

CONCLUSIONEthnographers have trouble with emotions: with recognizingthem in strange places ( judging what they are, where theybegin and end) but especially with how to write about them.There is no priority in this difficulty: the writing problemcontributes to the recognition problem. As my exampleshave shown, when anthropologists have explicitly focusedon emotion, they have tended to avoid detailed descriptionand particularly time depth: the interwoven past relationsthat give feelings their precise circumstantial fit. (Vagueanxieties reflect a vague apprehension of past relations.)Ethnography (in all the schools considered) moves swiftlyoutward to general factors, robbing emotions of the personalsignificance that is—as most authors would agree—theiressence.

The simplest remedy for this failing, recourse to theethnographer’s own experience, remains deeply problem-atic. More technical approaches through discourse, proto-types, case histories, and potted biographies can only be apreparation, serving to return us to the greater complex-ity of the natural setting. As the few exceptions indicate,only a narrative approach—because it locates emotion inpractice; in the indivisible flow of action, character, andhistory—can reveal the dimensions of emotion hidden byother methods. There is nothing very new in this claim.Novelists have known it for centuries. But as ethnographerswe have still—most of us—to learn the lesson.

Andrew Beatty Department of Anthropology, School of Social

Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, U.K.;

[email protected]

NOTESAcknowledgments. My thanks to Mercedes Garcia de Oteyzafor her suggestions. I am indebted to four AA reviewers for theirpainstaking comments and to AA editor-in-chief Tom Boellstorff forhis detailed criticisms. Their suggestions have helped greatly in theshaping of this article.

1. Goodwin and Goodwin (2001) argue for an understanding ofemotions within the tight frames of “situated interaction,” buttheir examples—a hopscotch game and dialogue in the familyof a man who can say only four words—are exceptionallyconstrained. Their article draws on a conception of emotionas an internal process that is “made visible” (2001:253) ininteraction. For a criticism of this idea, see Beatty 2005.

2. Renato Rosaldo’s (1989) work best illustrates this pendulumswing; see also Wikan 1992.

3. For key scholarly statements, see Roberts 2001. Thinking onthese issues goes back a long way. Morson reminds us that“in War and Peace Tolstoy constantly contrasts the neatness


of narrative accounts with the messiness of lived events”(2002:213).

4. The one-to-one clinical encounter and the ethnographic-psychoanalytic interview are remote from the emplotment ofemotion in action. As such, they systematically misrepresentnaturally occurring emotion. Because they sample one storyto tell another, always finding significance elsewhere, they arepoor models for a narrative approach. By “historical emplot-ment of emotions,” I mean the way in which emotions referback to interwoven personal histories. I do not mean broaderchanges in structures of feeling or emotional discourses, whichrequire a very different kind of historical treatment.

5. Goldie (2000:33) distinguishes two senses of “knowing whatsomeone is feeling”: (1) recognizing the “paradigmatic narra-tive structure” of an emotion—its typical action context andexpression (this is close to Carrithers’s [1992] argument); and(2) knowing what it is like to have that feeling. Rosaldo conflatesthe two.

6. Rosaldo’s interest in narrative is directed less to particularstories and sequences than to “other people’s narrative analyses”(1989:147) and alternative modes of story construction—forexample, in Ilongot hunting stories.

7. “Transference” is, again, a problem having to do with the prac-tice of fieldwork, part of our baggage; the insights it provides,doubly unreliable. It does not help us understand the jealoussister at the wedding, even if it gives us that illusion. Some phe-nomenologically and psychoanalytically inclined work (e.g.,Devereux 1967; Jackson 1998) analyzes this predicament butdoes not offer an escape from my general criticism.

8. “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of sur-prising in a convincing way. . . . It has the incalculability of lifeabout it—life within the pages of a book” (Forster 1988:81).

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FOR FURTHER READING(These selections were made by the American Anthropologist editorialinterns as examples of research related in some way to this article. They donot necessarily reflect the views of the author.)

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