Jean Briggs:What do we get out of it?
·Complexities
of doing fieldwork
·Difficulties
of living with people who are very different from us
·How
host communities view anthropologists—how we are viewed by the people we
study
·Related
to that, we learn that the learning process goes in two directions: It
is an encounter with both sides studying each other in the terms each side
understands
·We
learn something through failure—in this case we learn about the meanings
of Utku emotions through Briggs’ failure to learn them at first.
·We learn about what it means to be an Utku person and how Utku shape children into persons—through Briggs’ own process of conversion—or failed conversion—into an Utku person.
·We
hopefully get an overall, in-depth feel of what it means to be Utku
Emotion Cross-Culturally
Context is crucial, as in many aspects of anthropology
·Language is a key component of context
·Word and concept are not the same thing
·A word is a pointing tool:It may point to a rather complicated group of examples and ideas which together form the concept
·Emotions need to be viewed in context, in a number of situations, and with as many examples for a particular emotion term as possible to begin to understand the concept.
Container/Screen Example for Viewing Emotion
Picture one chaotic ooze of emotion potential which we can call ‘basic affect’.
·Picture culture as a screen through which the ooze is poured.
·Picture the holes of the screen as the language or languages through which a culture operates.Each culture has screens with different numbers and shapes of holes through which basic affect squeezes.
·The number of holes tells us about how precision with which emotions are channeled into culturally meaningful concepts.
·The shape of the holes tells us about the concept itself.
In a sense then, our emotions are guided and shaped by our cultures and languages.