Keywords

1 Introduction

If emotions are so often viewed as universal, it is to a large but definite extent because psychology has produced a considerable amount of studies in which emotions are equated with physical bodily processes (for example, Damasio 2000). These include facial expressions (see Ekman et al. 1969) or brain scans or measurement of heart pulses, etc. In other words, methods of measurement seem to induce the theoretical conclusions with regard to the nature of emotions. Yet, in a recent meta-analysis of studies of cross cultural emotions published between 1967 and 2000 (Van Hemert et al. 2007), the researchers found that method related factors, such as sample characteristics, method characteristics, statistical artifacts or translation methods, explained only 13.8 % of the cross-cultural variance in emotion variables, while substantive country-level variables such as mode of subsistence, political variables, stability of a country, and aggregated psychological variables such as individualism, religious values, etc. explained 27.9 % of this variance. We may thus say that 58.3 % of the observed cross-cultural variance of emotions remains unexplained (Van Hemert et al. 2007, p. 935).

These and others related findings lead the authors to conclude that Cultural diversity of emotions is not yet well understood in cross-cultural psychology (Van Hemert et al. 2007, p. 938). Another way to say the same thing is to declare with Greg M. Smith (1999) that “since none of the emotive subsystems except the limbic has been shown to be necessary for emotion- yet all of them contribute to emotion in some way- a simple model of an emotion system is not possible. The emotion system requires a model that allows multiple causes […]” (Smith 1999, p. 108). Such empirical evidence suggests that one need not be an unrepentant cultural sociologist to admit that culture plays a significant, albeit yet undefined, role in the experience and expression of emotions.

Culture provides the framework for the labeling, classification, categorization and interpretation of emotions, and social norms regulate and form their expression and even their experience. In this chapter, we focus on culture as both the causal framework and the terrain for the life of emotions, while trying to put aside or overcome commonly held epistemological dichotomies such as materialism vs. idealism, nature vs. culture, individual vs. society, positivism vs. constructivism, universalism vs. relativism, romanticism vs. rationalism (Lutz and White 1986). If “emotions” per se, as an ideal type, are not available for empirical observation (James 1894; Reddy 1999), we can however observe the social expressions or performances of emotions as they derive from models of the self. Culture is understood as the assemblage of norms, institutions, practices, rituals, symbols, interpretive repertoires, action scenarios, narratives, discourses, and meanings which shape and guide thought and action. Culture then is both the systematic interpretation of social action and the bestowal of meaning to events, persons and processes. This is a rather wide definition of what “culture” is, involving pragmatic, semiotic/interpretive, and structural dimensions.

A caveat is in place: In claiming the importance or primacy of culture, sociology does not deny the existence of psychological life. But it views psychological processes as shot through with cultural models (recurrent images and meanings stating what the world is and how it should be) and ‘social forces’ (defined here as the aggregate effects of many interactions structured by similar patterns—such as class, discrimination, gender differences, patriotism). Emotions are at the interface of the individual’s experience, collective meanings and social constraints (through such social emotions as shame, depression, or anger). To say this differently: emotions are shaped by cultural models of the self, moral codes and forms of sociality. The cultural approach to emotions is thus premised on the view that selves are always both psychological and cultural entities.

Models of selfhood contain prescriptions about what in a person is most important to uphold (e.g., one’s honor; or one’s self-control and rationality; one’s autonomy); they contain implicit models and lines of force motivating a person to act, making some norms or moral views more legitimate than others (e.g., one’s self-interest; one’s desire to self-sacrifice; or one’s uncontrolled emotions); they contain models of action (e.g., fatalistic, determinist, voluntarist). A man taking revenge for an offense in an honor society acts on a different model of selfhood than a man attending a therapist to control his frequent bouts of anger or his fantasies of revenge. Models of the self are inextricably connected to public codes of selfhood, to the narratives and the norms through which members of a group feel and act as competent members of that group (Geertz 1974). To connect emotions to models of the self is thus to suggest that emotions are shot through and through by “outside culture,” that the boundaries of the inner and outer self are forever porous, and more crucially, that they are at once psychological and collective. If anger or love expresses one’s interiority, they do so only through shared and public definitions of personhood, and at the same time express and constitute a specific form of relating to others.

It follows from this claim that emotions, although learned through intricate language games or social practices (Burkit 1997), are not learned by what Wittgenstein (1953) called ostensive teaching—showing a one-to-one correspondence between words and emotions—nor are they constituted by one’s emotional “private language”. Rather, emotions are the result of a complex set of inferences, from the norms embedded practically in situations, from stories, from discourses about emotions, and from how personhood is culturally defined and socially performed. To learn Emotions is thus not only to know which name to give to one’s emotions but also to know to monitor feelings socially—to be context sensitive, to know how and how much to express an emotion, to decipher others’ emotions, to monitor their intensity (through self-control or through increasing their intensity). This means then that anger or love describe a range or repertoire of experiences, rather than a fixed set of features and properties under a name of emotions. In that sense the cultural approach to emotions is about clarifying a range of semantic meanings in given social contexts and interactions.

In what follows, we portrait the role of culture in the sociology of emotions through four categories: social norms and emotional control; emotional discourse and performance; ritual and the public production of emotions; and fictive and virtual emotions in technologies of mediated interaction.

2 Norms, Emotions and Self-Control

One of the most obvious places to take stock of the influence of culture on emotions is the norm of emotional control, the fact that emotions are experienced by most people as entities that must be controlled, that is, whose expression and intensity must be either regulated or repressed. This is why self-control is such a good point of entry to a sociology of emotions: it shows clearly that something “external” to the subject—injunctions, norms, discourses—interacts with and shapes that subject’s emotional experience, whether in the form of actual emotional self-control or whether in the form of a feeling of inadequacy at having failed to self-control. We divide two broad lines of inquiry into the relationship between emotions and norms of emotional control. One line of inquiry views norms as a set of more or less fixed rules which bind the expression of emotions, while another line of work suggests that culture and social structure regulate emotional experience from within the feeling subject through the very framing and interpretation of emotions.

In a series of studies, Stearns and Stearns (1985) have focused on the development of self-control in a variety of emotional domains such as anger (Stearns and Stearns 1989), coolness (Stearns 1994), fear (Stearns and Haggerty 1991) and desire (Stearns 1999). They examine the relations between the normative and structural emotion standards, and the felt experience of these emotions, as well as the social consequences of such experiences. Drawing from anthropological works on culture and emotions, they claim that all societies have emotional standards “even if they are sometimes largely unspoken or undebated, and societies differ, often significantly, in these standards” (Stearns and Stearns 1985, p. 814). Emotional standards vary temporarily, spatially, and socially between societies, historical contexts and social classes or groups.

There is however always a gap or a tension between the institutional standards regarding meanings and norms of emotions, and the emotional behaviors and experiences of individuals. The social prohibition to express anger in the Eskimo culture, for example, does not mean they do not experience anger; rather, they experience and express it in other ways in informal social arenas, such as demonstrating extreme violence towards their dogs. It is the complex interplay between these two aspects which produces the dynamics of socio-historical change. The distinction between the normative and the experiential aspects of emotions and their historical account is conceptualized as the difference between emotionology, that is,

the attitudes or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression; ways that institutions reflect and encourage these attitudes in human conduct, e.g., courtship practices as expressing the valuation of affect in marriage, or personnel workshops as reflecting the valuation of anger in job relationships.

And emotions themselves, that is,

a complex set of interactions among subjective and objective factors, mediated through neural and/or hormonal systems, which gives rise to feelings (affective experiences as of pleasure or displeasure) and also general cognitive processes toward appraising the experience; emotions in this sense lead to physiological adjustments to the conditions that aroused response, and often to expressive and adaptive behavior. (Stearns and Stearns 1985, p. 813)

These concepts aim to establish an historical perspective on emotions which elaborate the study of the history of emotional standards, with the study of the history of emotional behavior and experience, and examine their interplay by looking at “peoples’ efforts to mediate between emotional standards and emotional experience” (Stearns and Stearns 1985, p. 825). This mediation can take different forms and have various social and cultural consequences.

Arlie Hochschild—one of the pioneers in the sociology of emotions— similarly started from the intuition that the relationship between society and individual emotions was best found in norms of self-control. Her path-breaking line of research focuses on the rules which shape emotions: “[E]motions are greatly influenced by norms since thinking, perceiving and imagining are intrinsically involved in their inducement. In addition, social factors guide the microactions of labeling, interpreting and managing emotions. These microactions, in turn, reflect back on that which is labeled, interpreted, and managed” (Hochschild 1979, p. 555).

In Hochschild’s view, culture or ideology is an interpretive framework which has two completing aspects: framing rules, which are used to ascribe definitions and meanings to a situation, and emotion rules, which are “guidelines for the assessment of fits and misfits between feeling and situation” (Hochschild 1979, p. 566). Emotion rules are generally implicit and informal guidelines to what emotions we are expected to feel and in what social context, or what emotions are to be expressed and when. They “delineate a zone within which one has permission to be free of worry, guilt, or shame with regard to the situated feeling.” Such spatial, institutional and cultural zoning outlines a range of specific emotional experience and expression to be performed. Like other interactional rules and rituals, they can be obeyed halfheartedly, or deliberately broken, or unconsciously avoided, but this will be at varying social costs and consequences.

In contrast to Stearns’ concept of emotionology, Hochschild’s concept of “feeling rules” attempts to account not only for the normative constraints over the expression of emotions, but for the actual experience of emotions as well, as they reflect patterns of social membership and are symbolically exchanged in social interactions. The gap between the normative and the experiential is mediated by what she calls emotion management, i.e., the work individuals do while “inducing or inhibiting feelings so as to render them ‘appropriate’ to a situation” and trying to change the degree or quality of an emotion or feeling. Moreover, changing feeling rules, when one decides to adhere to certain feeling rules and to break others, represents changing ideological stance towards social life.

All in all, they focus on the normative aspect of emotions, mostly informal and implicit but public and collective emotion norms, standards or rules, and set to investigate the “work” that is being done by individuals in order to adhere to emotion norms or to actually come to experience what they demand (Hochschild 1983), or the emotional consequences of certain emotional standards (Stearns and Stearns 1985). Focusing on the normative aspect of emotions separates the study of felt emotional experience from its regulation and examines in turn how this gap is handled. We may however wonder if the focus on this tension is not deeply influenced by western emotionology itself which has been concerned with the tension between authentic emotions and social constraints. That is, in focusing on outward rules and standards, emotionology refrains from challenging the construction of the emotion categories themselves by culture. A far more sophisticated approach to the conundrum of the relationship between cultural standards regulating emotion and social structure is to be found in the early work of Norbert Elias.

In his classic work The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias (1978) explores the development of non violent social interactions in the West from the twelfth century onward. The refinement of behavior and affective reactions was the result of a long socio-historical process in Western societies by which human beings were drawn into ever-denser relations of mutual interdependence.

This process, according to Elias, is a result of the increasingly differentiated and complex networks of social relations, the growth in scope and scale of social interdependencies between individuals, and the centralization of political power to the aristocratic court first, and later to the monopolization of power by the state. This new social figuration and the unique net of interdependencies it promoted increased social control and imposed restraints on aggressiveness and violence. To demonstrate what this transformation looked like, Elias suggests that the valiant knights who were used to practice their political power through violence and aggression, had to learn how to dance and charm in the kings court, as the centralization of political power increased. Moreover, they had to learn how to control their emotions, that is, to avoid their spontaneous expression on one hand and to learn how to read the emotional states of others in order to maneuver their behavior as a central tool of power in the new political order, on the other hand.

Elias explores a variety of etiquette manuals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and describes a process by which standards applied to violence, sexual behavior, emotional expression, bodily functions, eating habits, table manners and forms of speech became gradually self-policed and increased what we may call the threshold of shame, embarrassment, and repugnance. That is, a growing variety of forms of behavior and feeling have been put “behind the scenes” of the social, turning them into shameful, disgusting, or deviant.

The main and most interesting claim Elias makes is that ‘the molding of instinctual life, including its compulsive features, is a function of social interdependencies that persist throughout life’, and these interdependencies change as the structure of society changes. ‘To the variation in this structure correspond,’ wrote Elias, ‘the differences in personality structure that can be observed in history.’ (Elias 1978, cited in Krieken 1998, p. 91). It is not norms per se which shape and constraint behavior but rather the increase in length and density of social interactions which create new norms and reshape emotional conduct. Elias argues that what we experience as ‘civilization’ is founded on a particular habitus, a particular behavioral, affective and psychic structure which has developed over time, and which can only be understood in connection with changes in the forms of sociability (Elias 1978).

Exploring the process he called the Civilizing process, Elias did not intentionally act as a sociologist of emotions, but his insights and theoretical framework have been elaborated by social theorist and researchers of the history of emotions (Stearns and Lewis 1998; Reddy 2001; Wouters 2007). The most interesting line of inquiry is the one that has focused on emotional habitus (Burkit 1997, p. 43; Calhoun 2001; Illouz 2007, 2008; Kane 2001). In this view, emotions are part of the individual’s inscription into social relationships, they are related to cognitions and involve a sense of “how to act, how to play the game, that is never altogether conscious or purely reducible to rules—even when it seems strategic” (Calhoun 2001, p. 53).

Emotions then are learned and embodied since early childhood through social practices and interactions, while “culture provides for people an emotional habitus, with a language and set of practices which outline ways of speaking about emotions and of acting out and upon bodily feelings within everyday life” (Burkit 1997, p. 43). Emotional habitus reflects identity, structures of social differentiation and hierarchy: “Emotional habitus lies thus at the intersection of three domains of social experience: the interactional, the bodily, and the linguistic. It reflects and signals one’s social class position at these three junctures. Emotional habitus shapes the ways in which one’s emotions are bodily and verbally expressed and used in turn to negotiate social interactions” (Illouz 2008, p. 214).

Elias’s object of study is the system of emotional economy and its relation to social and political structures. It differs from that Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in that it is not based strictly on common social position, but on macro-structures, or social figurations in Elias’ words, defined as the social density, differentiation of social functions, degrees and extension of social interdependencies, distribution of power and its form of exercise. Although the civilized habitus uses as a status marker, this form of habitus, Elias claims, trickled “down” to encompass an ever growing variety of classes and social groups: first the bourgeoisie which adopted/imitated some aristocratic manners and lifestyle, and later other classes as well.

Elias’ work has been elaborated and contested by critics for various reasons and claims, but his general claim regarding the interconnection between individual emotional life, socio-political structures and culture, still persist as a common ground for discussion in the socio-political history of self and emotions. One prominent theoretical strand, which we have just discussed, is the normative theories of emotions. Normative approaches to the sociology of emotions emphasize the importance of culture in providing emotion ideologies, emotional standards (Stearns and Stearns 1985), vocabularies of emotions, framing rules and feeling rules (Hochschild 1979). These elements of culture operate as behavioral guidelines to how emotions should be expressed in a situation and how or what one has to feel and when, as well as to what practices and repertoires are to be used in adjusting emotional responses to specific situations.

Although these approaches differ in their account of the historical dimension of emotion norms, they tend to focus on the relation between emotion norms and individual emotional experience. However, there could be two major objections to normative theories of emotions. First, they do not account for the ways in which emotional norms themselves are produced and the interplay between cultural reproduction and changes in social structure through emotion categories and norms. Second, they tend to overlook emotional states that do not result from specific emotion norms, or the unintended emotional consequences of socio-cultural structures. A sociology of culture and emotions should not only account for the close correspondence of emotions with their regulation, but also for the ways in which they express a loosening or transformation of the connection of social structure, culture and emotion. These two questions will be discussed in the following sections, respectively.

2.1 Socio-Historical Conditions, Agents and Institutions in the Construction of Emotion Ideologies and Emotion Norms

Elias’ legacy in the sociology of emotions reframes the key research question in studying emotions historically: Under what historical and structural conditions will some strategic lines of action, and thus some emotional ideology, become dominant? (Thoits 1989, pp. 335–336). Ann Swidler (2001), for example, demonstrates this in relation to love ideologies among the American middle class, while employing a pragmatic conception of culture in which agents have various cultural repertoires which they use as “tools” of meaning making under specific social structures.

One way to approach these questions is to examine the ways in which social structure and culture are intertwined in the production of new forms of organization and control, sociability and emotion management. Eva Illouz (2007, 2008), for example, draws on the work of Norbert Elias in explaining the emergence of norms of emotional control in the capitalist workplace, viewing it as a result of the intensification and variation of social interactions and networks which demand cooperation and reduce conflict—and as a cultural change in the framing and evaluation of emotional responses—the psychologization and democratization of the workplace—which resulted in new forms of control.

Illouz emphasizes the role of social groups responsible for the formulation of this change: an increasingly expanding group of psychologists, who acted simultaneously as a body of professionals and as producers of culture, who codified emotions in the new context of economic rationality by incorporating models of efficiency, productivity, cost and benefit into emotional repertoires, offering new narrative scripts of conflict. In contemporary post industrial societies, psychologists are the central actors who produce classification systems, cultural repertoires and practices for emotion interpretation and management (or emotional control) not only in the corporation, where they deal with anger, stress, communication, cooperation and teamwork, but in romantic life, where they codify sexuality, intimacy and romantic love, and in the family and child rearing arenas.

Illouz argues that in becoming the object of professional expertise, psychologists carved a realm of action in which mental and emotional health are the primary commodity produced and circulated. Thus, creating in turn an “emotional field”: “a domain of action with its own language, rules, objects, and boundaries” (Illouz 2008, p. 171). This emotional field comes to define emotional life as an object of management, control and regulation through specific techniques, under the incessantly expanding ideal of health channeled by the state, professionals and the market. In this process, the expansion of the category of mental illness and the loosening of its definition is the result of expert scientific logic which attempts to rationalize a growing variety of behaviors and emotional states while charting and defining disorders. It is also the result of the market logic of pharmaceutical industries which utilizes psychological classification schemes and repertoires to expand their consumer audiences, reach more and more specific market segments and produce new commodities for them. That is to say that the construction of emotion norms and pathologies and the production of emotional self-transformation techniques in post industrial societies is a social process which is carried out by various actors and organizations.

Psychologists give rise to “emotional capitalism” and the “therapeutic emotional style” (Illouz 2008). Psychological institutions and professionals construct healthy versus pathological emotions; positive versus negative emotions; provide the emotion norms and cultural repertoires to label, frame, chart and act upon specific emotions; and finally, they provide techniques of emotional self monitoring and emotion management in various social spheres. While the concept of emotional capitalism refers to the interweaving of market-based rational repertoires into the realm of emotions and the introduction of emotions into the economic sphere of action, the concept of emotional style refers to “the combination of the ways a culture becomes “preoccupied” with certain emotions and devises specific “techniques”—linguistic, scientific, ritual—to apprehend them” (Illouz 2008, p. 14). Culture is the flip side of structural transformation of the figuration of society in the emergence of new emotional styles, concepts of selfhood and forms of sociability.

The notion of emotional style thus does not only focus on the presence of normative injunctions in emotional experiences, but describes a more diffuse quality: it rises when a new “interpersonal imagination” is required in order to provide cultural framework and action scenarios for actors to interpret their social environment and personal experiences, and act in the context of changing institutions and social structures where new forms of sociability are formulated. The therapeutic emotional style is disseminated into the social fabric of various institutions by the professional practice of psychologists, their role in the corporation and public health institutions, and the wide range of popular culture media—self help books, talk shows and movies—which popularize psychological narratives, repertoires and techniques to interpret and act upon emotions. As we have seen, the formulation of emotions in normative approaches is done either trough reference to norms or to habitus, which are both reflections of social structure but in different ways and meanings. In this view, social structure and institutional changes are the causes of emotions and their cultural framing.

2.2 Structure of Feeling and Cultural Reproduction

Far less focused on the historical agents bringing about a change in norms, Raymond Williams’ concept of “Structure of Feeling” attempts to encompass the experiences induced by the totality of a specific form of life, its resulting contradictions and its actual and possible socio-cultural consequences. What Williams calls Structure of feeling is not the aspect of ideology which deals with emotions, which Hochschild calls “feeling rules” or what Stearns call “emotionology”. Rather, it has to do with the experience produced by the general organization of society and culture, the mode of production and cultural ideals. Hence, it includes the unintended emotional consequences of ideology and social practice, and the possible affect they might have not only on experience but on cultural reproduction as well. Emotions, in this view, do not only result from or exist in relation to “feeling rules” or “emotional standards”, but result from general social structures and cultural frames, similar to Elias’ original claim. But as it is understood in the context of power relations, it enables to form new ways of resistance to hegemony or emergence and acceptance of new ideologies. The term aims to stress the socio-historical particularity of experience, and its dialectic relations to social structure and cultural reproduction—on the one hand, emotions are a result of the whole of social order and symbolic structure, but on the other hand, as they are a reflexive account for these circumstances themselves, emotions encapsulate a possibility for social and cultural changes. Williams highlights the practical aspect of emotional experience:

Practical consciousness (which) is almost always different from official consciousness… For (it) is what is actually being lived, and not only what it is thought is being lived… a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase […]. (Williams 1977, pp. 132–133 cited in Filmer 2003, p. 208)

Hence, a structure of feeling encompasses the emotional consequences of general beliefs and institutions, so we can speak of the anger and frustration resulting from confronting a bureaucracy, the anxiety resulting from the protestant idea of predestination, or self-irony resulting from internet dating sites and the structure of the romantic encounters they produce. These affects can have different social results. Williams, however, looks at a specific form by which the dynamic structure of feeling is being represented in art and literary works by poets and painters, while he doesn’t account for the wider range of agents and institutions engaged with naming, framing and interpreting emotions on one hand, and providing emotion norms and techniques of emotion management on the other. “Structure of feeling” is particularly useful to capture those emotional social experiences that are not well organized under a single label or ideological frame such as Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” or social climates of unrest and anxiety. In the next section, we will turn to examine approaches which focus on the discursive and performative causes of emotions.

3 Discourse, Performance and Emotions

The term discourse has become popular in philosophy, linguistics and the human sciences in general, especially since the 70’s, after what has been dubbed the “linguistic turn”. Basically, it refers to the system of spoken and textual objects and events in their spatial, temporal, social and political contexts. More specifically, it refers to the symbolic order in which speaking, writing and reading take place, and the social roles, institutions and practices through which they are carried out. However, the concept gains different meanings depending on the theoretical background on which it is presented, ranging from structuralist (Levi-Strauss 2008 [1963]), constructivist, performative or post-structuralist (Foucault 1971) approaches.

A wide body of literature conceptualizes the relation between culture and emotions through the concepts of discourse and performance. These approaches highlight the cultural specific elements, the interrelations between language and emotions on the one hand and the performativity of emotions on the other hand, and of course the close relation between culture, social organization and emotions. In what follows, we review the various theoretical strands that focus on the relations between language, culture and emotions grouped around four categories: language as a shaper of reality; discourse and the definition of personhood; intra-cultural discourses and social context; and performativity of emotions.

3.1 Language as a Shaper of Reality

The term discourse is used in different ways, ranging from the linguistic, textual and semiotic aspects of social objects and interactions, to the whole of what is generally termed culture, i.e., the totality of actions, practices, institutions, beliefs, values, symbols and relations within a definite group (Gee 2001, p. 17). In this section we review theoretical approaches that examine the relation between language or discourse in its narrow sense, to emotions.

Emotions are occurrences in which the labeling of an event, and the categorization of inner experience play a crucial role in shaping which emotion is experienced and how. The fact that the emotional experience is shaped by language can be seen both in the level of the individual’s emotional claim and in emotional claims that different cultures use. Cross cultural studies of emotions revealed the differences between languages in the ways in which they perceive emotions.

The connection between language and emotion is presented in the work of James Russell (1991) who examines the labeling of emotions in different cultures and languages, and argues that cultural similarity and difference in the realm of emotions should be examined in several dimensions: the availability of a signifier for “emotion” in a specific language; the number of words for and folk theories of emotion; the boundaries of the category of emotions; and the concepts and categories of emotions. Russell brings various ethnographic accounts which show the lack of a word for “emotion” in some cultures, and others which have a relatively close term. In addition, the specificity of emotion words and their number differs significantly from one culture to another: The largest gap lies between over 2000 words that have been found for categories of emotions in the English language (Wallace and Carson 1973) to 7 words that could be translated as categories of emotions in Chewong (Howell 1981). Moreover, in the same way that some English emotions words, including emotions considered basic and therefore universal, have no equivalence in other languages, these other languages have words for emotions without equivalent in English. Emotion words, their referents and meanings represent different symbolic classification systems by which emotion categories are distinguished (Russell 1991, p. 431).

In the same vein, Russell takes language and the cultural categorization and classification it embodies as central to emotions and their meaning, but he does not accept the objectification of emotions by language. Emotion words do not refer to clearly distinguishable mental objects, rather they are action and interpretive scripts (Russell 1991, pp. 442–443). Russell argues that the meaning of each emotion word and the concept it expresses is a script consisting of features which are not hidden essences but knowable sub-events which are ordered in a causal sequence, similar to the way actions are ordered in a playwright’s script. Based on Kahneman and Miller (1986), Russell further claims that some people may understand emotion in terms of more abstract scripts and other in more concrete ones. Moreover, even in the same culture different people might possess slightly different scripts for the same emotion (1991, p. 443).

3.2 Discourse, Emotions and the Shaping of Personhood

The relation between language, culture and personhood is the mouthpiece of structuralist and post structuralist theories of culture and the subject. The most prominent figure in this field is Michel Foucault. Foucault rejects the two dominant schools in structural linguistics and cultural analysis: the purely synchronic analysis of language, that views the meaning words as determined by the structure of language as an a-historical system, what the great structural linguist Ferdinand De-Saussure called “Langue” (2013[1903]); and the analysis of symbolic mythic forms in terms of binary deep cultural structures that makes meaning possible (Levi Strauss 2008 [1963]). While these classical structuralist approaches hold a view of discourse as an autonomous and arbitrary linguistic structure constitutive of reality by itself, Foucault (1971) elaborates the concept of discourse in a different direction. He offers a historical (in fact genealogical and archeological), research to uncover the actual social practices and concrete economic, technological, political, professional or administrative activities by which discourse is produced.

According to Foucault, linguistic interaction is embedded in and constitutive of social and political institutions and structures of power, which produce exclusion of certain behaviors and identities that do not fit the conventional rules and frames of the dominant discourse. Discourse then, is constitutive of knowledge systems, power relations and subjectivity. However, Foucault’s approach gives an almost metaphysical status to structural abstract power, although this feature had changed in the course of his work from stressing the production of subjectivity through macro discourse and knowledge systems, to micro technologies of the self.

Along with the focus on language and personhood, anthropologists became increasingly interested in the developing field of emotions, which they viewed as central elements of the constitution of personhood and sociability. Exploring the relations of language to emotions and exposing the cultural variability of emotional meanings, anthropologists argue that the focus of the study of emotions should be the politics of the social rather than the psychology of the individual (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990).

Clifford Geertz is one of the first anthropologists to offer directions of analysis to think about the category of the person as a public construct. In his analysis of the connection between culture, emotions and personhood in the societies he had studied, Geertz presents the disparity between these emotional habituses cultural models of the person and emotional technologies of the self, from those that had characterized the West:

The goal is to be alus in both separated realms of the self. In the inner realm this is to be achieved through religious discipline, much but not all of it mystical. In the outer realm, it is to be achieved through etiquette, the rules of which, in this instance, are not only extraordinarily elaborate but have something of the force of law. Through meditation the civilized man thins out his emotional life to a kind of constant hum; through etiquette, he both shields that life from external disruptions and regularizes his outer behavior in such a way that it appears to others as a predictable, undisturbing, elegant, and rather vacant set of choreographed motions and settled forms of speech.[…] [T]he result is a bifurcate conception of the self, half ungestured feeling and half unfelt gesture. An inner world of stilled emotion and an outer world of shaped behavior confront one another as sharply distinguished realms unto themselves, any particular person being but the momentary locus, so to speak, of that confrontation, a passing expression of their permanent existence, their permanent separation, and their permanent need to be kept in their own separate order. Only when you have seen, as I have, a young man whose wife—a woman he had raised from childhood and who had been the center of his life—has suddenly and inexplicably died, greeting everyone with a set smile and formal apologies for his wife’s absence and trying, by mystical techniques, to flat-ten out, as he himself put it, the hills and valleys of his emotion into an even, level plain (“That is what you have to do,” he said to me, “be smooth inside and out”) can you come, in the face of our own notions of the intrinsic honesty of deep feeling and the moral importance of personal sincerity, to take the possibility of such a conception of selfhood seriously and to appreciate, however inaccessible it is to you, its own sort of force. (Geertz 1974, pp. 33–34)

Emotions are the dimension of culture which represents most clearly the cultural specific model of selfhood and sociability, ethics and morals. The experience of an emotion includes the practices to frame, consult and shape emotions, the role and place of emotional expression (or lack of it), how these are legitimated and valued, the form and extent of individuality in a culture and in relation to a specific cosmology. It is this connection between self, the public performance of self, culture and emotions which Catherine Lutz and Michele Rosaldo pursued, thus creating an anthropology of emotions.

Lutz (1982) argues that the way in which people talk about emotion words and the ways in which they use them are related to broader ethno-theories about the nature of the self and the values of the specific society. In Western thought, internal feeling states are assumed to be the primary referents of emotion words. The function of these words is to label an internal state and to communicate this state to others. However, examination of the use of emotional world in several Oceanic societies reveals an alternative view of emotion. In these societies, emotion words are seen as statements about the relationship between a person and an event while physiological descriptions of emotion rarely occur (Lutz 1982, p. 113). Lutz examines the connection between emotion words and the social discourse in which they are expressed by looking at the cognitive organization of the domain of emotion words on the island of Ifaluk in relation to the Ifalukian ethos.

Lutz further asked members of the Ifaluk to sort 31 words related to the “inside” into groups. Based on this sorting, Lutz claims that “a person on Ifaluk does not look inward to “discover” the emotional state being experienced so much as he or she evaluates the existing situation” (Lutz 1982, p. 120). As she claims:

These broad evaluations of situations and the finer distinctions made within each cluster have important reference to (1) cultural values that are being either conformed to or violated, and (2) the reactions of other individuals to the behavior of the self within the situation. Individuals must appraise a situation as rewarding, punitive, dangerous, frustrating, or overly complex within the constraints and with the aid of cultural values, as well as in relation to significant others, in order to label themselves with a specific Ifalukian emotion word. (Lutz 1982, p. 120)

In other words, Lutz claims that the language of emotions is used to situate the self in a broader social context and to define and evaluate the situation, its meaning and the possible actions embedded in it.

Lutz concludes by showing the relations between the use of emotion words, language and the social factors which are used as reference points for evaluation in the construction of emotions. There is a difference, she claims, in the organization of the domain of emotion words between Samoan, the American English and the Ifalukian terms. While in the English case, the dimension of evaluation is focused on pleasant and unpleasant feeling states, on Ifaluk it is centered on the pleasant or unpleasant consequences of the situation. In Samoan emotions words, the focus of evaluation is the social good rather than on pleasant feeling or consequences.

A similar theoretical path has been carried out by Michelle Rosaldo, stressing the interrelations between culture, emotions, social order and notions of the self. Based on her work with the Ilongots, a horticultural and hunting population of Northern Luzon, Philippines. Rosaldo (1983) claims that emotions are culturally dependent, not only as a medium of their expression, but in essence, i.e. different cultural frameworks produce different emotions and different experiential content altogether. She draws on her ethnography to demonstrate this, while focusing on the headhunting activities of adult Ilongot men, and the meaning, existence and place of feelings of shame and guilt in them. Since the Ilongots’ feelings and actions are framed by different set of values and a concept of selfhood than those of the West, their emotions turn out to be different as well. According to Western views, guilt and shame are moral affects necessary to constrain the individual and define the borders of the self. Rosaldo argues that “the ‘selves’ that these, or other feelings, help defend—and so, the ways such feelings work—will differ with the culture and organization of particular societies.” (Rosaldo 1983, p. 136).

For Rosaldo then, Ilongot headhunters don’t feel guilt, since Ilongots rarely discuss actions with reference to normative codes or formal rules of right and wrong. Instead, their actions are guided by kinship and the fear of the consequence of acting otherwise. “Shame” which operate as stimulus and constraint for the Ilongots, is a concept that can help understand how subjective experiences are related to their social context. Rosaldo highlights the differences between the Ilongot’s and the western concept of shame:

Shame for Ilongots, as for ourselves, involves a set of feelings tied to threatening sociality and threatened boundaries of the self. And yet, for them, it is concerned much less with hiding or constraint than with addressing, or redressing, situations where the fact of hierarchy provides a challenge to ideals of “sameness” and autonomy. Our inner truths are things for shame to mask, whereas for Ilongots “shame” speaks more of reserve than of disguise. The thoughts they harbor deep inside their hearts are more like plans than impulses repressed. And hidden thoughts do not contrast with spoken words as things more vital, true, or rich in inner conflict. (Rosaldo 1983, p. 143)

Ilongot affect works within the framework of a set of images and a moral order that must be understood in order to grasp the Ilongot feeling. Although there are resemblances between emotions Ilongots acknowledge and the shame and guilt we Westerns know “shame for us is not a healthy stimulus; anger inhibited is not a thing forgotten, but at best a thing repressed; violence enacted tends to yield as much of guilt as of relief; and maturity involves submission to a set of moral affects that are focused more upon one’s self than on one’s interlocutor or social situation.” (Rosaldo 1983, p. 148)

However, the path-breaking and insightful works of Lutz and Rosaldo on emotions, culture and the self, present two central problems: they claim for a too-tight a fit between culture and emotional experience; and they overlook different cultural contexts and social arenas in a given society or group. A complementary line of research examines the interrelations between emotional and discursive repertoires which populate different social arenas in a given society. In this view, discourse is differentiated through cultural genres and social spheres, which have quit different emotional affects.

3.3 Discourses, Contexts and the Deployment of Sentiments

These anthropological works view the self as shaped through and through by language, thus suggesting that it acts as a grammar of emotions. Leila Abu-Lughod, in her classical fieldwork study with the Awlad ALI Bedouins of the Egyptian Western Desert between 1978 and 1980, offers a less structuralist and more context-based view of sentiments, more specifically, she claims there is incongruity between sentiments that are communicated in the poetic and mundane discourses (Abu Lughod 1985, 1986). When confronted with personal loss, poor treatment or neglect, individuals usually express hostility, bitterness and anger in their ordinary statements. In matters of loss in love they profess indifference or denied concern. However, in their poems they “conveyed sentiments of devastating sadness, self-pity, and a sense of betrayal, and, in the case of love, deep attachment”. (1985, p. 246).

Abu Lughod claims that this difference in discourses of emotional expression results from the embeddedness of emotional responses in cultural contexts which value differently certain sentiments, and put to practice different discourses. Abu Lughod shows that these two cultural contexts enable two distinct forms of sentiments expressions which may seem opposed but actually they strengthen each other.

The Awlad ALI pattering of emotional expression can best be understood in terms of a set of culturally specific ideas that are fundamental to social life in Mediterranean societies: the honor code. In terms of the Awlad ALI’s honor code, only sentiments that create the impression of autonomy are appropriate to self-image and self-presentation. But, the honor code structure individual aspirations and interactions only in certain social context. The sentiments of invulnerability expressed in ordinary public interaction are appropriate to a discourse of honor. However, in the medium of poetry, individuals can express intimate sentiments in response to loss, which betray their vulnerability without forfeiting their claims to being honorable. “This suggests that the ideology of honor, perhaps like any other cultural ideology, neither exists alone nor completely determines individual experience.” (Abu Lughod 1985, p. 247, 251).

One explanation to the puzzle of having two seemingly discourses of selfhood lies in the social context in which the two discourses come into play. Except at ritual occasions, individuals share poems only with close friends, social peers, or lovers. Ordinary discourse, in which the discourse of honor belongs, is public, not intimate and personal. This is the arena in which the self is judged. From the context- bound nature of the discourses, emotions and models of selfhood it can be concluded that for the individuals there is a split between public and private “which corresponds to self-presentation in terms of cultural ideals versus revelation of ‘inner reality’” (Abu Lughod 1985, p. 253).

By showing the differences of these two discourses, Abu-Lughod enables us to examine the interrelations between them, through an alternative understanding to the psychoanalytically oriented approaches which conceptualize it as repression and sublimation of individual drives or impulses (e.g. Stearns and Stearns 1989) on one hand and the Marxist approaches which conceptualize it in terms of hegemony and resistance (e.g. Williams 1973).

Abu Lughod pays close attention to the intra-cultural discursive differentiation and the different forms of emotional expressions it enables, while understanding discourse as a vehicle of emotional expression, a bridge between individual experience, language and social relations. In contrast, performative approaches denounce the view that emotions have an “inner” residuum on which they are based (Benedicte Grima 1993, p. 7). Instead of focusing on the relations between personal experience of emotions and their cultural framing, the performative approach examines the ways in which emotions are taught by and performed through culture.

3.4 Performativity of Language and Emotions

A performative theoretical approach adopts a different concept of language altogether, and hence reformulates the relation between language, culture and emotions while highlighting agency and action. In contrast to the Western view of statements about emotions as descriptive in character, this approach views them as “performative” in the Austinian sense. Austin’s (1975) speech act theory recognized two types of utterance, descriptive and performative. According to the theory, language is not merely descriptive of outer or inner reality; rather, it is an acting force which enables agents to create and shape aspects of their social world, to do things with words. People use performative utterances to perform or accomplish something rather than to describe it. The by now cliché example is the announcement “I do” in a wedding ceremony, in which it is the performance of this utterance that makes the bride and groom a husband and wife. In the performative view, language is not merely a socio-cultural tool to make sense of one’s emotions by having language shape individual experience or being used means of its expression, rather, language is the means by which emotions come to be present in and act upon the social and political orders (for example Ng and Kidder 2010). This helps conceive of the ways in which emotions are produced in order to organize social protests and political movements and to achieve political goals (Goodwin et al. 2001).

William Reddy (1997, 1999) offers an intermediate or synthetic approach between the expressive (descriptive) and performative dimensions of emotions. Reddy claims that statements about emotions are neither descriptive nor performative. Instead, emotions statements are efforts by the speaker to offer an interpretation to something that is not observable to any other actor. Since such an effort is part of the relationship and identity of the speaker, it has a direct impact of the actual feeling of the speaker. Reddy calls these emotional statements “emotives”.

The concept of emotive encompasses two completing conceptual aspect of emotions and culture: verbality and awareness. Thought material can be verbalized or unverbalized, and conscious or non conscious. Results of variants of Stroop color-naming tasks revealed that such material comes in both verbal and nonverbal forms. It was found that naming a word for a thing takes more work than to understand the thing itself and that translating a cue into words is a harder task than recognizing it. Reddy claims that if “consciousness” is entirely discursive in structure, some types of thought material are more discursive than others. “There is a split between recognition and articulation, a difference between the verbal and the nonverbal. The context in which utterances and discursively structured practices occur must be understood as including a halo of (verbal and nonverbal) activated thought material within a larger background of (verbal and nonverbal) temporarily less accessible thought material.” (Reddy 1999, p. 267).

Emotion claims are attempts to translate into words nonverbal events that are occurring in this halo or enduring states of this halo and its background. Therefore Reddy views emotion claims as constituting a special class of utterances that he named “emotives”. Statements about the speaker’s emotions are type of utterance that is neither constative (descriptive) nor performative. Emotional utterances have (1) a descriptive appearance, (2) a relational intent, and (3) a self-exploring or self-altering effect:

Descriptive appearance

emotion words are used in predicates that apply to personal states (for example, “I am sad”). Although in first glance these utterances present themselves as semantically the same as “I have red hair,” emotion claims do not admit of independent verification. The only way to determine the “accuracy” of an emotion claim is to notice its coherence with other emotionally expressive utterances, gestures, and acts- all of which make reference to something that can’t be seen, heard, or sensed.

Relational Intent

statements about emotions in social life occur most frequently as part of specific scenarios or relationships. Some even argue that emotions are nothing but such scenarios. Moreover, it can be claimed that emotional expressions and statements are performative in relation to social relationships: they determine and constitute the nature and content of these relationships, constitute membership and participation or denounce them.

A self-exploring or self-altering effect

emotions involve widespread activations of thought materials. As studies show “the range and complexity of thought material activated at any given time can be so great, and can so completely exceed the capacity of attention, that attempts to summarize or characterize the overall tenor of such material inevitably fail” (Reddy 1999, p. 269). A first-person emotion claim is such an attempt. This attempt is an endeavor in which the activated thought material itself plays a role and relationships, goals, intentions, and practices of the individual may be at stake. Consequently, the attempt unavoidably affects the activated thought material.

The exterior referent that an emotive point to, emerges from the act of uttering in a changed state. Thus, emotives are performatives in that they do things to the world. They are instruments for directly change, build, hide, and intensify emotions. Although there is an “inner” dimension to emotion, it is never just “represented” by statements or actions. “It is the necessary (relative) failure of all efforts to represent feeling that makes for (and sets limits on) our plasticity. Many ways of expressing feeling work equally well (poorly); all fail to some degree. It is here that a universal conception of the person can be founded, one with political relevance.” (Reddy 1999, p. 270).

To conclude, theories of emotions and discourse, in its narrow or wide meaning, claim that in order to fully understand emotional experience and expression, and to frame intercultural and intra-cultural differences in both, we have to account for the specific socio-cultural settings of emotional experiences and interpretations and to consider the impact of language and the production of speech on emotions. However, this outlook produces a “hermeneutic circle”, in which the discourse, performance and the emotions are co-producing each other. While this approach locates the cultural causes and conditions for the experience and expression of emotions, the next section will deal with the mechanism for the public production of collective emotions, namely, ritual.

4 Ritual and the Collective Production of Emotions

While the normative and discursive approaches to emotions we have seen so far locate the socio-cultural causes and conditions of possibility for emotional experience and expression, and deal primarily with the role of language in constituting them, this section deals with a specific mechanism for making emotions public, by creating routines, events, temporal and spatial definitions and relevant objects and specific gestures, through which one feels the same emotions with other. Or, more specifically, the collective and public process in which emotions are produced in ritual forms.

Ritual has been one of the main subject of scholarly theorizing and research in the social sciences since the nineteenth century. In general, it is agreed to be an activity in which society is objectified symbolically, while the community appeals and ascends to a “higher” level of being, beyond the daily and casual aspects of life, into the sacred. However, this large body of knowledge has dealt with emotions only scantily. Emile Durkheim is said to be the first and most influential thinker who shed light on the social function of ritual and the social organization of emotions in ritual forms. For him, ritual is a practice of shifting from the realm of the profane to the realm of the sacred. In this process the symbolic representation of society and its moral order are objectified and validated; individuals express and experience their belongingness to the community; and a social bond is produced by sharing a common emotional state.

Ritual is a collective process by which the group constructs its collective consciousness—the collective symbolic and moral universe—through the production of emotions and solidarity, and gets to know itself through it. This view encourages us to understand ritual not as a merely symbolic process of translating myth into practice, or an emotional catharsis of spontaneous emotional expression for preserving the social order, but as a process by which the symbolic and moral order is reproduced by emotional practice and social coercion. Here, emotions are the social “glue” or the magnetic field in which social structures stand. Ritual is a mechanism for the collective constitution of the group’s representation to itself and its moral code through the production of common emotions.

Emotions and culture are co-produced in ritual in three dimensions: First, Ritual is an affirmation of belonging and submission to collective moral codes through the collective participation, expression and experience of feelings: “[…] when the individual feels firmly attached to the society to which he belongs, he feels morally bound to share in its grief and its joy. To abandon it would be to break the ties that bind him to the collectivity, to give up wanting collectivity, and to contradict himself” (Durkheim 1995[1912], p. 403).

Second, rituals do not just evoke spontaneous individual emotional reactions, but provides guidelines for individuals to perform emotion work—the effort individuals make to foster an emotional state which corresponds to collective practice and common symbolic and moral order: “If the Christian fasts and mortifies himself during the commemorative feasts of the Passion and the Jew on the anniversary of Jerusalem’s fall, it is not to give way to sadness spontaneously felt. In those circumstances, the believer’s inward state is in disproportion to the harsh abstinences to which he submits. If he is sad, it is first and foremost because he forces himself to be and disciplines himself to be; and he disciplines himself to be in order to affirm his faith. The attitude of the Australian in mourning is to be understood in the same way. If he cries and moans, it is not only to express individual sadness but also to fulfill a duty to the feeling—an obligatory feeling of which the society around him does not fad to remind him on occasion”. (Durkheim 1995[1912], p. 403) (emphasis added). Here clearly, emotional states are induced by ritual practices.

Third, the collective nature of ritual makes it an “amplifier” of emotions: “[…] human feelings intensify when they are collectively affirmed. Like joy, sadness is heightened and amplified by its reverberation from one consciousness to the next, and then it gradually expresses itself overtly as unrestrained and convulsive movement.” (Durkheim 1995[1912], p. 411).

The centrality of emotions in ritual has been elaborated in psychodynamic social approaches. In a psychoanalytically inspired anthropological account of ritual and emotions, Thomas Scheff (1977) defines ritual in terms of the emotional dynamics of its participants, and claims that rituals function as a mechanism for the social distancing of emotions, and consequently socially organized discharge of distressful emotions, such as grief, fear, shame and anger. In this view, rituals are organized around a recurring sources of collective distress, and acts as to distance them to an extent that allows the discharge of these distressful emotions, instead of suppressing them or reliving them neurotically. Scheff opposes approaches that see ritual as a suppression of individual emotions on one hand, and others that see it a spontaneous expression of emotions on the other. However, this view stresses the universal, individual and psychological functions of ritual, and is influenced by the therapeutic view of ritual and emotions.

Durkheim’s understanding of ritual and its relation to the production of culture, society and emotions was rather influential, and has been elaborated by numerous scholars. While Durkheim’s understanding of ritual was based on the framework of religious ceremonies and their formal and macro aspects, micro-social theories have adopted it for the analysis of daily interaction. Ervin Goffman’s familiar theory of symbolic interaction frames daily interaction as dramaturgical and ritualized actions, in which emotional expressions are symbolically exchanged as part of a wider variety of symbolic actions to produce situated sociability and meaning (Goffman 1955). However, its attempt to avoid either macro structures or psychological structures, and overlooks the relation between macro structures and individual experience (Hochschild 1979). Arlie Hochschild has developed this approach to analyze exactly this relation by focusing on emotion work and feeling rules, the relation between emotional ideologies and individual experiences (see above).

Randall Collins has elaborated this theory in a different direction, examining the ways in which individuals’ emotions in micro interactions are used as the material for forging collective and more enduring and symbolized emotional structures. Randall Collins calls the collective emotional sweeping in rituals “collective effervescence”, by which he refers to the “buildup of emotional coordination within an interaction ritual” (Collins 2004, p. 108) which produces feelings of solidarity, or should we say solidarity of feelings, as well. Collins distinguishes the short-term emotions that are the specific emotional ingredients of certain interaction ritual (such as sadness and sorrow in funerals or friendliness and humor in a party), from the long-term emotions of group solidarity or status group membership. The process of transforming the former into the latter he calls “interaction ritual chain”: “An interaction ritual is an emotion transformer, taking some emotions as ingredients, and turning them into other emotions as outcomes. Short-term situational emotions carry across situations, in the form of emotional energy, within its hidden resonance of group membership, setting up chains of interaction rituals over time” (Collins 2004, p. xii). In this view, different levels of emotional energy reflect differentiation of group membership and thus, it enables us to speak of emotional stratification, or emotional capital (Illouz 2008, 2012).

4.1 Modernity, Rituals and Emotions

As we have seen so far, ritual interweaves the normative, discursive/symbolic and performative aspects in producing emotions, whether we use the term to frame formal or religious ceremonies and rites, or to frame daily interactions. However, modern ideals and social structures undermine the traditional meaning and practice of rituals and the ways in which they are related to collective and individual emotions. Moreover, some theoretical approaches see ritual as a non-authentic emotional process, since it is compulsive, collective and public and uses to channel, repress or control emotions through social devises (Lutz and White 1986, p. 413). This is a common tendency not only in the academic circles. As James Wilce (2009) argues, the modern moral imperative of authenticity undermines the collective regulation, experience and expression of emotions in traditional rituals of grief and lament. These rituals and their appeal to collective expression of emotions become suspicious for being unauthentic and phony performances. As Wilce puts it, “the norm of authenticity may prevent moderns from appreciating the traditional-normative duty to lament” (Wilce 2009, p. 31, emphasis in the original). Moreover, “The notion that authentic feelings are spontaneous and personal, and that the good life entails following those feelings, has made it harder for ‘traditional lament’ to survive” (Wilce 2009, p. 102).Footnote 1

However, this does not mean rituals are obsolete in modern society, but that the ideals of emotional authenticity and hedonistic individualism (Campbell 1987) have challenged their collective and coercive nature in some cases and that the life of emotions is now structured by a search and norms of authenticity. Thus, we can look onto the ways in which specific emotions—which are conceived to be individual, authentic, and spontaneous—are produced by modern forms of ritual. In her research of modern romantic practices, Eva Illouz (1997) shows how a modern form of courting ritual is constructed to produce romantic atmosphere and emotions, by spatial organization of dating practices in public places, the use of images, scenarios and artifacts from consumer culture, and consumption activities. Thus, rituals are far from disappearing from social practice, but their spatial, cultural and social organization is transformed, corresponding to changes on social structure, cultural ideals, economic practices (consumer culture), and technology. The shifting logic of emotional production through the intensification of social virtual computer technologies are elaborated in what follows.

5 Imagination, Narrative and Emotions

In this final section, we want to reflect on the status of emotions in a culture that becomes saturated with virtuality and images. From the perspective of the sociology of emotions, emotions must be understood in the context of cultural repertoires, social practices, rituals, institutions, and discourses, or what we can call language games. In modern cultures, emotions are learned through media cultures, print, TV, movies, and the internet (Wirth and Schramm 2005). Furthermore, the rise of experience economy in the last decades constructs a reality in which people are increasingly engage with engineered experiences mediated through technology and the market (Pine and Gilmore 2011). In addition, the increased engagement with virtual social networks and communication pushes further this trend (Memmi 2006). These processes have major implications for many aspects of social life, modern selves and emotional life. A cultural sociology of emotions needs to examine the impact of these processes. This will be the focus of this section.

It has long been acknowledged that artistic and literary cultural forms comprise emotional components. As far back as Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of poetics, art and aesthetics, the performance of these cultural forms are known to have emotional impact upon their audiences (Sihvola and Engberg-Pedersen 1998). However, Plato saw the sensual and emotional aspects of literary and art forms as a sort of illusion, lie or deception, as an attempt to manipulate the correct judgment of reason (Solomon 1993, p. 3). In contrast, Aristotle did not take these cultural forms to be inherently deceptive; rather, he was apparently the first to account for the ways in which they are constructed and their distinctive features as cultural genres (i.e. Poetics) (Solomon 1993, p. 5). In ancient times, and until recently, the main cultural institutions which invoked emotions by myth and imagination were oral story-telling, the public reading of canonic texts, and the theater. This form of emotions production has several distinctive features: it is collective, well scripted and organized spatially and temporally, it is relatively stable, and it appeals to a higher order of things: the cosmic, moral, spiritual, religious or mystical. It sweeps one away from daily life to the world of spirits and gods, heroes and kings, but these are not conceived of as fictional, rather they appeal to the “real” cosmic and moral orders.

The emergence of print and the rise of the novel, especially during the nineteenth century, brought new mediums, cultural genres and social practices into the relationship between text and reader and between the subject and her emotions (Goody 2010, p. 147) when silent solitary reading has become a common practice among the growing reading public (Goody 2010, p. 8). As Jack Goody suggests, the emergence and spread of fiction in this period, framed the practice of reading as “entertainment”, as opposed to serious (Goody 2010, p. 149). The novel in particular and fiction in general not only draw heavily on emotion as never before, but offer new ways to frame emotions and arguably new emotional experiences—romance, thrillers, etc. Moreover, it offers an individualized ritual for producing emotions by interacting with a fictive narrative and the intensive use of imagination. The development of communication technologies from the eighteenth century onwards enabled the production of new mediums and cultural genres, such as erotic literature and gothic novels and the production of new scripts of pleasure and forms of imagination (Harvey 2004; Hume 1969; Kilgour 1995). These new technologies can be said to create fictive emotions in several meanings.

They are not recruited to collective solidarity and identification with a specific moral obligation of a given community, rather, they enable the individualization of their consumption according to one’s personal choice. This lead to the dissociation of emotions from actual sociability by the solitary experience of emotions, that in many cases can be subversive, morally transgressive, non conventional or obscene by common standards (Spacks 2003; Regarding Gothic novels see Hume 1969, pp. 283–284).

What this historical development can teach us about the relations between culture, social institutions and emotions is that emotions have to be understood in relation to the form of sociability in which they occur, the mode of cultural reproduction through which they are framed and the technological means through which they are shaped. These can include face to face interaction, text mediated interaction, book reading, movies, virtual realities, online gaming, social networks sites, etc. This view relates the mode of production of emotions to the social structures, communication technologies, cultural artifacts and social objects which induce emotions, their nature and the ways in which they do so. Emotions are produced in various ways which are not restricted to interpersonal interaction, but involve objects, artifacts, places, images, practices and networks (Latour 2005). This means we can distinguish different ways by which emotions are produced and the role they play, by characterizing the distinct features of their social, cultural and technological production.

These issues are discussed in what follows. First, we will distinguish “real” from fictional emotions and fictional from virtual emotions. Then we will discuss different aspects of virtual emotions: the range of emotional response that can be virtually produced, expression of emotions in social media.

5.1 “Real” Vs. Fictional Emotions

In contemporary culture, various agents are engaged in the production and manipulation of emotional experiences in different mediums (advertisers, movie producers, novelists and writers, entertainment industry) and by different techniques (narratives, images, rhetoric, sound and music, etc.—cinematic tools). These experiences come to constitute a central part in the consumption of the art/literary/cinematic work. Historically, emotional experiences have become more and more central for producers’ and consumers’ motivations and expectations in engaging with these cultural genres (Illouz et al. forthcoming). These emotional experiences are conceptualized as fictional emotions since, in contrast to “Real” emotions, they are produced by narrative, images and rhetoric devices; they arguably have no further consequences to one’s social relationships; and they are excluded from one’s experiences and actions in the “real world”. This part will deal with fictional emotions and their distinct features. First, a contemporary discussion dealing with the characteristics of fictional emotions in relation to real life emotions will be presented. Then, we will discuss the relevance of fictional emotions to the connection between emotions and culture.

Young (2010) deals with the paradox of fiction that centers on the question whether it is possible to express genuine emotion toward a character (or event) known to be fictitious. Walton (1978) claims that despite certain similarities between the expression of real emotion and the generation of fictional emotions, fictional emotions are quasi-emotions, since the person experiencing them knows they are fictional. Radford (1977) accepts that one can be truly moved by a fictional character, but claims that the lack of belief in the truth of the events means that the emotional reaction is incoherent to one’s belief in its fictionality (Young 2010, pp. 5–6).

During the years, numerous writers proposed various alternative resolutions for the paradox. However, it is important to note that this is conceived of as a paradox, only in relation to the cognitivist assumption of rationality and emotions, which presumes that “every emotion must be caused by an appropriate belief that is consistent with every other belief one holds at the time” (Hartz 1999, p. 559; quoted in Young 2010, p. 7).

Sociologically, the production of fictional emotions is not ridden with paradoxes as psychologists view it, since it is viewed as inherently dependent on the specific institutional context in which emotions emerge, the cultural repertoires used to frame them; the material, architectural and aesthetic organization of the environment in which they occur; and the form of ritual by which they are provoked. In this light, fictional emotions are the result of new cultural genres, technologies of interaction, and social organization and practices of feeling. In the context of post industrial cultural industries, there are two central aspects of the production and distribution of fictional emotions: First, they are produces in a specific cultural context and for a specific medium, relying on common interpretive frameworks and emotional scripts; Second, they are distributed globally, hence they export emotional scripts and specific fictional emotions, resulting in either creating a common cross cultural emotional scripts, or adapting and transforming the original emotional scripts so they can correspond to local cultural emotional frames and categorization (for discussion in Hollywood movies global distribution (see Scott 2004).

The production of fictional emotions by means of narratives, images and movies, involves socialization into a new form of media literacy: the practice of “reading” them and acquiring the relevant cultural capital, both in the meaning of learning how to interpret the narrative event and respond appropriately to it, and the use of fictional emotions to construct emotional scripts which frame social expectations and actions in the “real world”, (i.e. how should one act and experience in a romantic date, for example (Illouz 1997). Hence, “fictional” as they are, they have rather material and actual social consequences: “This fictionality shapes the self, the ways in which it emplots itself, live through stories, conceives of the emotions that make-up one’s life project” (Illouz 2012, p. 278).

A central feature of fictional emotions is that they are produced and distributed as part of leisure activities and entertainment in the experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 2011) by the cultural industries supporting it. This feature has two central results: First, it reframes emotions as part of what Collin Campbell calls the “modern autonomous imaginative hedonism” (Campbell 1987) in which individual emotional experiences come to be managed in order to produce satisfaction, excitement and personal well-being; Second, it relates the ability to produce affect with the ability to increase revenue/surplus value for certain cultural industries. This connection sets in motion two processes: the specification of emotions to create a variety of emotional commodities for consumers to choose from, and to differentiate market segments and audiences and in order to meet their needs; and the intensification of emotions which aims to preserve excitement and high level of arousal (Illouz et al. forthcoming).

5.2 Fictional Emotions Vs. Virtual Emotions

In recent years, significant technological developments enabled the creation of virtual worlds and interactions. This trend includes three main phenomena: First, the construction of interaction with fictional characters in virtual worlds, for example computer generated characters that “participate” in virtual games (Tavinor 2005) or in simulated realities used for psychological research and therapy (Young 2010). Second, the development of electronic communication technologies, which make possible the emergence of social networks sites such as Facebook enabling interactions with other real people. In this case, the interaction is between identifiable individuals, who’s online interaction can be infused into or have consequences for their off-line relations and interaction, i.e. it has socially real results, users interpret profiles as representing real personalities and have ways to identify false profiles (Gershon 2011, pp. 871–872). Third, the convergence of the previous two phenomena, combining social media and virtual worlds. This enables the interactions with other people in virtual worlds who construct themselves a fictional avatars, through the use of electronic communication media. A solid example to this combination can be seen in the website Second Life, an online virtual world in which users can create avatars which interact with other avatars on a virtual platform and take part in many activities and connection similar to real life. These developments have significant consequences for the experience and expression of emotions.

In the following sub-sections we will analyze these three categories of interaction and their consequences for emotional experience and expression through the following analytic axes:

First, the range of possible emotional experiences and expressions in virtual worlds expands in relation to those enables by fictional emotions.

Second, the Absence of the Body and the substitutions to bodily cues of emotional expressions, by an array of visual and textual techniques. This gives prominence to several technologies of interaction: (a) Verbal Categorization, by which relationships are mediated and which correspond to tastes (musical, cinematic or literary) and to the idea of psychological compatibility; (b) the emergence of technologies for identification and expression of emotions, which aim to bring emotions into social media; and (c) it promotes a Regime of Visibility, in which social network become visible to oneself and to others and experience is converted into a “public” spectacle.

Third, the social structure of interaction and the ground in which emotions sprout, is characterized by five features: (a) The volume of interactions and quantity of social relations has increased in a historically unprecedented rate; (b) Large prevalence of Weak Ties and increasing overlap of weak and strong ties; (c) Ranking Tools or prevalence of formal tools (e.g., “Like”) to rank others, and to be ranked by them; (d) Virality of processes of diffusion of emotions, as opposed to the processes of Contagion via direct and collective observation and participation; (e) Paper Wall Presence. ICT technologies make presence continuous, in the existential background;

5.2.1 Virtual Fictions: Expanding the Range of Emotional Responses

While narrative can induce emotions mainly through the reader’s empathy this mechanism is limited to specific types of emotions. Some emotions- like guilt, remorse, pride, shame or jealousy- demand more active involvements of the subject and a sense of a reciprocal relationship. Therefore, they are unattainable to those engaged in traditional fictional pursuits. However, they can be expressed in virtual realities environments, since these environments enable the subject an active role and the experience of relationship, even if it is a fictional one (Young 2010, p. 12). For, example Tavinor (2005) described that he felt guilt and ashamed about the fact that as a character in a video game he used the services of a prostitute and then mugged her.

Similar to fictional emotions, virtual emotions too, may have the same cognitive content as real emotion, but they are generated by involvement with aesthetic forms and genres; they include a wider range of more social emotions (sentiments); and they are a result of interaction with a real or fictional character. Despite their difference from “real” emotions, psychologists claim that virtual emotion can be generalized to emotional experiences in the real world (Young 2010). Our discussion does not aim to judge what a real emotion is and what is a fictive one, rather we aim to understand the social and cultural processes which underlie the development of new forms of feelings, new emotional repertoires and new technologies of interaction and sociability.

5.2.2 Technologies of Experience and Expression of Emotions in Social Media

In 2007 Myspace added an option for users to share their mood with others.Footnote 2 Since April 2013, Facebook status updates include the option of “share your feeling”; meaning, posting the subject emotions at the moment as a status. Each emotion includes its name and an emoticon—a visual image of a smiley figure with various emotional mood expressions. There are a lot of possibilities for sharing emotions and associate them with other texts, objects or contents.

This emotions sharing attempts to overcome the absence of bodily cues, and has several relevant implications: First, it enables to objectify emotions through rather simple textual and visual means, and give coloring, tone and direction to muted and ambiguous text or visual images. Second, it blurs the distinction between the private and public presentation of self and expression of emotions, and infuses different discursive fields and their specific emotional meanings into one another. Third, it enables to form emotions as basis for self presentation, identification and association with others. It can also create wide world connections between people based on their feeling toward different issues and in the future maybe even based on their feeling in general. One of the leading tools in facebook is a smart search tool that enables to search people based on different characteristics. It seems reasonable to assume that soon this search will include feelings. Fourth, it permeates a new field of data mining and targeted advertising which focus on emotional categories.

Similar attempts to bring in emotions into virtual platforms by technological means are done in the virtual world of Second life. While the expression of emotions is needed in order to establish a social atmosphere, media for online communication lacks the physical contact and visualization of emotional reaction and contain only text messages (Neviarouskaya et al. 2010, pp. 1–2). In accordance, till lately, emotions in Second Life had to be communicated through verbal categories.

In order to enrich the experiences that emotional expression provide, Neviarouskaya et al. (2010) crated a new tool for the expression of emotions in Second life, based on affect analysis model. Based on the text that the user writes his avatar will automatically present suitable emotion (type and degree). This expression will be expressed through an EmoHeart objects attached to the avatar’s chest and the avatar’s facial expression (See Neviarouskaya et al. 2010, p. 8).

As it seems, technologies of emotional representation and expression in virtual worlds are aiming to make it as direct and reliable as possible, to the point of trying to translate brain activity, bodily reactions or facial expression into virtual representations of emotions (Luck and Aylett 2000).

6 Conclusion

We have identified four main approaches to the sociological study of culture and emotions: (a) The normative approach which focuses on the interplay between emotional norms and their experience and expression. Such interplay is blatant in the case of emotional self-control. The normative approach enables us to look at the ways in which emotion norms emerge, are maintained or changed over time and in relation to social and political structures. This approach has also the advantage of enabling us to look into the unintended consequences of the interplay between individual and collective emotions, norms, ideology, class or gender differences, and socio-political contexts.

(b) The discursive approach focuses on the ways in which language and symbolic systems come to structure emotional life through institutionalized practices and repertoires which are used to name, label, classify and interpret emotions, and narratives, scenarios and scripts that enable to bestow meaning upon emotional experiences. The performative theory, which we included in this approach, emphasizes the constitution of emotions through symbolic public action, while highlighting agency and the ability to alternate or reformulate symbols and experiences through performance.

(c) The ritual approach focuses on emotions as public and collective occurrences, produced through well scripted symbolic action as part of the reproduction of collective identity, and endorsement of shared moral code. This approach enables to understand how emotions are generated through and in highly constraining social structures. (d) The last category refers to a relatively new form of emotionality produced by new information technologies, starting from fictional emotions induced by textual interaction with narratives and characters of novels and other genres of fiction, to virtual emotions induced by computer mediated human interaction (or alternately, the emotions involved with the human computer interaction).

Each of these approaches point to the constant interaction of emotions and their verbal, institutional, artifactual and technological contexts. The power of these approaches lies in their ability to identify cultural variability, the role of context, the role of various gender and class ideologies, the constitution and transformation of class, gender and group boundaries, and the role of rituals, practices and technologies in shaping and transforming emotions, or even forging new emotional experiences. Emotions play an increasing role in an economy where persons as persons are classified and ranked. To that extent, they are co-extensive with the economy of objects and the commodification of the person that characterizes neo-liberalism.

In other words, instead of examining emotional life on the basis of the subjective-objective or internal-external divide, we should look at them as intermediaries, as an array of modes of attachment and detachment which testify on the intricate interrelation between poles. As Bruno Latour puts it: “Things, quasi-objects, and attachments are the real center of the social world, not the agent, person, member, or participant—nor is it society or its avatars” (Latour 2005, p. 238).

This view relates the ways in which emotions are produced to social structures, communication technologies and practices, cultural artifacts and social objects. They are produced in various ways which are not restricted to interpersonal interaction, but involve objects, artifacts, places, images, practices and networks. This means we can distinguish different ways by which emotions are produced and the role they play, by characterizing the distinct features of their social, cultural and technological production.

For example, if cinema produces new emotional experiences, we can analyze the emergence of emotion norms relating to specific movie genres and their contestation or variation; the development of discourses and narratives around specific genres and the ways in which they forge lines of action, emotion categories, terms, classification systems and concepts; the architecture and aesthetic features of the rituals through which new emotions are experienced in movies (or known emotions are experienced in completely new ways); and the technologies and practices which enable the production of a new or renewed emotional genre.

Another example is from the growing field mediated emotions through ICTs, that are playing an increasingly important role in the market (targeted marketing, facilitating communication and exchange, clearing up ambiguity, forging interpersonal relations), work and social life: How does technology restructure social relations and emotions? What are the new interrelations between sociability, emotional experience and expression, and commercialization enabled by these technologies; what are the consequences of ambiguous emotional norms in social media (e.g. facebook), how emotion norms develop in new arenas, and what are the emotional consequences of the ambiguity of the interactive practices and their symbolic meaning for actions.