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The social/individual dichotomy itself seems to have emerged from the very attention paid to the social and relational aspects of emotion. In Milton’s view, this attention has had the effect of reinforcing the social side of the biological–cultural dichotomy because ‘the cultural constructionist perspective’ argues for a social genesis of emotion, at the expense of biological explanations for the generation of emotion. Questions about the social genesis, or otherwise, have led again to the polarization of the debate into individual and social camps. The upshot is that dichotomy continues to characterize anthropological work on the emotions. Milton observes, as others have done before her, that this is not particularly useful for an ongoing and fruitful anthropological exploration of emotional life.
Milton’s alternative approach, one designed to break the deadlock, is one drawn from the insights of William James (1950 [1890]) and from Damasio (1999). From James, Milton takes the idea that emotion is a two-stage occurrence, comprising the physical response against an exciting stimulus (say, elevated heart rate) and the subjective experience of that response (‘resultant’ fear, excitement, etc). In James’ model, the response comes first, followed by the subjective feeling, meaning that, as Milton (2005) says, ‘we feel sad because we cry, rather than crying because we feel sad’ (p. 199). Damasio is a neuroscientist who extends James’ model by making a distinction between emotion (the physical response to an exciting stimulus) and feeling (a perception of an emotion caused by the physical response to an exciting stimulus). The former is public and observable, the latter always private and unobservable, internal.
Milton argues that this is not simply a replication of the biological/cultural dichotomy but instead points to a middle ground of an ecological approach, because each theoretician deals with the relationship between an organism and its environment, and to the process that links environment with organism: learning. Emotion here stands as located between individual and environment. Such an approach, argues Milton (2005)