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The danger is especially high in accounts that specifically analyse talk within anthropology (Holland and Kipnis, 1995; Russell, 1991; Wellencamp, 1995), and particularly in those accounts conducted within the discipline of linguistics (see, e.g., Frijda, Markham, Sato, & Wiers, 1995; Smith and Smith, 1995). As Jenkins and Valiente (1994) observe, although it is possible to get to the ideas of intentionality and agency in creating experience by means of ‘analyses of mental representations such as language and ethnopsychological knowledge, the cultural creation of intersubjective realms of social space via the body has often eluded the anthropological gaze’ (p. 164). But it is not only linguistic analyses of emotion talk that have come under fire; theoreticians like Michel Serres (1995 [1982], 1998) have argued that even the phenomenological accounts of sensual life, including emotional life, penned by Merleau-Ponty (1962 [1946]) mistook the language of sensation for lived experience. This idea and my critiques of the ‘two layers’ approach form an important point of departure for the approach to emotions that I take in this work.1
Almost a decade later, John Leavitt (1996) provided another snapshot of the state of play in the anthropology of emotions. In his Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions, Leavitt bemoaned the fact that the nature/culture and the mind/body dichotomies in particular continued to dominate anthropological approaches to emotion, despite the warnings issued by Lutz and White 10 years before about the follies of creating dichotomies out of the rich vein of emotional life: what would we miss of the fertile middle ground?
It is in response to the dangers articulated by Lutz and White in the mid-1980s, and to the same kind of danger discussed by Leavitt in the mid-1990s, that theoreticians like Milton contextualize their current work on emotion. In 2005, Milton alerted us to the resurgence of another dichotomy: the social/individual dichotomy. Referencing the important mind/body debates that took place within the ‘two layers’ approach, questions emerging from Milton’s focus on the social/individual dichotomy include those which question the basis, even the genesis of emotion. Is emotion interpersonally generated? Or are social elements of emotion important, but not generative, not primary? Are feeling and emotion the same? And if not, are they divisible into subjective and objective categories, and/or cultural and body categories, respectively?