Police Beat: The Emotional Power of Music in Police Work By Simon ...

Kleinman (1980), Levy and M. Rosaldo (1983), and Needham (1981), among others, contributed to work around a mind/body dichotomy which Lutz and White (1986) argued is typified by a ‘two layers’ approach (p. 407). This categorization refers to the tendency of these scholars to distinguish between ‘natural’ or ‘bodily’ emotion and ‘cultural’ or ‘second order’ emotion. These kinds of distinctions resonate strongly with those made with regard to the positioning of individual and society with regard to emotion in, for example, those accounts which distinguish emotion from sentiment. In these accounts the term ‘emotion’ refers to an individual’s private, unarticulated, culturally unmotivated feelings, and ‘sentiment’ refers to socially articulated symbols and behavioural expectations (see, e.g., Fajans, 1983). This long-standing dualism, in which the mind is related to culture, and the body to the natural or biological, again causes trouble; unwilling to take emotions back to the body because of their psychobiological history, anthropological examination has seemed, somewhat surprisingly in the conditions of postmodernity, to observe the outmoded notion that the closer we move to the body, the farther away we are from culture (Jenkins and Valiente, 1994, p. 164). The ‘two layers’ approach has recently made a resurgence (see Milton, 2005), and some of its original problems have returned with it.

As Lutz and White (1986) noted in their review, positivism ‘is purported to be on the wane in anthropology’ (p. 407), and currently, positivism in emotion research still appears to be the domain of psychology (as alluded to by Besnier, 1995, p. 561). As Lutz and White also note, interpretivism has impacted on anthropological investigations of emotion primarily in terms of an emphasis on the language of emotion (e.g., Briggs, 1970, Crapanzano, 1980). As Katz (1999, p. 4) notes, this approach can move dangerously close to taking representations of emotion for the objects of study, rather than concentrating on lived and, in particular, bodily experience. This concentration can often mean that the body again becomes peripheral in investigating the lived experience of emotion, which, as noted, can weaken the lines of inquiry (see Coulter, 1989; Lyon, 1995; Lyon and Barbalet, 1994).