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Preface
This book deals with the intersection(s) between music and emotion, and how police officers in a major Australian metropolitan police department draw on these intersections to wield subtle power over the policed community. Each of these arenas has been individually the subject of anthropological attention. The intersection between these arenas has also been visited: Qureshi (2000), Adorno (1976) Stokes (1994), and Abu-Lughod (1990) to name but a few have explored the ways in which the musically affective, or the affectively musical, have been involved in the exercise of power. Anthropological forays into each of the arenas constituting the intersection I am interested in exploring in this book have created domains enriched by scholarly argument, by starkly opposing positions and by rapidly growing bodies of literature.
But no matter how quick the parry and dodge is in the game of exploring the emotions in anthropology, an interested person might be forgiven for thinking that very recently penned discussions and debates about emotions were in fact of the mid-1980s, or the mid-1990s, for the writing continues to be organized around apparently resilient poles.
In the 1980s, the field of emotion was fairly new to anthropological inquiry. Lutz and White (1986, p. 405) noted at the time that emotions were originally considered in the discipline in terms of a psychobiological framework, belonging in the domain of the natural and biological human experience, and, therefore, they were often understood to be unreachable with anthropological tools. Current anthropological interest in the emotions is sustained by quite different conceptions of emotion, in which the social, communicative and cultural investigations of aspects of emotion are primary. This primacy does not go uncontested, though (see, e.g., Milton, 2005); and it has not been uncontested for the past two decades of anthropological interest in the emotions.