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In 1986, Lutz and White completed a thorough overview of anthropological treatments of emotion. In this comprehensive review of the emotion literature of the 1980s, Lutz and White identified several dichotomies. Lutz and White recommended in their review that the dichotomies they identified should be worked on from perspectives that centralized the body, as well as the social–communicative aspects of emotion, to counter the splitting of studies into either biological or social arenas. Despite these recommendations, most recent theoreticians continue to cite these recommended perspectives as largely absent from anthropological work on emotion (see Besnier, 1995; Kitayama and Markus, 1994; Jenkins and Valiente, 1994; Lyon and Barbalet, 1994; and, for perhaps the most scathing attack to date on anthropological work on emotions, Katz, 1999). Even now, it seems that even those works that attempt to address the rich and fruitful terrain between the poles are located nearer to one or the other; Milton (2005), for example, has recently argued that Lyon’s (1998) work on the emotions, which sought to incorporate physical and cultural aspects of emotion, is ‘social’ and gives priority to the ‘cultural meaning’ side of emotions, at the expense of the ‘physical feeling’ side (see also Lyon, 1998).
Anthropological treatments of emotion continue to present the opportunity for anthropologists (and others) to direct attention to and work upon a series of interrelated dichotomies: just about every major dichotomy is involved in the process of locating emotion in material or ideal terms, in the realm of nature or culture, within the domain of the mind or the body, as a feature of structure or agency, in the theoretical tradition of positivism or interpretivism, and in the domains of universalism or relativism, the individual or culture and even romantic or realist terms (Lutz and White, 1986, p. 405). I look to some of these below to sketch out the approach I take to emotion in this work.
Materialist conceptions of emotion have taken the biologically constituted evidence of emotion—facial muscle movements, raised blood pressure and so forth—as material for investigation. This has yielded psychodynamic and evolutionary anthropological literature, such as that made famous by Ekman (1980a, 1980b) and includes contributions by scholars such as Lindholm (1982).