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What on earth makes the study of emotions immune from the lessons anthropology has had to learn in postmodernity about grounded theory? But my approach is firmly and impassionedly social because I have taken my lead from what (my own perceptions of what it was that) those under ethnographic scrutiny did, said, thought, felt and told me about, as well as from my own bias towards what I find to be, at least so far, the more compelling arguments from the social, relational and embodied side of the emotion debate. While avoiding conceptions of emotion as embodied is perhaps, in anthropology, a guard against the kind of reductionism apparent in bio accounts of emotion, there is no compelling reason for absenting emotion from the anthropological conversation on embodiment. In dispensing with dichotomous understandings of emotion, and in adopting instead a position from which emotion is understood to be at the seat of embodied agency, the central role of emotion in the process of creating the social body is revealed. A focus on the ways in which emotion activities distinct sensual–physical and attitudinal dispositions allows for an exploration of the different orders of emotion that are involved in forging, in this case, musical connections.
This book, then, is primarily interested in the ways in which emotion is embodied and is involved in facilitating connections between persons and world. In pursuit of this interest, I follow the lead that Abram (1996) took in his ecological/philosophical explorations of ways in which sensual extensions are involved in connecting persons and world. This book differs, though, in its comments upon relationships forged between the world of being and the world of things for it looks closely at the ways in which sensual extension incorporates others and things in an organizational context. Further, it focuses attention on the ways in which the contraction of sensual extension might lead to contracted relationships with others, even to the extent that persons may attempt to remove themselves or be removed from ‘the social body’ through sensual–emotional constriction. This book is particularly interested in the ways in which emotion, as embodied and as central to agency and to the construction of the social body, is involved in sensual extension in musical contexts, and sensual contraction, in both musical and police contexts.
I have said that people cannot remove themselves from sociality, but they can try. Particularly, cops—at least Grayville cops—try it.