136 CLIFFORD GEERTZ References, Geeste, Clifford. 1960, The Religion of Java. Glencoe, I: Free Fess. 1963. Peddlers and Princes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1968. The Social History of an Indonesian Town. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT ress. 1966, Tihingan: A Balinese village. In Koentjrahingrat, ed, Vilage Com- ‘munities in Indonesia, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1968, Islam Observed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 1973, Person, time and conduct in Bali. In Clifford Geertz, The Interpre- tation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Kohut, Heinz. 1971, The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Uni- Wersties Pres Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1967, A Diary in the Strict Sense af the Term. New ‘York: Harcourt, Brace and World. ‘Spitzer, Leo. 1962, Essays on English and American Literature, Princeton, ‘NJ: Princeton University Press. ‘Watson, James. 1968, The Double Helix. New York: Atheneum 5 Toward an anthropology of self and feeling Michelle Z. Rosaldo For purposes of argument, my past is mythic. Once upon a time (it sometimes helps to think), the world was simple. People knew that ‘thought was not the same as feeling, Cognition could be readily opposed to affect, explicit to implicit, “discursive” to “presentational” forms ‘of symbols, outer “‘mask” to inner “essence,” mere facts of “custom” to less malleable dispositions and personalities. For comparatists, these oppositions merged with the contrast be- tween the variable and the universal, the relatively cultural and the relatively biological. For sociologists, the opposition between the so- cial and the individual was evoked. And for psychologists, these con- trasts paired with processes that were conventionally assigned to either shallow" or “deep” aspects of the mind. Finally, to anthropologists, such oppositions made good sense because we recognized that, how- ever strange the customs of the people that we studied in the field, we all could speak of individuals who, in personality, recalled our enemies, friends, or mothers: There was, it would appear, a gap between the personality and its culture. Moreover ~ although in an almost contra- dictory vein — we knew that learning any culture’s rules (like how to bow or to ask for a drink) was not the same as feeling that their ways of doing things could satisfy our impulses and needs: Affective habits, ‘even when culturally shaped, appeared autonomous from the sorts of facts that cluttered our ethnographies.' Has there been progress? Although it strikes me that in some ways the dichotomies mentioned here are inevitable, as they appear unduly ‘wedded to a bifurcating and Western cast of mind, I want to argue that the development, in recent years, of an interpretive" concept of cul- ture provides for changes in the way we think about such things as selves, affects, and personalities. The unconscious remains with us. Bursts of feeling will continue to be opposed to careful thought. But recognition of the fact that thought is always culturally patterned and infused with feelings, which themselves reflect a culturally ordered past, suggests that just as thought does not exist in isolation from af- fective life, so affect is culturally ordered and does not exist apart from thought. Instead of seeing culture as an “arbitrary” source of "“con- tents” that are processed by our universal minds, it becomes necessary iis Aen a138 MICHELLE z. ROSALDO to ask how “contents” may themselves affect the “form” of mental process. And then, instead of seeing feeling as a private (often animal, presocial) realm that is ~ ironically enough ~ most universal and at the Same time most particular to the self, it will make sense to see emotions ‘not as things opposed to thought but as cognitions implicating the im- mediate, carnal "me" ~ as thoughts embodied. ‘In what follows, I will begin by speaking first about the power and limitations of the contrasts just evoked, discussing a set of intellectual developments that suggest a need for revised models. | then sketch some sorts of evidence likely to support a different, and more cultur- alist, account of how our feelings work ~ one that ins'sts upon the Sociocultural bases for experiences once assigned to a subjective and ‘unknowable preserve of psychic privacy. Signs of the times ‘To begin, it is quite clear that a discomfort with “‘our"” opposed terms is not orginal to myself. One can trace something of the movement ‘with which I am concerned in developments in the last twenty or $0 years in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. - ‘Thus, years ago structuralists abolished affect, posited an identity between “mind” and the world, and then recovered “energy” through notions like “anomaly” and “liminality."? “Cognitive dissonance” placed fecling inside cognitive discourse.* Social psychologists and an- thropologists argued that “personalities” are the illuscry product of reflections that abstract from social life." And psychoanalysts, in a Uifferent but related vein, retreated from instinctual, unreflective, and ‘mechanical conceptions of the self in elaborating such terms as "ego" ‘and “object.” More recently, Foucault (1978) has argued that “repres- sion” is itself the product of a world where we “confess.” A stress fon “narcissism” has made concern with “face” (rather than with ta: booed drives) a central motive for the psyche,® and “‘action language” has attempted to displace “unconscious structures” in psychoanalytic accounts of mental process.” That all of this has happened at a time ‘when terms like action and intention have become the problematic foci ‘of much philosophical discourse,* when literary theorists have at- ‘tempted to “deconstruct” our views of selves and actors,” and, finaly, ‘when anthropologists, like myself (Rosaldo 1980),"° have shown re hewed concern for how selves, affects, and persons are constructed in particular cultural milieu all this suggests that something deeper is at stake than hackneyed cultural relativism or youthful distrust of received categories. "An advocate may not be the best person to name the substance of trend. Nor is the “trend” of which I speak sufficiently delimited or well formed for me to claim that an enriched concept of culture is the Key to recent arguments in fields as different as anthropology and psy~ cchoanalysis. What I would argue, however, is that central to the de- ‘TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SELF AND FEELING 139 velopments evoked here is an attempt to understand how human beings tunderstand themselves and to see their actions and behaviors as in some ways the creations of those understandings. Ultimately, the trend suggests, we must appreciate the ways in which such understandings ¢grow, not from an “inner” essence relatively independent ofthe social ‘world, but from experience in a world of meanings, images, and social ‘bonds, in which all persons are inevitably involved. Perhaps one of the deepest and most probing instances of this con- ‘tempory turn of thought s P. Ricoeur's masterful Freud and Philosophy (1970). In it, Ricoeur contrasts two interdependent and yet — he sug- jeests ~ irreconcilable perspectives in the writings of the founder of psychoanalysis. First and most critically, Freud's texts make use of ‘what Ricoeur sees as an hermeneutic, or interpretivist, approach, ‘Wherein our symptoms and the images in our dreams reflect experi- ences, things heard and seen, as these are linked to one another through associative chains and established in the course of living in the world. But, a the same time, Ricoeur makes clear that in the Freudian account cour psychic images have force, our symptoms depth, because they interact with biologically based energies and histories of repressed de- sires. Surely, the subsequent history of psychoanalysis can be traced through theorists concerned with universally given instincts and those who stress the ego ~ or the patient, whose development is shaped by understanding, intelligence, social relationships, and self-knowledge. ‘The “energetics” and “hermeneutics” that Ricoeur discerns in Freud have thus, in fact, become mutually dependent yet uneasy bedfellows {in most academic psychoanalysis. Ricoeur's contribution was, at once, to emphasize the central place of meaning, language, and interpretation in psychoanalytic discourse and then to show the tensions that accom- pany a seemingly insoluble split between the poles of meaning and desire. Desire and meaning are not, of course, identical to such opposed terms as affect and cognition, feeling and thought, or, for that matter, personality and culture/society. And yet, much of the interest of the formulations developed by Ricoeur is that one apprehends a common- ality between his terms and more pervasive analytic themes. In an- thropology, as in psychology, the culturalideational and individ- ual/affective have been construed as theoretically, and empirically, at ‘odds. And, furthermore, in both one finds the second set of terms described as basic, brute, precultural fact ~ and therefore granted ana- lytical primacy. Thus, among most early writers in the culture and personality school, the organization of culture was that of the culturally typical personality writ large; just as, for later thinkers, culture an- swered to the typical actor's typical problems." Subsequently, such theories of ‘reflection’ were abjured, but psychological anthropolo- gists tended continually to see in culture a set of symbols answering to (or perhaps channeling) unconscious needs,"? whereas social an- thropologiss like Victor Turner (1967) readily proclaimed that symbols be140 MICHELLE z. ROSALDO work at opposed poles, serving as tokens of society's rules while mak- ing an immediate appeal to semen, feces, blood, and the desires fixed within our universal bodies. Durkheim's (1915) insistence on the dual nature of “‘mankind” (and his assumption that our social worlds are made to organize, or transcend, a selfish, biologically given individ- tality) was thus reiterated in a tradition that construed the individual’s inner world in terms of processes that could be channeled by, but were in essence separate from, the culturally variable facts of social life. ‘Although the “dual” nature Durkheim saw may prove a legac} or truth ~ impossible to avoid, it seems to me that cultural analysis in recent years has (much like the “hermeneutics” highlighted by Ri- Coeur) led to a reordering of priorities. Loathe to deny desire or the {nner life, the recent trend has been to stress the ways that innerness is shaped by culturally laden socialty. Instead of emphasizing the psy- ‘chological cast of cultural forms, this recent turn — elaborated perhaps ‘nost tellinaly in the works of Clifford Geertz (1973a)"? ~ insists that ‘meaning is a public fact, that personal life takes shape in cultural terms, for better yet, perhaps, that individuals are necessarily ard continually involved in the interpretive apprehension (and transformation) of re- ceived symbolic models. ‘For present purposes, what is important here is, first, the claim that meaning is a fact of public life and, second, the view that cultural patterns - social facts - provide a template for all human action, Growth, and understanding. Cultural models thus derive from, as they Seseribe, the world in which we live, and at the same time provide a basis for the organization of activities, responses, perceptions, and experiences by the conscious self. Culture so construed is, further- more, a matter less of artifacts and propositions, rules, schematic pro- grams, of beliefs than of associative chains and images that suggest (what can reasonably be linked up with what: We come to know it through collective stories that suggest the nature of coherence, prob ability, and sense within the actor's world. Culture is, then, always richer than the traits recorded in ethnographers” accounts because its truth resides not in explicit formulations of the rituals of daly life but in the practices of persons who in acting take for granted an account lof who they are and how to understand their fellows’ moves. Thus, for ethnographers in the field, a set of rules that tells them what the natives do can never show them how and why a people's deeds make psychological sense because the sense of action ultimately depends tipon one’s embeddedness within a particular sociocultural mile ‘What then of affect? One impli of this recent “culturalist”” style of thought is that our feeling that something much deeper than sere” cultural fact informs the choices actors make may itself be the ‘product of a too narrow view of culture. If culturally organized views Of possibility and sense must figure centrally in the acquisition of a sense of self providing images in terms of which we unselfconsciously connect ideas and actions then culture makes a difference that con- ‘TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SELF AND FEELING ui ee eee liefs. They are instead, cognitions - or more aptly, perhaps, interpre- ions always culturally informed, in which the actor finds that body, a etry oe ntl ta a ort en inal someting ihn priest 8 eos oS oft mb and en On eps en a ee ee ee ear ac es tee eae bg mre oe cnet eran te eee ee A A ee el Ee ey el at erie enone Se wen rg hots mt melo fon ect fewer SI a ee econ ce aoe rela eee tly hea eal Dec ene affect, are essential to all thought, and, on the other, that we could sie, een Eon eo er. am CE ee ee cae tet op wr ong ce esr co Aa are ee ae ee ae are a ee rene Toward ethnographies ‘To some of you, these claims may seem ridiculous; to others, careless; to others, common sense. In what follows I want to ground my some ‘what sweeping stance with reference to a set of concrete observations. Is to follow are presented with a goal of show- ‘how my abstract claims may have empirical implications: They make a difference for the things we look at and the ways we understand. The first example argues that emotions are not things but processes that are best understood with reference to the cultural scenarios and