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Language and the Politics of Emotion:Language and the Politics of

Emotion

Article  in  Journal of Linguistic Anthropology · June 1991

DOI: 10.1525/jlin.1991.1.1.115

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Book Reviews

Language and the Politics of Emotion. Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 217 pp. $44.50 (cloth)

WILLIAM O. BEEMAN
Brawn University

Interest in the study of emotion and affectivity has been building in anthro-
pology for several years. This area of human experience is a kind of "last bastion"
of ethnographic research, investigating at it does human inner states. The para-
dox of emotions is that everyone recognizes that humans express them, but no
one can know exactly what the experience of emotion is for others. If humans
could know the emotional experience of others, poetry, narrative and music
would undoubtedly be much different than they are.
This collection of papers approaches the understanding of emotion through
"discourse." The authors eschew earlier approaches: "essentializing" emotions,
or "relativizing" them both culturally and historically. They view these ap-
proaches as flawed because they detach emotions from the flow of social life. In-
stead they:
. . . begin with the assumption that (emotion) is a sociocultural construct (and) . . . g o
on to explore through close attention to ethnographic cases, the many ways emotion gets
its meaning and force from its location and performance in the public realm of discourse,
[p-7]
This gives the authors a very wide palate. They deal with poetry, song, per-
formance, narrative, coversation, interviews, verbal interaction, linguistic regis-
ters and scientific discourse. In their studies, most of the authors establish the
"pragmatic force of emotion discourse" (p. 13). For the most part this means rules
for presentation of emotion-marked discourse in social life, in the context of
power relations. These approaches, then, do not aim so much at understanding
the nature of the experience of emotion; they rather help us to understand some-
thing about the principles of emotional expression in different cultural settings.
To do this the authors, with a couple of exceptions, return to their own already
well-published fieldwork for new insights.
Lila Abu-Lughod returns to the discourses of "love" in the Bedouin commu-
nity she studied in her earlier monograph, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in
a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). She demon-
strates that in a society where marital attachments are determined by others than
those who marry, expressions of love in poetry can reflect defiance or freedom.
Even love songs and love poetry on tape recordings can contribute to this dis-
course.

115
116 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Geoffrey White deals with a native discourse genre, graurutha, "disentan-

gling/' among A'ara speakers of Santa Isabel, one of the Solomon Islands. In us-
ing graurutha, negative emotions arising from misunderstandings are "talked
out" or made public in order to realign skewed interpersonal and social relations.
Catherine Lutz deals with the rhetoric of emotion and gender in American so-
ciety. She shows how emotion becomes an "emblem of female gender identity"
(p. 83) in the United States. Female emotionality as a category of discourse is seen
to shore up hierarchical and power differences between males and females.
Moreover, the danger of female emotion is revealed in American discourse cat-
egories as the need to: "control oneself," or "rise above one's emotions."
Arjun Appadurai deals with praise in Indian society. He argues that "praise is
not a matter of direct communication between the 'inner' states of the relevant
persons, but involves the public negotiation of certain gestures and responses
(pp. 93-94)," creating a community of sentiment which involves all parties in the
praise discourse. Praise is thus situated squarely in interaction structures, and
has something formulaic about it. Praise includes such operations as: flattery of
"big men," parents' praise (or rather reticence to express praise) of children, and
praise conferred by beggars on benefactors.
Donald Brennis discusses the social practice of emotional expression among
Hindi speakers in the Fijian village of Bhatgaon. His discussion centers on the
concept of bhaw, translated not only as "emotion" but also as "display" and "ges-
ture." Brennis suggests that although individually felt emotions, such as anger,
are recognized, it is shared, socially constructed emotion which is given full social
value as bhaw.
Judith T. Irvine provides the most linguistically sophisticated analysis in the
volume, with the largest body of actual data, based on her research on Wolof
speakers in Senegal. She extends the concept of "register" as defined by Sapir—
"a coherent complex of linguistic features linked to a situation of use (p. 127),"
to show how it possesses a seldom appreciated dimension of affective display in
interaction. Two styles of speaking: waxu gewel, "griot talk," and waxu geer "noble
talk" are compared in terms of contrasts in prosidy, phonology, morphology,
syntax and discourse management. Affectivity is shown in the contrast between
hyperbolic versus restrained speech and in the area of rhetorical elaboration.
"Noble talk" is restrained in its expression of emotion, whereas "griot talk," re-
ferring to the speech of praise-singers, speech makers and bards is much freer in
its emotional expression. These registers, though associated with particular
groups, are in fact used by people of all social classes. They thus correspond to
images of the social roles implied in speech rather than actual social roles, and
color all Wolof discussions of emotion.
Daniel Rosenberg provides a critical, programmatic discussion of the meth-
odology of the use of language in the analysis of emotions by anthropological
researchers. He claims that a number of well-known studies of emotion, based
on language use, actually "decontextualize" the language used as data, and "re-
contextualize" that language in an analytical discourse which is far removed from
the original circumstances of utterance. This results in distorted conclusions
about the nature of emotion in the societies under study.
Finally, Margaret Trawick deals with emotionally in a single song sung by an
untouchable woman well known as a singer in her district of Tamil Nadu. The
song is a hymn to a local goddess in which the singer recounts an legendary ep-
isode involving the goddess, Singamma, her pollution, defilement and death. It
is replete with emotional expression. Trawick shows how this song reveals a
great deal about Tamil feelings concerning pollution. Examining the term payam,
 117
Book Reviews

which is best translated as "revulsion" or "fear" at pollution, Trawick shows how

the singer in her song is able to create "wholeness" in her own world through
her song of a goddess who is even more polluted and defiled than she.
Each of these studies is in its own way exemplary, and all are well written.
Nevertheless, though the papers share a loose, broad (but worthwhile) meth-
odological focus, they are hard to pull together as a whole. In fact, such extreme
diversity gathered under the general rubric "discourse" raises the question of
whether that term has now come to mean so many things that it has outlived its
usefulness. Further, though each author says something useful and interesting
about the way we might view emotion in new ways, the collection as a whole
gives scant aid to the reader in reentering the discussion of emotion as ap-
proached by earlier researchers. Nor does it really solve the problems with those
earlier approaches outlined in the introductory chapter. In short, though the in-
dividual papers chip away at understanding the circumstances through which
emotion is expressed in a variety of cultural settings, the collection leaves us wait-
ing for the other shoe to drop in understanding the nature of emotion itself.

Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia. Kathryn A.

Woolard. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. 183 pp. $29.50 (cloth).

JOHNM. LIPSKI
University of Florida

Urban Catalonia is a relatively unique sociolinguistic area in the modern world,

in that a regional language which had previously been accorded no prestige or
even official recognition (Catalan) is now a de facto necessary language for im-
migrants speaking the high-prestige national language (Castilian/Spanish).
Events of the past decade in Spain, including official acknowledgement of the
Catalan language, and the regional autonomy accorded to Catalonia in 1979, have
resulted in a dynamic sociolinguistic cauldron which has attracted the attention
of researchers in a number of disciplines. Woolard's book offers one view of this
rapidly evolving situation, based on a combination of fieldwork and consultation
of secondary sources.
The time period covered by the field research, and underlying most of the dis-
cussion, is 1979-80, when the first fruits of Catalan linguistic and political nation-
alism were emerging. This is one natural consequence of the dismantling of the
Franco regime and the granting of regional autonomy to many areas of Spain that
had felt the strongest repression of regional linguistic and political characteristics.
The focus of the study is limited to Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia and prin-
cipal attractor for immigration from other areas of Spain, and the fieldwork con-
centrated on in-depth observations of and interviews with chosen informants,
which were supplemented by brief anonymous observations.
Although one of the dimensions along which sociolinguistic variables are de-
fined in contemporary Catalonia is the pronunciation, grammar and lexicon of
Spanish and Catalan (in particular the interference of one language on the other),
Woolard deals exclusively with choice of languages as an indicator of identity; only
peripherally is the question of fluency in Catalan addressed, and then only qual-

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