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Agency in Emotions

These three contributions to the study of emotions offer occasionally overlapping, often very different, perspectives on what emotions are, how we can study them and why it is important to do so. While viewing emotions as responses to change, the three authors display different degrees of certitude about their normative value, the role of the social in their construction or display, and the possibility to observe them in the first place. In Ben-Ze’ev the value of emotions is assumed and the role of the observer is to describe them in their constitutive elements. While Nussbaum similarly views emotions as coping mechanisms, she joins Chodorow in enlarging the parameters of analysis to include the degree of reliability of different observational parameters and experiential stances. To an anthropologist’s eye, the interest of these approaches rests on their silent assumptions regarding what constitutes normalcy; whether the personal and the social are discrete or inextricable experiences; and what agency may be involved in the forging of either.