<
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/08/how-universal-are-our-emotions>
"There’s nothing like migration to reveal how things that seem natural may be
artifacts of culture. When I left India for college in England, I was surprised
to find that pinching my Adam’s apple didn’t mean, as I had thought it meant
everywhere, “on my honor.” I learned to expect only mockery at the side-to-side
tilts of the head with which I expressed degrees of agreement or disagreement,
and trained myself to keep to the Aristotelian binary of nod and shake.
Around that time, I also learned—from watching the British version of “The
Office”—that the word “cringe” could be an adjective, as in the phrase “
so
cringe.” It turned out that there was a German word for the feeling inspired by
David Brent, the cringe-making boss played by Ricky Gervais in the show:
Fremdschämen—the embarrassment one feels when other people have, perhaps
obliviously, embarrassed themselves. Maybe possessing those words—“cringe,”
Fremdschämen—only gave me labels for a feeling I already knew well. Or maybe
learning the words and learning to identify the feelings were part of the same
process. Maybe it wasn’t merely my vocabulary but also my emotional range that
was being stretched in those early months in England.
Many migrants have such a story. In “Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions”
(Norton), the Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquita describes her puzzlement,
before arriving in the United States, at the use of the English word
“distress.” Was it “closer to the Dutch
angst (‘anxious/afraid’),” she
wondered, “or closer to the Dutch /verdriet/wanhoop/ (‘sadness/despair’)?” It
took her time to feel at home with the word: “I now no longer draw a blank when
the word is used. I know both
when distress is felt, and
what the
experience of distress can feel like. Distress has become an ‘emotion’ to me.”
For Mesquita, this is an instance of a larger, overlooked reality: emotions
aren’t simply natural upwellings from our psyche—they’re constructions we
inherit from our communities. She urges us to move beyond the work of earlier
researchers who sought to identify a small set of “hard-wired” emotions, which
were universal and presumably evolutionarily adaptive. (The usual candidates:
anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness.) Mesquita herself once
accepted that, as she writes, “people’s emotional lives are different, but
emotions themselves are the same.” Her research initially looked for the
differences elsewhere: in the language of emotion, in the forms and the
intensity of its expression, in its social meaning.
Over time, though, her conviction began to weaken. “What would it mean that
emotions are the same?” she asks. Working with Turkish and Surinamese
immigrants to the Netherlands, and later being an immigrant herself, in the
United States, she came to believe that the idea of a culturally invariant core
of basic emotions was more of an ideology than a scientific truth. For one
thing, Mesquita notes, “not all languages have a word for ‘emotion’ itself.”
What about words for particular feelings? “If we were to find words for
anger,
fear,
sadness, and
happiness everywhere,” she writes, “this
could be a sign that language ‘cuts nature at its joints.’ ” That last phrase,
much beloved of philosophers, echoes a line in Plato’s Phaedrus. It captures
the hope that our human concepts correspond to something “out there,” natural
kinds that exist independently of whatever we happen to think or say about
them. The biologist Ernst Mayr thought that species concepts in biology were
joint-carving in this way. He was impressed by the fact that “the Stone Age
natives in the mountains of New Guinea recognize as species exactly the same
entities of nature as a western scientist.” Are “anger” and “fear” like Mayr’s
examples of chickadees and robins?"
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-nuclear-ocean-chile-climate-change-solution/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
