Catherine Lutz

Ethnographic Perspectives on the Emotion Lexicon

Extensive ethnographic research has been conducted on the emotion lexicon in the last 10 years. The anthropologists who have done this work have generally used traditional participant observation methods to discover the form and function of the vocabulary of emotion as it is used in natural, everyday contexts. Some of this research has attempted to outline the full range of terms that could fall under the rubric of “types of emotions” (Briggs, 1970; Gerber, 1975; Lutz, 1982), while others have focused on elucidating the meanings of a smaller set of culturally central emotion terms (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Myers, 1979; Rosaldo, 1980). Common to most of this research is a concern with the role the emotion lexicon plays in both cultural meaning systems and in the ordering of social life or interpersonal behavior. This research has shown that emotion terms are important operators in sociocultural systems and, by extension, in the organization and interpretation of what might be only then inadequately described as personal or private experience. From the perspective of much ethnographic research, people’s emotional lives and understandings are in an important sense their social lives.

Disciplining Social Difference: Some Cultural Politics of Military Training in Public High Schools

This article compares the sociopolitical context of the origin of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) to the period of its radical expansion during the 1990s. In its early years, military training aimed to Americanize new Southern and Eastern European immigrants while easing upper-class fears of social tensions and building support for impending military actions. In this decade, JROTC serves white, middle-class desires to “discipline” minority students and subordinate racial difference to an identification with the nation. At the same time, it quietly contributes to contemporary military manpower needs in a postconscription era. Offering one example in which extra- or noneducational interests become institutionalized in the public schools, the article recommends further interrogation of cultural beliefs buttressing claims on the educational public sphere.

The Wars Less Known

Yossarian tensed with alert astonishment when he heard Colonel Korn’s concluding words. ‘‘What’s that?’’ he exclaimed. ‘‘What have you and Colonel Cathcart got to do with my country? You’re not the same.’’ ‘‘How can you separate us?’’ Colonel Korn inquired with ironical tranquility. ‘‘That’s right,’’ Colonel Cathcart cried emphatically. ‘‘You’re either for us or against us. There’s no two ways about it.’’ ‘‘I’m afraid he’s got you,’’ added Colonel Korn. ‘‘You’re either for us or against your country. It’s as simple as that.’’ —Joseph Heller, Catch-

Cultural Patterns and Individual Differences in the Child’s Emotional Meaning System

To observe the variety of ways in which children around the world learn to be human is to observe, among other things, the socialization of emotion. This variety, however, has not been explored by those interested in affect. Virtually all of the existing studies of emotional development have been conducted in American settings. Although these studies of the development of emotional repertoires in American children have found fascinating and important types of subcultural variation (e.g., Miller, 1982), the range of variation is nonetheless quite narrow when compared with that found outside our own society. An anthropological shibboleth has it that the world’s cultures present a “natural laboratory” in which the parameters of child development have been varied and the human psychosocial possibilities have been explored. This is no less the case in the area of emotional development than it is in the area of what is called social development. In this chapter, I would like to demonstrate not only that emotional development is a central aspect of social development, but that it is also importantly involved in the development in the child of a culturally specific world view.

Ethnography at the War Century's End

This paper examines how a century of war has shaped the ethnographic method as it developed.

Language and the Politics of Emotion

List of contributors Preface 1. Introduction: emotion, discourse, and the politics of everyday life Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz 2. Shifting politics in Bedouin love poetry Lila Abu-Lughod 3. Moral discourse and the rhetoric of emotions Geoffrey M. White 4. Engendered emotion: gender, power, and the rhetoric of emotional control in American discourse Catherine A. Lutz 5. Topographies of the self: praise and emotion in Hindu India Arjun Appadurai 6. Shared and solidarity sentiments: the discourse of friendship, play, and anger in Bhatgaon Donald Brenneis 7. Registering affect: heteroglossia in the linguistic expression of emotion Judith T. Irvine 8. Language in the discourse of the emotions Daniel V. Rosenberg 9. Untouchability and the fear of death in a Tamil song Margaret Trawick Index.

The Psychological Ethic and the Spirit of Containment

The Korean War brainwashing scandal explored in context of US and Cold War cultural history.

Culture and Intelligence in Infancy

Intelligence means many things to many people, but it is above all a Western cultural concept that has been incorporated into the language and theory of the social sciences. The continued usefulness of this term as currently conceptualized has been seriously called into question (Kamin, 1975; Lewis, 1976). Whether the debate on the existence, nature, and measurement of intelligence is conceived as a scientific, ethical, or political question (Cronbach, 1975; Samelson, 1979), it is also predominantly a debate embedded in American* cultural beliefs and social institutions. Gaining an understanding of the origins of our questions and preliminary theories is an important first step toward an understanding of intelligence. A comparative methodology becomes a necessary prerequisite to provide a perspective from which to view those questions.

Afterword: Producing States of Security

Each of these papers responds in unique ways and with often powerful ethnographic detail and helpful new conceptualizations to the problem of ‘security’ in the contemporary world. They draw attention to the striking new configurations of practice, materiality, and subjectivities associated with security in the era of counterterror. The papers give us a strongly historicized view of how securitization has emerged in a variety of contexts from Nairobi to West Oakland to Beirut, as well as in contexts, such as comfortable New York City coops or an American anthropologist’s laptop, that are normally construed as outside the danger zones that provoke securitization. In the flourishing new anthropological literature on the making of security, Low and Glück have organized the discussion around the important new question of how space is implicated and reorganized within that security-making. We learn two central things here about the geography of security. First, Low and Glück advance the notion that security processes create/reshape/allow the reimagining of space in particular ways. They argue that, in reforming space, those security processes also reform social relations such that they come to focus on security ideas, feelings, and goals. When security goals result in the gating of a community (Low) or motivate intervention in and deconstruction of state power in Somalia (Besteman), they create new social spaces that fundamentally alter how people feel and live. To observe the new technologies of urban traffic surveillance in Beirut, in one telling example (Monroe), is to watch the state extend itself in space as well as to watch the public use the technologies themselves to push back at those attempts to enlarge the space of state colonization of their lives by identifying police misconduct. Second, these articles follow Low and Glück’s invitation to think about how security is enacted at a variety of different spatial scales, from the body and the neighborhood (Low), to the urban (Monroe and Glück), to the regional (Maharawal), to the imperial (Besteman), to the planetary (Masco). They show us that examining that diversity of scale allows a deeper understanding of how power operates through securitization. It encourages study of how, for example, Anthropological Theory 2017, Vol. 17(3) 421–425 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1463499617729230 journals.sagepub.com/home/ant

Commentaries on “Knowledge and Empire: The Social Sciences and United States Imperial Expansion”

Commentaries on “Knowledge and Empire: The Social Sciences and United States Imperial Expansion” Lesley Gill a; Terence Turner b; Micaela di Leonardo c; Catherine Lutz d; Ananthakrishnan Aiyer e a Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA b Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA c Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA d Department of Anthropology and Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA e University of MichiganFlint Flint, Michigan, USA