W.Australian edition Anthropologist Christine Durault traveled to the Solomon Islands to investigate. she took her toddler. At first, she imagined that the universal experience of motherhood would help her develop a relationship with this cross-cultural Shingbo woman. However, it soon became apparent that maternal love for Australians was different from maternal love for Sinbo women. Barrel, the symbolic word for love, can often be tinged with sorrow. When her daughter fell ill, Dureau confronted this difference head-on, and a Simbo woman named Liza comforted her by telling the story of her own young son dying of measles. I tried to give
For years, psychologists and other scientists believed that all human beings experience the same evolutionarily fixed set of emotions. It’s a tangible and abiding experience that happens deep within every human being, just like the native Siberian case of white Americans herding reindeer while sipping coffee in Manhattan. When Bacha Mesquita, a key figure in the development of the field of cultural psychology, began studying emotions more than 30 years before her, she was convinced of this model. But Mesquita, now a distinguished professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, has come to see emotions through a completely different lens. In her new book, Between Us: How Culture Creates Emotions, Mesquita makes a provocative argument that we are all not the same when it comes to emotions. Are people angry, happy, scared, just like you? ’ she asks. “And do you feel the same as they do? I don’t think so.”
Book review — “Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions” by Batja Mesquita (WW Norton, page 304).
Visual: WW Norton
Mesquita’s book rests on an important distinction between what she calls “my” feelings and “our” feelings. For too long, she argues, cultural psychology has relied on an essentially Western, individualistic model of emotion. This framework relies on the idea that the most important part of emotional experience occurs within the individual. But most non-Western cultures view emotions as “ours,” Mesquita says.
For Mesquita, the OURS model, which encourages us to look “outwards, not inwards” when it comes to emotions, is a better schema than the long-vaunted MINE model. She argues that we must let go of the belief that emotions primarily arise within a person and instead view them as culturally constructed experiences.
Mezquita comes to this view from personal experience. She was the child of Holocaust survivors in Holland, and her parents’ experiences made it difficult to understand their emotional reactions, shaped by the shadow of terror that occurred before Mezquita was born. , Mesquita moved from Holland to Michigan, a social situation in which her Dutch bluntness and American friendliness collided, and American politeness hurt her sense of what forges close friendships. was repeatedly encountered.
Mesquita turns to a series of anecdotes and studies to show that these cultural clashes are more than mere garnishes of the same deep, static feelings around the world. From the time children of a particular culture are born, parents view certain emotions and emotional responses as important and valuable. In other words, “emotions help us become part of the culture,” she says.
When she was raising her child Oliver in America, they took pride in him, praised him for his achievements, and inspired him to thrive in an individualistic society that values individual achievement. , which contrasts Oliver with the story of the anthropologist Diddy. Didi is a Taiwanese toddler whose mother instilled a sense of shame in him after he tried to touch a researcher’s video camera. According to Mesquita, shame is valued in Taiwan. She points out that pride is not an intrinsically right emotion and shame is not an intrinsically wrong emotion. In each of these examples, each parent did the right thing by preparing their child to grow into an adult within their own cultural context.
Similarly, she reveals how anger, shame, love, and happiness hold different values based on the culture in which they are expressed. For example, modern white Americans anoint themselves with excited, energetic happiness and the individual as worthy, while some more collective cultures value calm, peaceful happiness and passionate Some see love as something full of sorrow.
Not only do different emotions carry different weights based on culture and context, linguistic differences between cultures also shape emotional experiences. A prejudice against the English language, and the concept of an English-named emotion, has led researchers to view Western emotions as universal, Mesquita said in her 2019 study published in the journal Science. gives an example of I have tried to group different emotions across cultures into 24 English concepts. But, as Mesquita points out, different languages have completely different emotional concept words that don’t map one-to-one to English. The Dutch have a feeling of “gezellig”. This means the coziness of spending time with friends in a warm place in winter. Egyptian Bedouins have a “Hasham”. This is the emotion that largely defines the potential for social humiliation. Japanese people have “Amae”. This represents the dependence inherent in the child’s bond with the mother.
In Mesquita’s view, not everyone on Earth is born with the ability to feel a static set of emotions at birth, all of which are recognized and named in English. Instead, as we grow up in our culture, we are each told context-specific emotional language, which is “emotional episodes from your culture’s collective memory and about those emotions.” ,” she argues.
As an American reader who has only lived in Western culture, I was sometimes frustrated with Mesquita’s ideas while reading Mesquita’s books. Under all these cultural traps, how can we be sure that deep down we are not experiencing the same feelings?
But at the end of the day, it may not matter if all emotions are rooted in a similar “elementary scenario,” as Mesquita puts it. Understanding those differences in the emotional landscape between cultures is essential for scientific as well as political reasons.
In its final chapter, Mezquita addresses the difficulties immigrants face in adjusting to the emotional landscape of a new culture. As she says, learn the waltz instead of the tango. Studies show that the emotional landscape of immigrant families is indistinguishable from that of most cultures until the third generation. Based on their rank, they have different attitudes towards emotions. They also encode emotions differently. Earlier in the book, she points out that female anger and black anger are coded in the United States quite differently than white male anger.
Ultimately, Mesquita’s book presents a powerful and evocative argument for putting emotions and emotional episodes holistically. It’s a call to action. The much-appreciated empathy is not enough. Beyond empathy, she argues, Mesquita needs to imagine that she can project her experiences onto others.
An understanding that transcends cultural, social, and political boundaries occurs, she says, “when they realize that their dance is different from what they are accustomed to in their social environment.”
Emily Cataneo is a writer and journalist from New England whose work has appeared in publications such as Slate, NPR, Baffler and Atlas Obscura.
